Here's hoping you can last through the first scene of playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins purposely inflammatory and certainly challenging play. In the opening, one black man and one white man standing in their undershorts yell “fuck you” back and forth for longer than most scenes in a David Mamet play. If you can take it, you will be demonstrating more pluck than many did on the night I attended. And that was nothing compared to the even larger exodus at intermission leaving those who remained to see to a play clearly intended provoke and reopen racial wounds. As unflinchingly directed by Peter Hinton, this uneasily digested comedy is culled from the fasten-your-seat-belts, it's-going-to-be-a-bumpy-evening school of theater. Racism is ugly and it peaks again and again with comical and an occasionally horrifying intensity throughout this play, a dramatic expansion/adaptation of Dion Boucicault's 1859 play The Octoroon. A black actor in white face and a white actor in red face as an American Indian amidst an overall mocking of color-blind casting give an added edge to this over-the-top melodrama, a hit in its time. At the center is a terrific performance by Andre Sills, who plays three roles, including playwright Jacobs-Jenkins. As George the heir to a plantation, he woos Zoe the titular Octoroon (Vanessa Sears). Being one-eighth black and the daughter of his Uncle, she is forever fighting off the attentions of the play's leering villain (also Sills) who is scheming to buy the plantation. Murder, mayhem and mischief naturally ensue. A fine supporting cast portray absurdly stereotypical characters in a raw play that doesn't hold back its message or its vision of where we were not so long ago.
