Latest news with #Jacobs-Jenkins
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins the best playwright in America?
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was anxiously amused about how he would be portrayed in this profile. Would I mention that twice when we met at the Hayes Theater, in the days after the playwright's hilarious and explosive dynastic drama 'Purpose' had won the Pulitzer Prize and six Tony Award nominations, he ordered the same quick bite while juggling a tight schedule? 'The idea that you're going to watch me eat Shake Shack twice is absolutely psychotic.' Sitting in the green room upstairs, subdued after a whirlwind week that included his first time attending the Met Gala, he gave an eloquent answer about how he metabolizes contemporary culture to generate plays that feel thrillingly urgent. 'My obligation is to write to people living in reality with me in the present,' he said. 'Obviously, I'm very neurotic. I'm always trying to understand what's happening and why. My friends every day talk about what they're anxious about, and yet no one's asking for the theater to address that anxiety — but that's what it's supposed to do.' He added, 'I try to follow my own panic.' Then, he quickly flipped the mirror back on himself. 'You're like: 'He was a sociopath! He just rattled on like a monster!'' He cocked his head back with a gravelly and breathless laugh that begins high in the back of his throat. And later, 'Are you going to, like, assassinate my character?' Jacobs-Jenkins has long articulated an especially vivid self-awareness. In his breakthrough 'An Octoroon,' the narrator is a Black playwright named BJJ who paints himself in whiteface and tells the audience, 'I can't even wipe my a-- without someone trying to accuse me of deconstructing the race problem in America.' Adapted from Dion Boucicault's 1859 melodrama, the show had an embattled premiere in 2010 but returned a few years later to become a sensation. It was produced and reprised for encore runs both off-Broadway and at Woolly Mammoth, where, among other area theaters, the native of Washington's Takoma neighborhood has enjoyed a fruitful artistic home. Jacobs-Jenkins would go on to become a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for 'Gloria' (2015), a shocking workplace comedy partly inspired by his stint assisting in the New Yorker's fiction department, and for 'Everybody' (2017), a remixed morality play about death in which the actors are assigned their roles by chance. In 2016, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the genius grant. Jacobs-Jenkins has been a leading voice among a cohort of Black playwrights, including fellow Pulitzer winners Jackie Sibblies Drury and Michael R. Jackson, whose daring and varied explorations of form and subjectivity have upended audience expectations and revolutionized storytelling onstage. 'There's still this instinct critically to say, 'Look at Black drama!'' Jacobs-Jenkins said of industry observers who have attempted to suggest that their work somehow captures that impossible misnomer — 'the Black experience.' 'It's like, no, this is your drama,' he said. 'You're surrounded by Black people, and it stresses you out.' His recent work reflects an artist no longer preoccupied with what people think his work should or shouldn't say. He remains one of American theater's preeminent provocateurs, but his showmanship has grown subtler and more assured. He won his first Tony last year, for best play revival, with 'Appropriate,' about White siblings who uncover an album of lynching photos while cleaning out their late father's plantation house. Originally produced in 2014 and revised for the playwright's Broadway debut, the show is, like much of his work, approachable and funny but searing in its incisiveness. 'Purpose,' which continues the playwright's career-long interest in family drama, is in some ways his most orthodox play to date. If it's awarded the Tony on Sunday, Jacobs-Jenkins will become the first Black playwright to win best play since August Wilson did for 'Fences' in 1987. And this summer, he's tackling an assignment that's become a rite of passage for mid-career dramatists, penning the book of a musical filled with hits by a pop legend — in this case, an adaptation of Prince's 'Purple Rain.' 'I turned 40, and everything insane has happened in the last four months of my life,' he said, referring to welcoming a second child, losing a parent and absorbing a new level of career success. 'I do feel weird, though, that my Black family drama is the one that everyone's like … you know what I mean?' he said, reflecting on the shower of accolades for 'Purpose' without completing the thought. 'There is a part of me that's self-conscious about that. But then I think about what I think I'm doing inside the play versus how it's received — I have to let that gulf exist, or I'll go crazy.' The chasm between public perceptions and messy private lives is at the heart of 'Purpose,' a behind-the-headlines meditation on family, faith and the legacy of the civil rights movement. The play grew out of a commission Jacobs-Jenkins received from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre a decade ago, at the tail end of the second administration of President Barack Obama. He began by identifying the ensemble members he wanted to write for — Jon Michael Hill and Glenn Davis, both Tony-nominated for playing brothers in the show, and Alana Arenas, who plays the wife who becomes collateral damage to Davis's blundering scion. The story, set in the posh home of a Chicago power couple (played by Harry Lennix and LaTanya Richardson Jackson, also Tony nominees), bears strong resemblance to the downfall of Jesse L. Jackson Jr., the former Illinois congressman who in 2013 admitted to misusing campaign funds. But the playwright's influences were both broader and more personal. 'I became obsessed with this idea of Black dynastic ambitions, and how they never seem to take root in this culture. The Jacksons were an interesting object lesson,' Jacobs-Jenkins said, though his research extended to other luminaries of the Black political class, including Obama, Colin Powell and John Lewis. A photo of the tearstained face of Jackson's father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, at Obama's first presidential victory stuck in the playwright's mind. 'It was about fulfillment, it was about jealousy, it was the end of something. I thought about that a lot.' Men of Jackson's generation were also the same age as the playwright's father, who died this year. 'I was asking myself, were my parents traumatized by the civil rights movement, and how do they feel about what's happening right now? And what do you do with a child who maybe didn't turn out the way that you thought they would?' In the years since he first received the commission, Jacobs-Jenkins became a father of two. (He and his husband, the performer Cheo Bourne, live in Brooklyn.) He tried his hand as a TV showrunner, with the 2022 FX on Hulu series 'Kindred,' based on Octavia Butler's sci-fi classic. He wrote a play distilling how it felt to emerge from the height of the pandemic and approach midlife as a millennial, 'The Comeuppance,' which premiered off-Broadway in 2023 and came to Woolly Mammoth in a gripping production this past fall. A deadline attached to some prize money he received finally prompted Jacobs-Jenkins to write 'Purpose' in earnest, a process he undertook in a workshop with actors, including Davis. Soon after the workshop, in 2021, Davis was appointed co-artistic director of Steppenwolf with Audrey Francis, and they approached Jacobs-Jenkins about staging the as-yet-unfinished play as part of their inaugural season. 'Once he started delivering new pages, it felt like the words were coming out of our mouths as if we created them,' Davis told me at a recent cocktail party held in the playwright's honor down the block from the theater. 'He's so attuned to how actors speak,' Davis added. 'He closes his eyes in rehearsal; he listens more than he watches.' Phylicia Rashad, who signed on to direct the Steppenwolf production that premiered last spring before transferring to Broadway, said in a phone interview: 'He creates real people. There's nothing contrived about any of them.' She likened the way Jacobs-Jenkins writes for actors to her experience working with Wilson on 'Gem of the Ocean.' Sarah Paulson was lured back to Broadway after a 14-year absence by the script for 'Appropriate' and won a Tony for her portrayal of an acid-tongued matriarch ultimately consumed by her own animosities. 'It was like the paper was on fire. It was so incredibly clear to me who she was,' Paulson said in a phone interview. Jacobs-Jenkins was actively revising the play, which he had written before he started a family of his own, throughout the rehearsal process. 'He was really open to seeing what it might look like if you tried the thing that occurred to you [as an actor], and that was really galvanizing,' Paulson said. (The two have stayed friends. When their Tony trophies were mixed up after engraving, they never bothered to switch them back.) 'Purpose' and 'Appropriate' are more familiar in form than much of his earlier work. ('Neighbors,' his 2010 New York debut, includes a family of Black minstrels named the Crows wearing blackface.) But Jacobs-Jenkins maintains a keen interest in toying with his audience, in ways that have grown slyer the broader those crowds have become. 'I had developed this obsession with trying to create an audience experience that felt related to what it is to be racialized, which is to go from feeling like a part of a group to very quickly feeling like an individual,' he said of writing 'Appropriate.' 'This experience of laughing with other people, and then you stop … and you're going, 'Why are you guys still laughing?'' Jacobs-Jenkins's own experience with race was shaped by growing up in D.C., where he attended an Afrocentric charter school through the fifth grade. (He gave that biographical detail to the houseguest played by Tony nominee Kara Young in 'Purpose'). 'It was a huge part of the formation of my brain,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'I never felt any inferiority.' It was not until he attended St. John's College High School, where he became a drama kid, and then Princeton that he slowly wrapped his mind around the social politics of race. 'I found people's racial anxieties very compelling and confusing,' he recalled. 'So much of the insidiousness of it is how it's internalized.' Marion Barry twice served as mayor during the playwright's coming of age, when he remembers D.C. being 'incredibly Black.' Woolly's outgoing artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, told me she has been encouraging Jacobs-Jenkins to write a play about Barry. 'It always feels like this incredible homecoming when he does a play in D.C.,' Goyanes said. His first theatrical experience, when he was 5 or 6 years old, was on a regular visit to his grandparents in small-town Arkansas. His grandmother took him to an outdoor passion play, where the ascension of Jesus was aided by an illusion that involved plastic garbage bags. ('I remember on the ride home being like, 'Wait, was that actually Jesus?' I didn't understand what theater was.') He was raised by a single mom (his parents never married and separated when he was 7) and attended a variety of summer programs that turned out to be profoundly formative. It was at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop where a teacher noted he had promise in the theater, and at Wildwood Summer Theatre where he overlapped with other kids who later made their way into the business. And it was at the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop, which he attended every summer during high school and called 'a find-your-tribe moment,' where he fell in love with fiction. He thought he would be a novelist but switched to playwriting while at Princeton, went on to earn a master's in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and experimented with performance art before studying playwriting at Juilliard. He's also been a professor of playwriting and now teaches at Yale. ('He's a scholar without all of the moss and cobwebs,' Rashad said.) A self-proclaimed 'Rent'-head who played the Ben Vereen part in his high school production of 'Pippin,' Jacobs-Jenkins is returning to his gateway passion for musical theater, writing the book for 'Purple Rain,' which will make its September premiere with a pre-Broadway tryout in Minneapolis. 'Prince would not want to reconstruct a museum piece,' he said of the project, which is in developmental workshops this summer. 'The open secret is that everyone has issues with the movie, including the people who made it,' he added. 'Very few people have done the work of trying to really ask, what did he change his mind about? What would he have revised?' In the 1984 film, which catapulted Prince to superstardom, he plays a fictional version of himself. It memorably features scenes of domestic violence, and one that ends with a woman being tossed in a dumpster. Details about Prince's alleged abusive behavior toward women came to light this past fall, in reports about a documentary by Ezra Edelman that was scrapped by Netflix over opposition from Prince's estate. The musical, which the playwright hinted will be updated from the film's 1980s setting, is being produced with the estate's involvement. 'I am thinking about how he dealt with femininity and women, and how he thought about them and honored them or didn't honor them as collaborators,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'That's definitely a big strain in the piece.' The thorniness and magnetism of Prince as a subject seems like an ideal fit. 'He was constantly encouraging people to question the trappings of identity,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'He was interested in exposing a lot of fictions as fictions — fictions about identity, fictions of belonging. He was always trying to encourage people to make everything new.' Here it seemed the playwright had again flipped the mirror back on himself. In addition to 'Purple Rain,' Jacobs-Jenkins will also write a screenplay for A24, based on a best-selling novel from this past summer. And he may soon be ready to give TV another try after what he called 'a very difficult experience' with 'Kindred.' (The series was canceled after one season.) Surreal as it seems to have found a comfortable place, he is processing the home he has built in the theater. 'For so long, there's a part of you that's trying to justify why you're in the room,' an experience he said was heightened by being Black and breaking through at a young age. 'I was doing the thing that I really loved, and I was having to beg for permission to do it — from critics, from theaters, from collaborators,' he recalled. 'Then I did the work, and now look up and I'm relatively happy. No one's going to tell me I'm not a playwright.'
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Winning a Pulitzer for ‘Purpose'
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was getting ready for his first Met Gala on Monday afternoon when he got the news: his latest play, 'Purpose,' which is now on Broadway, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama. The other finalists were Cole Escola's 'Oh, Mary!,' which is also running on Broadway, and 'The Ally,' by Itamar Moses, which had an Off Broadway run last year at the Public Theater. Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, has been a Pulitzer finalist twice before, for 'Gloria' in 2016 and for 'Everybody' in 2018, and last year he won a Tony Award for 'Appropriate.' In 2016 he also won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Brooklyn. 'An Octoroon' and 'The Comeuppance' are among his other well-received works. 'Purpose,' directed by Phylicia Rashad, was first staged last year by Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, which had commissioned the play; Jacobs-Jenkins wrote it for the company's actors. The Broadway production opened in March, and has been nominated for six Tonys, including best play. 'Purpose' is currently on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan. The cast includes, from left: LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Jon Michael Hill, Kara Young and Alana Arenas. Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age
LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of 'Appropriate' (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who's a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. 'You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?' Bo says. 'Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn't enslave anybody! I didn't lynch anybody!' The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped. 'They were clapping in earnest,' says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were 'someone who's genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, 'Found his letters and read each one out loud!'' Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: 'Are you serious right now?' For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. 'Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we're encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.' At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to 'risk learning something we didn't anticipate' about one another. Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it's vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire's indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term 'woke,' for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of 'equity' — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity. I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama 'Purpose' is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the 'Gulf of America,' acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, 'this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it's also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: 'Are you serious right now?'' The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities. Perhaps that's why in recent years satire has surged among Black American writers across all media, extending a longstanding tradition of seeking out laughter to entertain, and to stave off despair. From Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' (2015) to Kiley Reid's 'Come & Get It' (2024); Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' (2017) to Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You' (2018); Donald Glover's 'Atlanta' (2016-22) to Juel Taylor's 'They Cloned Tyrone' (2023), satire has once again emerged as a defining mode of Black expressive culture, on the page and on the screen. The satirical impulse is, of course, not unique to Black Americans — deep tributaries of wry humor flow from Jewish Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. communities and other groups that the country has continually ostracized. However, the Black tradition has done much to establish the terms of a distinctly American satire, one defined as much by its cleverness as its prophetic truth. The term 'satire' derives from the Latin 'satura,' a 'mixed dish,' in reference to the blend of humor and social critique that characterized classical satirical theater and still defines the form today. Satire is protean, defying taxonomy, though most of it weaponizes irony to expose contradictions, lapses in logic and moral failings, holding them up to ridicule and public account. Satire isn't simply comedy, but it often works through comic tools like caricature, parody and exaggeration. It's a social art, both in its frequent attention to matters of collective interest and in the fact that it's often experienced communally. FOR JACOBS-JENKINS AND many others, the most resounding contemporary satirical voice is the American writer Percival Everett. As the author of 24 novels and several volumes of poetry and collections of short stories, Everett has long enjoyed a reputation as an experimental writer willing to confront the darkest chapters of American history. His 2021 novel, 'The Trees,' is a murder mystery that transpires in the shadow of the unresolved legacy of the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. The result is unsettling by design: 'I make fun of stuff because it's so ridiculous,' he says. ' 'The Trees' is about lynching. But I don't think that's funny. As someone who comes from a population who's threatened by it, the only way we survive it is by looking at the absurdity of it. If we didn't, we would be scared all the time.' Everett, 68, recalls thinking after the first election of Trump, in 2016, that satire — indeed, comedy as a whole — might be dead. 'How do you parody something that's already a parody?' he asks. Rather than relinquishing his approach, however, he simply redirected it: 'Humor gives us an advantage [as writers],' Everett says. 'If you can get someone laughing, … the reader relaxes. Once someone relaxes, you can do other, more nefarious things to them — like make them think.' Last year, Everett published 'James,' his reimagining of the American classic 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' told through the voice of Mark Twain's enslaved Black character Jim. In the strictest sense, 'James' employs parody and pastiche, drawing broadly from Twain's plot and characters but endowing its first-person narrator with the wit and eloquence that his original creator denied him. Generous readers of Twain's novel, like the writer Ralph Ellison, who bemoaned that 'Twain's bitter satire was taken for comedy,' forgive 'Huck Finn' its many abuses — the 219 instances of the N-word; the indulgent last third of the book (which Ernest Hemingway advised readers to skip), which gives itself over to Jim's gratuitous confinement and petty torture, masterminded by a sadistic Tom Sawyer and a complicit Huck. Everett retains the best of Twain's story — especially the freewheeling adventures of Huck and Jim on the Mississippi — and layers over them a sophisticated satirical register in which Jim, now James, claims agency. The second chapter begins with James leading an unconventional elocution lesson for a group of Black children, instructing them on how best to fracture rather than to refine their English pronunciation. 'White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them,' James tells the children. One of his keen pupils offers up an axiom: 'Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,' she says. When encountering a kitchen fire, for instance, instead of warning directly, you might instead exclaim, 'Lawdy, missum! Looky dere,' so as not to show up your white mistress. 'What do we call that?' James asks his pupils. Together they respond, 'Signifying.' 'Humor is vengeance,' the novelist Paul Beatty writes. Signifying, a form of semantic indirection, is neatly suited to satire. As the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines it, signifying is encoded linguistic play that exposes 'the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.' Signifying, like the broad category of satire, is a double-voiced art; it doesn't so much say one thing and mean another as it says one thing and means two. An abiding practice that stretches back through the Black oral tradition — in the playful and profane narrative poems called the toasts, in the games of verbal jousting called the dozens and in sermons and songs — signifying testifies to the centrality of satire as a resource for Black Americans, both artists and everyday people. THE FIRST BLACK American satirists were enslaved, lampooning the rituals and manners of those who called themselves masters. Cakewalks, emulations of white high society's formal promenade dances, were ostensibly performed for the benefit of plantation owners, though in fact they were exquisite parody — exposing white pretensions through Black virtuosity. Traces of this same sensibility are apparent in 19th-century folk lyrics that white listeners often mistook for songs of mirth. Such subtle comic subversions sat beside more overt expressions that centered persuasion over amusement. David Walker's 'Appeal' (1829), a groundbreaking antislavery pamphlet that made the case for abolition decades before Harriet Beecher Stowe's stilted and stoic novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852), calls out the hypocrisy of a South Carolina newspaper that had the temerity to label the Turks 'the most barbarous people in the world' for their treatment of the Greeks while advertising a slave auction directly below. 'I declare,' Walker writes, 'it is really so amusing to hear the Southerners and Westerners of this country talk about barbarity, that it is positively, enough to make a man smile.' The Black smile would be cast as caricature starting in the early decades of the 19th century with the advent of blackface minstrelsy, a practice in which white male performers would 'black up' their faces using burned cork, painting on rictus grins of livid red. The songs, skits and comic routines of the minstrel stage served as cruel inversions of Black linguistic fluency and imaginative expression. Satire had no place in minstrelsy because the joke was invariably one-note: punching down at those excluded from the promise of American freedom. In the aftermath of the Civil War, some newly liberated Black performers would take the minstrel stage themselves, introducing a satirical sophistication winking from behind the black mask. This practice extended into the 20th century, most notably with the comic actor Bert Williams, who along with his co-star George Walker created 'In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy' (1903), the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists to appear on Broadway. The 1920s and '30s were a golden age of American satire, from the acerbic columns of H.L. Mencken to the writings of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Parker. It's no surprise, then, that Black authors also joined in. Writing in 1925 of the 'younger generation' of Black writers, the architect of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke observed that 'reason and realism have cured us of sentimentality: Instead of the wail and appeal, there is challenge and indictment.' Responding to Locke's call, Langston Hughes explored what he lovingly labeled 'the low-down folks, the so-called common element.' His series of stories from the perspective of Jesse B. Semple offered Hughes a means of satirizing both the absurdities of Jim Crow racism and the vanities of Harlem's Black bourgeoisie. Similarly, Hughes's friend and sometime collaborator Zora Neale Hurston explored the comic life of everyday people in her fiction and plays, as well as in her research as a social anthropologist, such as in her folklore collection 'Mules and Men' (1935). And the novelist Wallace Thurman exercised an eviscerating irony in his satirical critique of the Renaissance's own literary elite in his novel 'Infants of the Spring' (1932), a roman à clef that targets everyone from Hughes and Hurston to Countee Cullen and Thurman himself. The greatest satirical practitioner of the Harlem Renaissance, however, was the journalist and writer George S. Schuyler. His 1931 novel, 'Black No More,' is a work of sci-fi comedy with a startling premise: A Black inventor has devised a process that makes Black people's skin paper white. Schuyler turns his gaze not only on the savage inequalities of an American racial caste system but also on the Black leaders whom he believes have enriched themselves and gained their fame by exploiting that very system in the name of racial uplift. Schuyler and other Black writers found the courage to find fault not just without but within. 'At the heart of satire, isn't it about laughter at recognition?' asks the playwright Lynn Nottage. Her forthcoming works include two operas, 'This House' and 'The Highlands,' with librettos co-written with her 27-year-old daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber. Though both make space for laughter, Nottage's satire primarily shows up in a pair of earlier plays, 'By the Way, Meet Vera Stark' (2011) and 'Fabulation, or The Re-education of Undine' (2004), which have enjoyed frequent revivals around the country. Separated by centuries from the satire of the enslaved, Nottage's plays nonetheless share certain bedrock strategies with the early Black tradition. Foremost among them is an understanding of satire as a coded language for communicating intraracial truths, including self-critique. Nottage, 60, recalls debuting 'Fabulation,' a rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of a snooty Black New York publicist who loses it all and is forced to return to her long-abandoned childhood home, at the Off Broadway institution Playwrights Horizons. In a tiny upstairs theater, the uproariously funny play was greeted with near silence. 'We thought, 'Oh, dear. What's happening?'' she says. As the audience filed out, she noticed that it was almost entirely white: 'We realized that we needed a critical mass of Black people who understood all the nuances of the work and who felt like they had permission to laugh at some of the things that were a little more barbed and pointed.' The experience underscored for Nottage the challenge — and opportunity — of writing for a diverse audience. 'You realize,' she adds, 'that there's some truth under everything that resonates.' What happens, though, when the truths audiences take away contradict one another? Call it wrong laughter. In 2005, Dave Chappelle walked away from a $50 million Comedy Central deal to renew his hit sketch program 'The Chappelle Show.' What prompted him to leave, he once explained, was that the wrong people were laughing at the wrong things. To put it plainly, white audiences were laughing at the surface level rather than the satirical intention of his skits. His breakout characters and bits — viral before virality was even a thing, from his 'I'm Rick James, bitch!' catchphrase to his Tyrone Biggums crackhead character — were intended to upend certain cultural scripts and racial stereotypes that, in the minds of some white viewers, they ended up instead reinforcing. TODAY'S BLACK SATIRISTS, however, remain undaunted by the risks of wrong laughter, knowing that it's embedded in the very structure of the genre. 'I feel freer watching him,' the writer Danzy Senna says of Chappelle. 'That's what I want for my readers, that they feel freer when they're reading me.' Last year Senna, 54, who's married to Everett, published her fourth novel, 'Colored Television,' which several reviewers confidently categorized as a Hollywood satire. Senna is less certain: 'I'm always like, 'Am I writing satire?' I don't know.' Though 'Colored Television' includes at least one character — a Black film producer — who reads like a satirical type, the novel as a whole is more humanizing. Even if Senna doesn't consider herself a satirist in any strict sense, she prizes her worldview as a birthright from her late father, Carl Senna, a prominent Black book editor (her mother is the writer Fanny Howe) and a bequest to her and her husband's two teenage sons. 'My kids are Gen Z, and I feel like they're all irony,' she says. Everett recalls instilling that in their sons as a protection against a world that looks at Black and brown boys as a threat. 'I have to tell them, 'You be careful,'' he says. 'But if that's all they hear, they'll walk through the world scared to death and angry.' 'Humor is vengeance,' the novelist Paul Beatty writes in his introduction to his anthology of Black humor, 'Hokum' (2006). 'Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you laugh to keep from shooting.' Below the surface of satire is often a well of anger, what the novelist and satirical master Ishmael Reed terms 'comic aggression.' Why write satires, though, when you can take to the streets? Senna — who as a child attended protests with her mother and was involved in activism for South African divestment in high school; and who last spring joined demonstrations for Palestine in Downtown Los Angeles — draws a bright line between political speech and her own art. 'The language of those protests is always completely antithetical to anything that would interest me to write,' she says. 'It's not satire; it's a very purposeful kind of shouting slogans with a mob of people.' Still, speaking for the unrepresented is part of satire's ethos. Despite attempts by those in power to co-opt it, satire remains an outsider's art — or perhaps the art of an inside-outsider: someone who has certain access and insight into the people and the organizations they're targeting. 'Our political system is all so unserious,' says the comic writer and performer Ziwe, 33, who grew up in Massachusetts as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and interned after college at both The Onion and 'The Colbert Report.' 'I can't live and move through that as myself. I have to be separated because then I can judge, and that allows me to make something that has teeth.' She honed her craft through Instagram Lives, followed by a Showtime series, on which she refined an awkward, blunt and often flat persona. Her satire usually stems from silence, which induces her guests — from the disgraced former congressman George Santos to the convicted con artist Anna Delvey — to expose their own vices and vanities. Satire is, in part, the art of tone, and tone is notoriously difficult to convey in any medium, much less the written word. Expressed in song, however, satire benefits from the shadings of voice, melody and chord phrasings. On her song 'Denial Is a River' (2024), the 26-year-old rapper Doechii literalizes satire's double-voicedness by bifurcating her own, rapping in her normal voice and speaking back to herself — exhorting, cajoling, correcting — as a pitched-up sonic superego. On the surface, the song sounds playful and comic; Doechii raps with swagger about her newfound success, even as her other voice won't let her brush away her past traumas. The song became her first Billboard-charting hit, a feat she commemorated in a post this past January on the social network X: 'My first solo entry is a satire about one of the lowest points in my life and has no hook,' she wrote. 'As an artist, I feel the vulnerability of being in this moment,' says the playwright Nottage. 'The question becomes, 'How far can you push the boundaries?'' One thinks of Richard Pryor's 1976 album 'Bicentennial Nigger,' which concludes with the searing title track, recorded live at the Comedy Store in Hollywood. His voice closely miked, he plays both to the intimate crowd at the club and to the wider audience that would hear the album at home. 'A lot of people think I'm trying to offend whites and be nasty to them, but I'm not,' Pryor told The Los Angeles Times that year. 'I'm looking for truth and trying to be funny at the same time.' 'You all know how Black humor started. It started in slave ships,' Pryor says, beginning a 15-second distillation of 400 years of Black comedy. 'Cat was on his way over here rowing. Then dude said, 'What you laughing about, man?' He say, 'Yesterday I was a king.'' It's a potent punch line, though not a laugh line. In Pryor's typical manner, he conjures a character from this tragic conceit: a 200-year-old Black minstrel performer with 'stars and stripes on his forehead.' In the two-minute monologue that follows, recited while a military band plays 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' Pryor's character recounts Black America's journey from the Middle Passage to the present day. 'I'm just so happy. I don't know what to do,' he exclaims. 'I don't know what to do if I don't get 200 more years of this. Lord have mercy. Yessiree,' he says, punctuating each line with a grotesque guffaw. You can hear the audience laughing too — nervously, a laughter of incomplete release. Pryor's character is relentless, his testimony careening toward conclusion as the song resolves. 'I don't know where my own mama is now,' he says. 'She up yonder in that big white folks house in the sky. Y'all probably done forgot about it.' A pause for breath, and then in the last words of the album, Pryor rips off the satirical mask and speaks in his own solemn voice: 'But I ain't never gon' forget it.'
New York Times
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For Playwrights, Making It to Midcareer Is a Cliffhanger
'Absolutely not,' Branden Jacobs-Jenkins declared. Leslye Headland chuckled. 'Oh never, no.' 'I don't know anyone who could!' was Samuel D. Hunter's astonished response. 'Not really,' hedged Bess Wohl. 'Until maybe last year.' The question that brought such universal denials from four frequently produced, much-awarded American playwrights was: 'Have you ever made enough to live on from your plays?' To win audiences and awards for your efforts is undoubtedly affirming, but the financial returns for dramatists are slim. Even after the premiere of 'An Octoroon,' which would later win an Obie Award for best new American play, Jacobs-Jenkins was living in a 'horrible sublet on an air shaft,' with a possible case of whooping cough and a definite lack of health insurance. Headland considered herself a success not when her play 'Bachelorette' made a splash Off Broadway in 2010, but when she no longer had to work at Rocket Video to make ends meet. And Hunter told me that the most he'd earned in any one year from his plays — including 'The Whale' and 'A Case for the Existence of God' — was 'less than $30,000.' Playwriting has never been a golden ticket, or even, for most, a subway pass. It's hard enough to get a first play written and produced; getting a second and third off the ground, let alone a 10th, has in recent decades seemed just about impossible. Who knows how many rich voices we never got to hear in maturity? Especially since the Covid pandemic wiped out a host of emerging artist programs and career development grants, the problem has reached existential proportions. Theater, after all, depends on good plays, and good plays depend on authors with long professional horizons. Many of the greatest works of dramatic literature are neither early nor late but in between. ('Hamlet,' 'Twelfth Night' and 'Othello' are dead center in Shakespeare's professional timeline.) But how can playwrights have a midcareer if they can't survive the start? Or so I have often worried. Yet as I previewed the 2025 schedules of leading American theaters, I was delighted to find new work from more than a dozen writers I'd been following with great interest for years. Not just Jacobs-Jenkins, Headland, Hunter and Wohl, but also Joshua Harmon, Chisa Hutchinson, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Jordan Harrison are premiering new plays this season. All are well established in the field, with six or more major stage works on their résumés — in Hunter's case, 19. And all are in their 40s, though if I'd extended the range by just a year or two, I could have netted at least another four. Together they constitute an unusual cohort, bucking the bad news of the American theater by having made it past emerging to emerged. Granted, pretty much all of them did so with the help of other industries. Jacobs-Jenkins and Hunter have both taught extensively, Hunter at one point covering Theater 101 for a football team. Headland has worked steadily in movies and television, including as a creator of the series 'Russian Doll.' In 2015, Wohl had to rush from rehearsals of her breakthrough play 'Small Mouth Sounds' to shoot a pilot she'd written for a series about 'lady cops.' These nontheater jobs are, even now, how playwrights make real money and get health insurance. Still, Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, calls his cohort a 'weird bumper crop' of success and a 'guinea-pig generation.' He and the others were beneficiaries, he says, of a network of programs that arose in the late aughts specifically to make such careers less impossible. Bouncing from Soho Rep's Writer Director Lab to the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group to the Ars Nova Play Group to the Lark Playwrights Workshop, they could keep turning out pages, if not yet afford their rent, thanks to the availability of stipends, grants, the occasional place to live and regular helpings of pizza. JACOBS-JENKINS MAY WELL be the poster child for that guinea-pig generation, having recently achieved several midcareer highs. One, impossible without having a body of work to retrospect, is retrospective: His scathing comic drama 'Appropriate,' first produced Off Broadway in 2014, won the 2024 Tony Award for best revival of a play. Another is prospective; he says he could not have written 'Purpose,' a play about a large, blended political family that begins previews on Broadway this month, until he became a parent in 2021: 'I didn't have the authority.' Though moving toward the center of the culture can feel peculiar when you have defined yourself as a useful outsider, Jacobs-Jenkins is learning to accept what it means to be midcareer — though he prefers to think of himself as a 'journeyman' on a journey of unknown duration. When he won the Tony, he says, 'there were a lot of us first-time nominees, realizing that we're not the brat pack anymore, that there's this vacuum pulling us forward. And it would be irresponsible to resist it because of all those institutions that helped us get there.' Wohl, 49, is also ambivalent about the idea of a midcareer. 'I embrace the optimism of that term, but I don't take anything for granted,' she says. 'We all have encountered people who got successful early and became complacent.' Wohl's work strikes me as the opposite of complacent, as each new piece explores new ways to 'break the box' of formal expectation. 'Small Mouth Sounds' took place at a silent retreat, of the kind she had been attending at the time. In the harrowing 'Make Believe,' which debuted in 2019, she challenged herself, in defiance of ancient theatrical wisdom, to put children onstage and expect them to carry the drama. But with her latest play, 'Liberation,' which opens this month at the Roundabout Theater Company, the box she's breaking is not just formal (though blended timelines are involved). She is also trying to break the box of her own reserve — a reserve common among early-career playwrights. 'Liberation,' about mothers and daughters, tests that reserve with its autobiographical aspects. Feeling exposed, Wohl threw several early drafts away, even some that were offered production. 'I only cracked it,' she says, 'by putting myself into the work in a more direct and legible way, which is something I couldn't have done when I was younger. I wouldn't have had the bravery. Now it's 'welcome to my journal!'' All the midcareer playwrights I spoke to mentioned a newfound confidence: not just in the value of their lives as worthy subjects for drama but also in their ability to make them into good theater. That they could write with at least a reasonable expectation of being produced was part of that confidence, but so was a deeper faith in their vocation. When you've won a bunch of playwriting awards, no one can say you're not a playwright. 'The biggest fear as a younger person is: What if the artistic impulse goes out?' Wohl says. 'And now I know that it won't.' Or at any rate, can't. Somewhere between early and midcareer, not just Jacobs-Jenkins but also Wohl and Headland and Hunter became parents. The costs and the constant emergency of caring for a child that drives some people out of the arts drove them deeper in. FOR HUNTER, IT WAS a relief. 'In your 20s, you write from such a place of anxiety,' he says. 'At 43, I'm a dad, we got a puppy, and we're finally in an apartment we really love. Once you have those middle-class things you never thought you were going to have, your shoulders drop a little bit.' Neither he nor the others feel that the hunched shoulders and housing insecurity of their youth were good for their art. The 'La Bohème' portrait of impoverished painters and poets was after all a description, not a prescription. 'And at least they could afford the garret,' Jacobs-Jenkins says. 'In New York, forget it.' Yet for Hunter especially, the arc of the concerns of his plays closely traces the arc of the concerns of his life, starting with 'a solidarity with people who are suffering' that stems from his upbringing in Idaho. When I ask about the obese protagonist of 'The Whale,' he says, 'At one point I weighed 375 pounds and was self-medicating with food.' And being outed at a fundamentalist Christian high school like the main character in 'The Harvest'? 'I was that guy!' That these characters are, as Hunter puts it, 'versions of me had I not found offramps' does not make them less dramatically valid. In a way, as he has been discovering ever since, it makes them more so. If 'A Case for the Existence of God,' from 2022, is about the struggle to have children, his latest play, 'Grangeville,' which opens this month at the Signature Theater, is about the struggle to care for parents. 'I'm now in the sandwich generation,' he says. Like Wohl and Jacobs-Jenkins, Hunter feels he could not have written his newer plays, with their newer concerns, sooner — nor, for that matter, his earlier plays now. One of the benefits of reaching midcareer is that a new life stage offers new stories to tell and a larger reserve of craft with which to tell them. Another benefit is that midcareers are obviously a prerequisite to late careers, with their witchy, molten qualities. You don't get to write 'The Tempest' unless you've already written 'Hamlet.' The question of what comes next for these playwrights is in any case no longer an anxious one, as it was in their youth. For Headland, 44, it seems to be pleasantly unanswerable. A cycle she calls the Seven Deadly Plays, which began with 'Cinephilia' in 2008 and continued with 'Bachelorette' in 2010, came to a close this season with 'Cult of Love,' the first to make it to Broadway. The sins were 'such a good container,' Headland says, like breadcrumbs leading forward instead of backward. But despite having run through them all ('Bachelorette' was gluttony; 'Cult of Love' was pride), she in no way feels at loose ends. A highly praised TV series like 'Russian Doll' and a 'Star Wars' spinoff ('The Acolyte') will do that. And perhaps it helps too that, atypically among the midcareer cohort, Headland's dramatic interests have been 'the same from day one': addiction, God, the female experience 'and some version of how those things conflate to make you grow or die.' 'Cult of Love' is about all three, like tornadoes inside tornadoes. That it was also a critical success is of course a nice capper, but Headland is less concerned about the fate of any one play than with overall output. Some will hit, some will flop, she says, but always 'more will be revealed.' Which seems to be the greatest gift of the guinea-pig experiment. Those emerging playwright programs not only opened doors for their beneficiaries but helped them develop the stamina and wherewithal to trust that they can keep the doors open. Members of early Ars Nova Play Group cohorts, including Jacobs-Jenkins and Hunter, still meet 15 years later. That they thus write with less anxiety (and more health insurance) is a boon for us too, allowing them to bring us newer, weirder ideas as they plow through their midcareers. It is entirely a good thing, despite 'La Bohème,' that the panic (as Headland puts it) is not there anymore — 'but the curiosity still is.'
