If you’re not familiar with the content of Artists Repertory Theatre’s An Octoroon, the spare set and opening monologue may have you convinced you’re in for a staid solo show. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
While at times a necessarily difficult performance to watch—it’s about slavery, and the racist history of theater, and drunk white playwrights stereotyping Native Americans, and some of the most racist shit you’ll see anywhere—An Octoroon is unfailingly smart and full of deceptive humor that doesn’t seem like it should work at all, but it does. Just when you think you’ve got a read on what the play is trying to do, it punches you in the face with an image you can’t unsee. There are moments from the performance I attended that were still burnt into my memory days later, which is how you know playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins succeeded in his aim of addressing the potential connection between “the illusion of suffering versus actual suffering.”