When Nataki Garrett read Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon and other antebellum dramas during her undergraduate studies at Virginia Union University in the ’90s, her professor presented it to her with a major caveat.
“These are beautifully formed plays that are really about an idea that you should lament your birth or your existence because you’re not a part of the status quo,” Garrett says. “I grew up with a disdain about these sorts of plays.”
Now she’s find a way to channel that disdain into her work. As the director of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s upcoming production of An Octoroon, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2014 adaptation of and critical commentary on the 1859 original, Garrett gets to engage with the ideas in Boucicault’s play while also updating them with the help of Jacobs-Jenkins’ additional layers. Having worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright in the past, she was drawn to his provocative style, which tends to draw controversy upon initial release and acclaim once the confusion settles down, she says.
Garrett first heard about the play from Jacobs-Jenkins himself, when she was directing one of his earlier works, Neighbors, at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles. He told her he was working on An Octoroon, and she had to stop herself from signing on to direct without reading it first. Once she did, she threw herself into a 2015 production at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, and eagerly signed on for the Woolly production as well. “I rarely read a writer who writes into a level of consciousness that I already have,” Garrett says.
The script called for an actor to play three critical roles: BJJ, a playwright who narrates the action and comments upon it; George, an heir to a Southern plantation; and M’Closky, a neighbor who plots to buy George’s family’s plantation. Garrett knew she needed someone exceptional for that three-pronged performance. When she saw Jon Hudson Odom, she knew within a few seconds that she’d find no one more qualified.
“‘He could play any of the roles. That was in the audition,” Garrett says. “It’s just endless what he’s capable of.”
In an early rehearsal, Garrett asked Odom how he would approach a scene in which BJJ tosses himself about the stage. She expected some hesitation, or that Odom would ask her for choreography tips. Instead, Odom launched himself into the task, nailing it on his first try.
Odom is more modest about his abilities. He has experience playing multiple characters in a single performance, having played an eye-popping 12 or 13 characters in Yellowman at Rep Stage in Columbia, Md. When he first heard the name An Octoroon, he was puzzled — “Is that a cookie?” he wondered to himself. Now he likens the show to “Hamlet on crack without the mommy-daddy issues” and says the show continues to reveal new facets even now, on the eve of the production’s premiere.
The play is particularly relevant in the modern age of racial tumult, Garrett says. Much of the play centers around questions of how much black heritage a person must claim in order to call themselves “black.” By the end, the goal of the text is to help people accept themselves as beautiful no matter their skin color or ethnic background. BJJ’s journey mirrors that of contemporary black viewers contemplating their place in the world.
Connections to current events aren’t lost on anyone involved in the production. In fact, they’re a driving force. Garrett says she’s been thinking a lot about the ongoing trials for the police officers who are accused of killing Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and recent incidents like a cartoon comparing Michelle Obama to Melania Trump. The rise of Trump’s husband, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t surprise her like it does her white friends, she says.
“People who are liberal and black like me are looking at it like, well, that’s how it’s been the whole time,” Garrett says. “I know you didn’t think so because it wasn’t affecting you directly, but now that it’s so clear, welcome to the table.”
She’s done her best to channel her passion against forces like those in the play, emphasizing symbols of stereotype and caricature and their effect on culture and human behavior. In crafting the play’s critical homage to the 1859 work, Garrett says she and her team took care to approach verisimilitude. “If we’re going to use face paint, it has to be exactly how it was represented as opposed to softening the blow, making it about something else,” Garrett says.
Odom has lost sleep over such ruminations, committing more than ever before to his morning running routine—which also keeps him in shape for scenes in which he’s stripped down to his underwear. He credits Garrett with forging a safe space in which he and his fellow actors get ample opportunity to speak their minds, even when the conversations aren’t easy.
“It’s very easy, as an actor, to get caught up in my own world,” Odom says. “This play’s kind of snapping back into reality in the world we’re living in right now in 2016.”
As opening night looms, Garrett remains focused on final tweaks and taking stock of the production design, which has made her feel “like a kid in a candy store.” She’s especially grateful that the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company afforded her five weeks of rehearsal time, as opposed to the standard four. Her cast and crew spent the extra week researching the history of the time periods and the subtleties in the text more closely.
“In one second you’re going to be laughing so hard you almost pee on yourself, and then the next moment your heart kind of gets ripped out from underneath you. And then you find yourself laughing again,” Odom says. “It’s really a roller coaster ride of emotions.”
An Octoroon opens tonight, June 2, then runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company through June 26. Tickets are available online.
