“The Impossible Performance of History, Race and Sexualities: Reboots of Slavery in 'An Octoroon' by Jacobs-Jenkins and 'Slave Play' by Jeremy O’Harris”
Résumé
The two recent plays by queer African-American playwrights Jacobs-Jenkins and Jeremy O’Harris take up frontally the issue of memory and slavery through two different modalities that in and of themselves create contiguous styles to interrogate the persistent return of this past that cannot go away. The deconstruction of the recurring tensions around race and slavery underscore the failing consensus of closure in present times and in the immediacy of performance. The urgency of theatrical representation of pain and troubles of the past signal the contemporary effort to address historic traumas as a way to reignite resistance against the ceaseless erasure of interlocking modalities of being and relating. Both plays suggest that various modalities, the rewriting of a canonical melodrama (The Octoroon) or the exploration of the unfathomable fantasies through pathologies (Slave Play) can produce explosive explorations both thematically and stylistically. While Jacobs-Jenkins serially undercuts the framing process of rewriting a script; he playfully deflates the “sensation scene” (Act IV) of melodrama as it is supposed to “overwhelm your audience’s senses of the end of building a truest illusion of reality” (An Octoroon, 202.) We can wonder if O’Harris does not repeat this gesture by actually starting over his play “building a truest illusion of reality” when he makes the audience cross the mirror of sexual fantasies to reboot the premise of Slave Play in his second part that takes in a group therapy session. We can then wonder if iteration is not the central performative modality that can help redefine the performance of history, race and sexuality on the US contemporary stage?