An Octoroon

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the Obie Award for his radical, incendiary, and subversively funny riff on Dion Boucicault’s once-popular 1859 mustache-twirling melodrama. Judge Peyton is dead, and his plantation Terrebonne is on the brink of foreclosure. George, the high-minded heir apparent, falls for the lovely Zoe, who’s one-eighth black. But the bigoted plantation queen has eyes for George, and the dastardly overseer M’Closky plots to keep Zoe and Terrebonne for himself. An Octoroon is a spectacular collision of the antebellum South and 21st-century cultural politics.