Great Balls Of Cotton: An Octoroon Part One

A sensation last season at Soho Rep, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon was revisited and restaged for a run at Theatre For A New Audience (TFANA) Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, opening in February and extended through March 29. The play is based on The Octoroon, Irish author Dion Boucicault’s 1859 antebellum melodrama, yet by bridging the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Jacobs-Jenkins has created an interesting conversation about race, confronting such haunting demons as slavery and lynching as facets of American history.

Directed by Sarah Benson, An Octoroon has sets by Mimi Lien, lighting by Matt Frey, sound by Matt Tierney, and projection by Jeff Sugg. For the world premiere at Soho Rep, Lien began her design process by “examining the events of the play.” For the prologue, set in the 21st century, the idea was having the audience walk into an empty space, as if for stand-up comedy, without a set, like a fringe show, “as if walking into an empty Soho Rep, then going to a plantation in the 19th century,” says Lien, whose concern was how that plantation should be represented and how to find the correct scenic gesture to get there. “We didn’t want to show a plantation in a literal or historic way,” she explains, referring to conversations with the director about performance art versus theatre. “We also didn’t want the audience to hold the material at arm’s length and be distanced from it.”

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

In asking, “What is the material of a plantation?” Lien made a list of things that are black and white—molasses, sugar, cotton—and came away with an image of slave women knee deep in cotton balls, as a way to represent the plantation. “I felt it needed a blunt gesture to make that change,” she says, explaining how a wall drops suddenly, transforming a small black stage area into a larger playing area with a white floor and back wall. A door leads to unseen interior spaces. “Soho Rep has no wings and no place for any other scenery,” explains Lien. “The wall was hinged to the floor and held in its up position by pins, but in the Brooklyn version, it has pneumatics and safety sensors, moving at 16 feet per minute on a chain motor.”

The first scene at the plantation is what Lien imagined: two slave women sweeping cotton balls on the stage, evoking a 19th-century reality, yet when the women speak, they use a 21st-century urban vernacular, adding a sassy dose of humor as they sweep. “We use real cotton balls sealed to be non-flammable and to seal in the cotton particles so they don’t fall apart,” says Lien. The cotton balls on stage are recycled but not the ones that go in the audience, so there’s a mix of new and old on stage for each performance. “They are replaced completely each week,” adds Lien, who estimates that more than 500,000 cotton balls will have been used by the end of the run in Brooklyn.

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

Another iconic, humorous character is a large rabbit, really an actor with a rabbit head designed by costume designer Wade Laboissonniere and representing Br’er Rabbit. “This character reaffirms the power of the mask,” says Lien, who created a grassy area next to the slave cabin for the rabbit to disappear.

When the action moves to the slave quarters, the set becomes more realistic. “We didn’t want the plantation to feel like a historic place, but to feel like the present,” Lien notes. “We treat the spaces in an abstract way but with real objects— brooms, tables, and other artifacts from the 19th-century—in the melodrama scenes.” In contrast, the slave cabin is very naturalistic; all of the objects used on stage are there, as if it is a repository for life on the plantation.

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

For Lien, one challenge in moving the show was “the shape of the theatre, not only the width of the stage. The wall is 30% larger, which is significant because of the way it has to fall,” she explains. “There is also a mezzanine and balcony, so the sightlines had to be considered for an audience that is very high and wraps around. One solution is a series of portals that get smaller and smaller.”

They also used the TFANA space with a proscenium set up for the first time in the short life of the theatre, which opened last year, needing that configuration to confront the walls front on. Another difference was that the actors playing the buyers at a slave auction are sitting right in the audience, giving the proceedings a heightened sense of reality to the point where some audience members have called out bids of their own.

Southern Lights

“At Soho Rep, the conceit of the show was that you came into a space that was a well-worn downtown hovel of a theatre, so the rig, to the degree that it could, needed to seem as if it was a part of the whole look,” says Frey about the lighting design. “But the show is full of surprises and keeps becoming something else. Because of that, there were things like a couple of SeaChangers, scrollers, and LED footlights. There were multiple styles of lighting throughout the show: simple presentational, dance club crazy, foot-lit melodrama, stage work light, realism, and more.”

If the lighting at Soho Rep tried to create a down-and-dirty look as the audience entered the theatre, in Brooklyn the show is in a brand new theatre space. “So that became our starting point,” says Frey. “To a certain degree, we needed to have the rig appear that it was a part of that space. The idea, though, was to make it seem simple and unassuming, but because of the newness of the space, it seemed necessary to add a little bit more in terms of lighting, so some movers were added, and more extensive LED strip lights were added. But it still seemed important not to be aware of fixtures. Seeing them on the electrics from the audience, for instance, did not seem right. So we tried to keep them as out of sight as best we could.” Most of the gear was part of the in-house inventory, with additional gear rented from PRG, including SeaChanger Tungsten Profile fixtures, Harman Martin Atomic Strobes, and atmospheric equipment.

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

Cecilia Durbin served as Frey’s associate. “We were extremely lucky to have her,” he asserts. “She worked with me the first time around at Soho Rep, and in some ways, she knows the show better than I do. It was critical to have her this time around because I could only be there for the four tech days. I had to leave before our first preview for another project at Playwrights Horizons. She did an amazing job seeing it to the finish line.”

Frey notes that his lighting is like the play, stepping through multiple styles, back and forth. “The lighting takes its lead from that,” he says. “With the melodrama scenes, footlights are meant to seem as if they are the main source of lighting. This is true to the traditional form and is important for the design of the makeup, but then we play with the color to sort of tweak these scenes, with a warm pink salmon-y glow for the plantation, green/blue for the scenes near the wharf. Other than that, I think the palette, hopefully, adjusts to where we are style-wise in the play.

Click here for Part Two, which covers the sound and projection design.

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