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RANDENJACOBS-JENKINSISAPOPVOCALIST, a mimic and a rollicking raconteur. He’s also an accomplished playwright pushing the boundaries of subject matter and form—a fact that has been noted in U.S. and international theatrical circles. A native of Washington, D.C., who now lives in Brooklyn, Jacobs-Jenkins has won numerous accolades ranging from the Princess Grace Award and the Dorothy Streslin Playwriting Fellowship to the Paula Vogel Award, and productions of his plays have made waves at theatres across the country. That’s sure to continue—he’s just 30. His new play War will bow at Yale Repertory Theatre in the fall, and New York City’s Vineyard Theatre will produce his Gloria next season.

Jacobs-Jenkins speaks at a rapid-fire pace, often referenc-ing obscure historical figures and pop icons in the same breath. His multifaceted plays ricochet between genres and from hilarity to heartache. N(E)IG(H)G(BO)ERS (or Neighbors), which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, is billed as “a play with c(art)oons.” Its titular typography is a clue to its explosive content: When a family of traveling minstrel per-formers moves in next door to an interracial family, trouble starts—and the play’s biting use of blackface upends any and all notions of racial identity and decorum.

Jacobs-Jenkins’s critically lauded Appropriate, on the other hand, appears on the surface to be a naturalistic family drama: When the estranged members of the Lafayette clan convene after the death of a patriarch in the family’s crumbling planta-tion home, they uncover a number of horrific relics from the past—including an album of lynching photographs. Appropriate has received productions at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s

Humana Festival, Chicago’s Victory Gardens, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth and New York City’s Signature Theatre.

Alex Barron, literary manager at the Playwrights Realm, has known Jacobs-Jenkins since they were teens doing theatre together in Maryland. “I find that when I see one thing, Branden sees 10 things,” he says. “His work represents the struggle to show an audience how these 10 things are all indelibly connected. The story of a dysfunctional family in Appropriate is actually about ghosts and class and self-loathing and cicadas and Chekhov and faith and the centuries-old legacy of slavery.”

An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins’s riff on Boucicault’s 1859 classic The Octoroon, which had a 2010 workshop at PS122, bows this month at Soho Rep in a production directed by Sarah Benson. “Branden is like a performer whose material is text,” Benson observes. “He has a holistic sense of what works in the theatre and uncanny insights into technical issues.” Though his plays reference history, they aren’t necessarily about history. “He’s taking ideas that are huge and complex and naughty and weird, and finding a way of literally theatrical-izing them. People aren’t sitting around talking about history in his plays—he’s embedding these ideas in the actual form, and finding ways to make the idea promote the form and the form promote the idea.”

Christie Evangelisto, literary director at the Signature, where Jacobs-Jenkins is a Residency Five playwright, sounds a similar note. “Branden said to me recently that ‘form is always character’ when he writes a play, and that’s one of the reasons why his plays feel so rich, so full—they operate on

From left, Johanna Day, Michael Laurence, Patch Darragh and Maddie Corman in Appropriate at Signature Theatre in New York City.

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BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS’Splays are high-wire performances in themselves

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many different levels at once, and shift beneath our feet, and we love keeping up with them.”

Jacobs-Jenkins and I met at a pie shop near the Signature and then again at Sushi Dojo in the East Village during previews of Appropriate. What follows is a kind of reduc-tion sauce of those two conversations—the full meal (a more complete text) appears online.

ELIZABENT: So how, and why, did you become a playwright? BRANDENJACOBS-JENKINS: There are three versions of that story—the first is like The Lion King. My grandmother wrote and directed plays for her church. I spent the summers with her in Arkansas and have all these memories of falling asleep to her tapping away at her typewriter in the kitchen. She wrote dark, kind of gothic adaptations of Bible stories and I’d play like a bunny or something.

The second version involves me, as a teenager, wanting to be a novelist but doing theatre stuff on the side mostly for lack of something to do in my free time. I acted, not seriously, but I grew up on the border of D.C. and Maryland—Montgomery County—which was remarkable for its funding for youth arts programs, and there were these rival youth theatres that almost everyone was involved with in some capacity. (Mine was Wildwood Summer Theatre.)

Then, in college, I accidentally took too many creative writing classes. They were like, “You’ve taken them all. You can’t take any-more.” So I took a playwriting class. And this thing happened—these two parts of myself that had been really nourished separately came together and I was kind of shocked by the experience. And then my senior year I wanted to write about August Wilson. You’re

taught about August Wilson as the apotheosis of black theatre. But I didn’t feel myself in any of his plays. That led to this collegiate spiral that wound up with me experimenting in writing about what it means to write a play that’s authentically interracial. What does an inclusive theatre look like? What is that? So that was my anthropology thesis.

You were an anthropology major, and then you studied performance at NYU, right?Yes. I thought I was going to be a historical anthropologist specializing in performance history, but I was so burned out on theatre, I was like, “Uh, what else is out there?” So I started seeing everything at PS122, everything at the Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop. I just wanted to know what was happening.

Then two things happened: One, I started studio assisting for [performance art-ist] Claude Wampler. She started as a butoh dancer but started doing these weirder, more conceptual events after a while. I helped her build a couple pieces. I was very drawn to her work, which was very mischievous—all about the audience/artist contract. So I was going to try and be on that path.

Two, I began making solo work, almost by accident. At NYU, I took this amazing class with [performance artist] Carmelita Tropicana, and started experimenting with blackface—toying with the idea of class and minstrelsy in some way. I’d wear these really expensive clothes—like a $500 pair of jeans, which I would return the next day—and

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have blackface on and perform these little clown bits, which eventually became more complicated.

In Carmelita’s class I made a piece called Thirst that involved me giving a monologue about being 22 and hating New York. I drank water out of a goldfish bowl with the goldfish still in it. So the water is going down and the goldfish is...basically drowning in air and at the end I’m like, “I’m gonna try throwing this water back up and save this fish’s life!” And then I would stick my finger down my throat and have at it. It horrified the class. But Carmelita loved it. And she arranged for me to show it at something called Avant Garde-Arama, which is this annual group show at PS122. And that was, oddly enough, my New York debut.

Then I did this show in D.C. A now-defunct gallery had rented out an abandoned school, which was set to be demolished, for a performance festival and commissioned me to do a piece. I filled this tiny room with smoke and had these amazing spotlights everywhere. So tiny—the audience sat in chairs, and only 15 people could see it at a time. I would come in in blackface and every chair received a very

specific performance—like a small, minute-long thing that would happen. I didn’t tell my family. Why am I telling this story?

Keep going!I’m from D.C. I was like, “Mom, I’m coming back to D.C. for work. Please don’t bother me.” But she had discovered Google, and found out I was in this performance festival, so

she invited herself and all these family friends and grade-school people, like teachers from my past. It was actually my living nightmare hell. I am in blackface and staring at my kindergarten teacher and lip-synching to this Cab Calloway song. One of the chairs gets to ask me a question and it was my principal—the whole thing is so surreal—and my principal goes, “Okay. Well, first of all, I want to say we

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Julia Campbell and Leif Burke in Neighbors at Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles in 2010.

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are so proud of you. And secondly, when are we going to see you on Broadway?”

I remember thinking in that moment, “I have to make work that my mother will under-stand.” This is all a roundabout way of saying that I became a playwright so that my mother could not humiliate me in a performance-art context.

I told this to Claude, who had become a sort of mentor, and she was so understanding about it. She told me: grow a beard, lie about your age, find your tribe and get someone to give you a space. And it’s worked. I’ve since given this advice to other people, who have told me it worked for them, too.

That’s good advice—and your assistant totally has a beard! I read in the New York Times that you were inspired to write Neighbors after learning that a professor thought you had difficulty directly addressing race in your work. I’m curious how true that is.That professor was the thesis advisor whose office I cried in every week. Basically, at Princeton, they ask select students and their advisors to write about their experiences

together for this book they put out every couple of years called Quintessentially Princeton. Mine was pretty melodramatic because I’d more or less blocked the experience out from all the trauma, but my professor wrote that he suspected that I’d had such a difficult time with my thesis, because it was the first time I had ever had to deal openly with questions of race in my work.

At the time, I was really insulted by this—mostly because I was 22—and so I was like, “I’m going to write the last play I ever have to about this subject! I am going to cram every single thing I can possibly know, think, or feel about race into this one play so no one will ever ask me about it again!” And there was definitely a part of me that was like, “Eff this guy,” who, by the way, I consider a kind of artistic father. (This is the guy who inspired me to become a playwright. Robert Sandberg. I owe my whole career to him.) But this was the impulse. Then, as I started writing Neighbors, I was gradually like, “Oh, right. This is a big, deep topic with a lot of layers and big philosophical questions at the heart of it. It’s not something you’re going to address with one play.”

Another quote from the same New York Times article: You said, “Everyone keeps telling me that Neighbors is a provocative piece, but no one can actually tell me what’s provocative about it.” I feel like “provocative” is a marketing term. People will apply “provocative” to anything that involves a person of color onstage. Any-thing! If you Google “provocative theatre” everything that comes up is probably plays by or about people of color, and I just find that weirdly false. It’s like, provoke to what? It’s not agitprop—I’m not asking you to go out into the street and burn down buildings. But if its provoking you to think—isn’t that what…

…all theatre should be doing?Exactly! But maybe not. For Neighbors I was really invested in the question of, like, What is black? What do we talk about when we talk about blackness in the theatre? Is it black actors? What about half-black actors? Is it someone in face paint? Is it a black professor who “talks white”? It was about cramming as many different visual ideas of “theatrical blackness” onstage as possible and then asking which ones are real and which ones aren’t, and

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do any of them matter? Then for Appropriate I was interested in how invisible I could make blackness, but still have it charge the room.

Turning to Appropriate for a second, in the Washington Post Peter Marks wrote, “That he evokes these people so believably activates one of the possible meanings of the title. Jacobs-Jenkins appropriates, makes his own, a story of white America, and this presages a more hopeful time when the ethnic identity of a playwright might not prompt a mention.” Peter Marks is so nice! Regarding Appropriate, there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the “great American family dramas.” I’d look around and be like, “There’s no people of color on these lists.” What about Stick Fly or The Piano Lesson? Who has access to this idea of “family” as a universal theme? [Jacobs-Jenkin’s bearded

assistant, Ken Greller, arrives with a migraine medicine delivery.]

I feel like Neighbors, An Octoroon and Appropriate are all linked in some deep, fun-damental way. I don’t think of it as a trilogy, but I feel like they’re all about a thing or a group of preoccupations that I have moved through and have come to a conclusion with it. [“What conclusion?” a well-dressed pie-eater interjects. It’s Lileana Blain-Cruz, who will direct Jacobs-Jenkins’s War at Yale Rep. She tells me she was the sound board operator for Jacobs-Jenkins’s senior-year thesis: “I would watch him be stressed out of his mind!” At this point Jacobs-Jenkins leaps up and performs a dance that was in Blain-Cruz’s thesis production of For Colored Girls…. More laughter, a few more moves, Blain-Cruz exits.]

Speaking of An Octoroon, what’s your relationship to melodrama? Melodrama is amazing—it’s like the science

of what we do. A generation of French guys literally just kept doing things to an audience, and refined a codified formula for making an audience feel the way they wanted them to feel—or thought they should feel. This idea that we’re just these animals that are easily manipulated by certain steps or moves or gestures is so amazing to me. It makes me wonder: What is it that we theatre artists are doing? Coercion? Is it ethical? Or is ethics somehow besides the point?

At some point in graduate school, I became really obsessed with Boucicault. I did all this archival research at the New York Pub-lic Library and I found this insane unfinished essay he wrote on the art of dramatic writing. He says a dramatist’s whole enterprise should be about—and I’m paraphrasing here—achiev-ing the most convincing “illusion of suffer-ing.” And that kind of became the guide for Octoroon—I wanted to talk about the illusion of suffering versus actual suffering and ask: Is there a relationship between the two?

And this isn’t a new idea—this is like Brecht. But the idea that you could feel some-thing and then be aware that you’re feeling it is really profound to me. Somehow we possess these two faculties, one which is intellectual and gets us through the world, and one that’s always working in that subconscious-feeling-place, and that’s what artists are supposed to care about. That’s what the theatre is concerned with.

Making people feel?Yeah, but that might just be me. I am obsessed with feelings, and how mysterious they are, and that we’re always trying to put words on them. And I think theatremaking is about building emotional experiences for people, which is a very tall order, and I think it requires thought and care.

And yet you’re not interested in telling people how to feel? Well, no, not how to feel about their feelings. I think my work has annoyed some people because I believe that ugly feelings have a place in the theatre! If you cannot feel angry or upset or scandalized or grossed out or bored in the theatre, where else are you supposed to do that?

Foralongerconversationwith

Jacobs-Jenkins,visitwww.tcg.org/

americantheatre.org.

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Fallen AngelsBy Noël CowardDirected by Rosina ReynoldsSeptember 3 – 28, 2014

Freud’s Last SessionBy Mark St. Germain

Suggested by The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.Directed by David Ellenstein

Oct. 15 – Nov. 9, 2014

Gunmetal BluesBook by Scott WentworthMusic & Lyrics by Craig Bohmler and Marion Adler | Directed by Andrew BarnicleJan. 14 – Feb. 8, 2015

Neil Simon’s Chapter TwoDirected by David Ellenstein

Feb. 25 – March 22, 2015

Unnecessary FarceBy Paul Slade SmithDirected by Matthew WienerApril 15 – May 10, 2015

BetrayalBy Harold Pinter

Directed by Frank CorradoJune 3 – 28, 2015

Side By Side By SondheimMusic by Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Mary Rodgers, Richard Rodgers and Jule StyneLyrics by Stephen SondheimContinuity by Ned SherrinDirected by David EllensteinProduced on Broadway by Harold Prince in association with Ruth MitchellJuly 15 – August 9, 2015

This Wonderful LifeBy Steve Murray

December 10 – 28, 2015

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