“The deftly crafted blend of shocking exaggeration and believability, politeness and fury…makes Appropriate land with the kind of thump you rarely encounter in the theater.” —Chicago Tribune
“So energetic, funny, and entertainingly demented, you can’t look away.” —New York on An Octoroon
A double-volume containing two astonishing breakout plays from one of the theatre's most exciting and provocative young writers.
In Appropriate, strained familial dynamics collide with a tense undercurrent of socio-political realities when the Lafayettes gather at a former plantation home to sift through the belongings of their deceased patriarch. An Octoroon is an audacious investigation of theatre and identity, wherein an old play gives way to a startlingly original piece.
Also includes the short play I Promise Never Again to Write Plays About Asians...
Two astonishing breakout plays from one of the theatre's most exciting and provocative young writers.
“An Octoroon isn’t just an alternative to the irony-free ‘black American theater’ of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson; it’s part of it—and part of many other things, too, because Jacobs-Jenkins’s surrealism grows out of naturalism, the strange circumstances that make us open our mouths, hoping to be heard, even as we forget to listen.”