[music]

Dani Perez: What is special to you about the experience of going to the theater?

Speaker 1: I love theater.

Speaker 2: I've been going to see shows since I was young. It's almost like nostalgia, but also it's incredibly entertaining. No show is ever completely the same.

Speaker 3: It's so present.

Speaker 4: It's so well done.

Speaker 5: It's professional.

Speaker 6: It's an experience.

Speaker 7: Just seeing the costumes, the music, the overall production is insane, normally. Just being there and being involved with it, it's a whole experience.

Speaker 8: They have really made an impact on me and my several hundreds of thousands of students that have come to the theater.

Speaker 9: It's like a movie theater but in person with real people.

Speaker 10: We laugh, we cry. It's beautiful. I don't know. It's just a fantastic immersive experience.

[music]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins first published his play Appropriate in 2012 in his late 20s. He has since staged it several times, been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for two subsequent plays, and been awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship among many other notes of acclaim. Appropriate, more than a decade after its debut was staged as Branden's Broadway debut this season. Later this month, it is up for eight Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Play.

The show is about a fraught family reunion. A group of estranged siblings and their chosen families are forced together when their father dies. They meet in his home in the South, a place that carries difficult memories for each of them, to deal with his estate and they uncover a macabre collection in the house, photographs depicting Black people being lynched. They debate the ramifications of their discovery, and in the process, they open very old wounds for themselves and for each other. I caught up with Branden recently to talk about the show and about his own efforts to understand the complicated inheritances of race in America. Branden, welcome to Notes from America.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Thank you. I'm so honored to be here.

Kai Wright: You've thought a great deal about the theater and the collective experience of going to the theater. This idea of an audience comes together, we go into this dark room and have an experience that never happens the same way twice. What do you think it is about that particular form of making contact with art and ideas that is uniquely meaningful?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I think I'm very moved by the theater. In some ways, I grew up around in it, and I grew up in a community theater context. I have always thought that at the heart of the enterprise is like a blind trust or faith in strangers that no matter who we are, we don't know each other, we're all going to sit in this room together in the dark and close the door. We're not going to be angry at each other. We're not going to hurt each other. We all are bound by this desire to have a collective experience of hallucinating a thing that we will take something with us back into the world that we could only find together, that we could only find as a group.

Having spent so much time in the theater, initially as an audience member, I have such vivid experiences of going from feeling like a part of a group to an individual in a group. That kind of waffling to me, it took me a while to realize how that was analogous to my experience as an American, that somehow that individual and collective waffling is somehow the shape of this form of life

Kai Wright: Right? Do I want to be here? Should I be here?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. Who is here with me? Why are they laughing or am I not laughing? Should I be crying? I'm not moved. This constant self-consciousness and yet it's all supported by a social contract or faith in a social contract, that this is going to be a safe space to feel the things. I'm not going to be judged for these feelings and it's dark so no one can see me feeling these things. It's just me feeling these things. I don't know. Just all that weird dimensionality to the audience experience has always been borderline sacred to me in a way.

Kai Wright: I heard you say once, "I've always believed that the most incredible and important things about theater and all art, really, is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially ugly feelings." What did you mean by that?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I feel like I've become a loopy when I start talking about this stuff, a little new agey.

[laughter]

Kai Wright: It's quite all right. It's a safe space.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: It's an amazing thing. I'm raising a toddler now, and I've read that book, The Whole Brain Child. It's all about how one of the best things you can do for your child is help them name the feelings that they're having. So much of their frustration and the hard times they're having and they're giving you are rooted in their confusion about feeling frustration versus anger versus irritation versus hunger, and that somehow the secret to being a functioning person in the world is about understanding this storm of things that happen inside of you and trying to interpret what they mean about how you should be in the world, how you should act in a given moment.

Yet we live in a world where people are afraid to show their feelings in public spaces. Then I would say, especially among people of color, the melanated, there's a lot of policing of our feelings that happens, especially in pop cultural spaces or even public spaces. Every time I see a young person get chastised for making noise, it's like, "Well, that person's just feeling jubilation. That person is experiencing exhilaration and somehow you're saying that it makes you uncomfortable, so they should stop feeling their feelings." I just think that one of the maybe struggles in life is that we have access to so many things that I might call affects and that's actually where power begins.

That's where you begin to take over the story of your life and rewrite your own story if you can understand your emotions inside the narrative of your life and yet we also live in a world, people just want to be entertained. People want to come home from work and feel good. People seek a creative experience, an aesthetic experience because they're craving an emotion to help them in their life. Sometimes they need it as a counter to the fact they had a bad day at work, they're going through a breakup. I have a really wonderful relative who lost his mother over the pandemic and he needed to watch Rom-coms to figure out how to cry. He didn't know how to cry in his life.

I always think of witnessing stories, witnessing the dramatic is about being able to rehearse feelings safely that you don't feel comfortable with in public for some reason. You're trying to learn the depth of your emotions in some way. It's just a little didactic, but that's just what I think.

Kai Wright: [laughs] I'll take it. On the subject of ugly feelings that you would encounter in shows, there are a great many ugly feelings in your work.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. Thank you.

[laughter]

Kai Wright: We are asked to encounter some very ugly feelings in others and in ourselves. That is certainly the case with Appropriate. It is full of some hard feelings among your characters. Let's start with an overall introduction to the show for folks who haven't seen it. It was actually first staged off-Broadway in 2013 and yet to me feels so specifically appropriate to this difficult moment we are living in a decade later. At its core, it's about three siblings reuniting who go through their deceased father's belongings and are confronted with his racist secrets. What brought you to this story way back in 2013?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Gosh, I think ideas come from many different directions and then it's where those roads cross that the idea emerges, I would say. On one hand, my parents were both collectors of what was referred to as Black memorabilia. This is a form of antique that they're relics of our history, but are uncomfortable items or artifacts of a way of thinking or thought that most people tried to bury but there's this fad, I would say, in the '70s and '80s when a lot of middle-class Black folks started collecting it for whatever reason.

Kai Wright: We're talking about like--

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Cookie jars that look like mammies. We're talking about, I don't want to start describing all this stuff, like old advertisements that we're now ashamed of, early iterations of popular characters who we may or may not realize were rooted in racist stereotyping.

Kai Wright: Sort of the detritus of Jim Crow.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, and been beyond, that was the thing.

Kai Wright: Just as an aside, why?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I don't know. They have different reasons. In some ways, it was the thing that everyone was doing. keep in mind that my parents grew up at the tail end of Jim Crow. For them, I think there was a curiosity about what they-- They were witnessing a forced forgetfulness about something that I think they wanted to hold on to. I think my parents both had-- They were rescuing something from oblivion. There was a curatorial quality to it for them but I think it was the thing that people were doing. They were antiques. They were investments in some ways. My parents met at one of the auctions for these things. That's the story of mine.

Kai Wright: Oh, wow.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. I know, trauma. [laughter] Keep in mind, that haunts my whole career, [crosstalk] my life.

Kai Wright: This is the beginning of your intellectual life.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: [laughs] Yes. Exactly.

Kai Wright: That family history with racist memorabilia is one part of the backstory of this play but at the time Branden wrote it, as a young man finding his way in the theater world of New York, his mind was everywhere on the subject of race. He was working as an editorial assistant for the famed New Yorker critic Hilton Als, who was developing his romping essay collection, White Girls. He was obsessing over a painting by Kerry James Marshall that he'd seen at an exhibit of artistic responses to slavery. It just fired his imagination. This seems to be how Branden's mind works, constantly pulling together disparate threads that somehow weave into a new idea.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I would say within the span of six months, I suddenly was like, "I want to write a play that works like Kerry's painting. I want to have the sentiment and approach of Hilton's essay. I want to think about a family inheriting a questionable collection." That becomes enough gas to get the car going.

Kai Wright: You're a very young man at this point, to me.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, totally.

Kai Wright: What I'm hearing is that you're just moving through the world being bombarded by these questions about race, and how we live it, and particularly in art, and you're just trying to sort your way through it, I guess.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, trying to make sense of it. Literally trying to make sense of nonsense-

Kai Wright: Trying to make sense of nonsense.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: -because I think that's the great legacy of the racial regime where there's no consistency to it. There's no real body of knowledge to set it on. I call it a big theater game.

[music]

Kai Wright: Coming up, how that big theater game came together into his Tony-nominated Broadway debut, Appropriate. Stay with us.

[music]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright, and I am joined this week by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Genius award winner. A play he wrote and first staged over a decade ago was revived and brought to Broadway this season and it's up for eight Tony Awards later this month. The play called Appropriate, or also Appropriate, depending on how you choose to read the title, is a family drama. It's the story of a white southern family in which the patriarch dies, and three estranged siblings reunite in their childhood home to try to settle the estate.

They stumble upon troubling relics in the house that suggest their father harbored a quiet and gruesome fascination with anti-Black lynching. The discovery forces open all manner of barely closed wounds and resentments between the siblings as they argue about whether and how to deal with these artifacts and what they represent. I asked Branden to talk me through the characters. Tony is the eldest sibling, the matriarch of the family, played by Sarah Paulson.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Played amazingly by Sarah Paulson.

Kai Wright: Played amazingly to great acclaim.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, unbelievable.

Kai Wright: Likely to be a Tony winner.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Knock on woods.

Kai Wright: She's a very difficult human being in the play. Who is she and what is she bringing to the weekend with the family?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Tony to me lives in the lineage of a number of important female characters in the canon. I should say one of the things I did when I started this play was I read every single family drama I could find, and I just stole something from each that I loved. I loved Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar, I loved Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, I loved Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. I loved these difficult women. [chuckles] I would say, for me, Tony is about trying to unpack-- Having now had a daughter, people love little girls, but there's a moment that comes where people turn on women. [laughs] I'm bracing for that moment.

I wanted to look at a person who had been calcified into something that she wanted to get out of or not. On an allegorical level, I very intentionally put her in Atlanta. [chuckles] She's a product of what I would call the New South, which is all these kids grew up in DC, which is where I grew up, where it's this "neutral territory" in the world. She chose to move to the New South. To me, that's a culture which is always at a strange relationship to its past, that it's haunted by its historical realities, but is in some ways its own source of renewal and growth and wealth. I wanted to build a character who had to live with ambivalence about her history and with her father.

Kai Wright: She is the character that is steadfast in her refusal, externally at least, to face the facts of their father's racist past of the artifacts they have found.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. It's worth saying, though, that I don't think the play necessarily-- Because it's interesting. It plays its own kind of Rorschach, but the play never confirms the provenance of those objects. She's definitely the person whose benefit of the doubt extends the farthest, and it's rooted in a feeling of, "There are bigger fish to fry right now, guys. This can't be the thing that we're worried about. I have personal reparations I need before I talk about anyone else's."

Kai Wright: Which I found difficult to wrestle with because I did empathize with the personal reparations that she wanted. She felt taken advantage of by her family and left to do all the hard work, and that's what she wanted to talk about, what was most close to her, not these abstract ideas about whether her father was a racist or not.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Because what does that matter? Because her father loved her. Her father was the last man in the family who gave her the time of day, who valued her life force, who valued the gift of her presence. I always feel like this would be a different play of-- I think it's a play about families that can't hear each other, but if her siblings had turned to her at the top of the play and been like, "We see how hard you're working, and we're so thankful."

Kai Wright: I kept wanting them to do that.

[crosstalk]

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: They couldn't, [inaudible 00:17:56].

Kai Wright: I would just say thank you to this woman.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: No, they can't say thank you. [laughs] It's the family that can't say thank you.

Kai Wright: In that way, is it a play about race?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I'm not the school that every play is about race. Point to a play, I'll tell you, "Yes, it's about race." Anything I write is going to be about race because it's why I'm writing it. I think the play is very much interested in who's allowed to forget what when it comes to historical crimes, so take that wherever you want. I definitely think the play is about these psychological legacies of American chattel slavery. In that way, it's definitely about race but I always get anxious when I hear the word about, because in some ways, is your life about race? No, but race is there. [chuckles] It accounts for a lot of things I feel in the day-to-day, and a lot of things are happening in my life but I can't let my whole life be about a theater game I inherited.

Kai Wright: It certainly seems to be inheritance is a central idea here and I think I see in a lot of your work is what we have inherited. I kept thinking, "Boy, this is a family that has inherited whiteness as a ghost that is haunting them and the house, and it can't be exorcised." I wonder if that is Branden's vision of the world. Is that where you were coming from, as you wrote this, that whiteness is a ghost that just cannot be exorcised?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. What is an exorcism? An exorcism means you have to talk to the ghost. Every exorcism begins with addressing the spirit, and I think the canon of work I inherited, the story culture I inherited when I wrote this play, did not talk about it, did not want to address it. They wanted to hide the specificity of something like whiteness behind the big R word. Everyone hears the word race and they short circuit because it's such an abstract. This play is about this moment at the back end of the play that gets the audience insane where one character accuses the other of not being white. Even then you're like, "What are we talking about? [laughter] It's like you're all walking around not even seeing each other as white.

What are we talking about when we're talking about whiteness? I would say it's been hilarious, this iteration of the play. The play premiered, like you said, 10 years ago, which is why we're in the revival category, apparently of the Tony's. Everyone's like, "You've rewritten the play." I'm like, "I actually have not. It's still the exact plot." I think actually what I realized in the 10 years past is we have all this new language now around whiteness, and I think people can see something different in it than they could see. In some ways, they've rewritten themselves, but we didn't have terms like fragility at the time.

Kai Wright: It's really fascinating to think about 2013, we didn't.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, we didn't. I think people were still saying post-race, you know what I mean? There's something about how we have more vocabulary around whiteness now, so we can actually really get at what it is. Remember earlier when you asked me, you asked about ugly feelings and what we're ultimately rehearsing. I was thinking about how, a lot of what makes us feel insane is that we feel something, and think we're the only ones who feel it. Actually, part of the theater is going in there and going, "Wait, you guys all feel this, too? You find this as uncomfortable, too."

That's when you begin to start building connections. I think I've noticed that everyone now has this shared language around what they're watching that allows them to connect in a different way to the work. The audiences feel more gelled or something.

Kai Wright: In some ways, the most challenging character is not Sarah Paulson's Tony to me, but rather the middle sibling, Bo. He's successful, he's made money, and is kind of, in my reading, the classic white liberal, and enters the story certain of his enlightenment relative to his siblings. We come to learn the boundaries and the limitations of that enlightenment.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Agreed. [laughter] Yes, he's the most equivocating. He's the one who seems to have a lot that he's not talking about, but you can feel him, and Corey still I think does an excellent job of playing that, of someone who is just trying to toe the line enough to be done with this weekend and this confrontation. He works in the media. It's alluded to that he works at a magazine.

Kai Wright: A little close to home.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: He works in the business side of a magazine, but he's someone who of course thinks of himself as liberal, and of course thinks of himself as evolved. That is at the expense of acknowledging his own with the way that he profits from the labor of his sister and the way he profits from his last name. That his ability to traverse boundaries in an enlightened way is still based on a history that he actively has to perform distance from all the time.

Kai Wright: This seems like the kind of character that would most provoke you.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Me?

Kai Wright: Yes. Based on our conversation, somebody who's equivocating and does not want to face the thing that we are here to face seems like the one that would be most challenging for you.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: In terms of what they're right now, I'd be upset. Maybe. I don't know. I feel like I live with more Bos than I live with Tonys, and of course, in some ways, I'm an oldest child, so in some ways, I'm very emotionally attached to Tony. She's my anger in some way, but in some ways, Bos are the problem. I feel like I'm being forced to judge the characters.

Kai Wright: I'm sorry.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: No, no. It's okay, but I think about the fact that, like at the end of the play, spoiler alert, he's like, "I'm going to handle the house," but it's clear he doesn't handle the house. He refuses to address anything. He'd rather it all fall into--

Kai Wright: Handling it is going away.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. Letting it die, letting something else take care of it. That's not accountability, that's not responsibility.

Kai Wright: What does it mean for you that this is your Broadway debut, this play?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: It's rife with irony. [laughter] People keep asking me how I feel, and it's hard to describe, because it's a thing I did in my 20s, and I'm so moved and impressed and touched and honored that it's still in the world. If you told me 10 years ago this was happening, I would've been like, "Get out of my face. Who are you? What do you mean you work for WNYC?

[laughter]

Kai Wright: You don't want to talk to me. I'm not talking to you.

[laughter]

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Who are you? Exactly. I'm not talking to you. I got to move, which was another tiny apartment. There's something about it that's fascinating. There's a part of me that also panics a little bit, because I don't know-- the play is set in 2012, but no one seems to have noticed. I don't know what that means. You know what I mean?

Kai Wright: I don't know what you mean.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Meaning when I wrote the play, it was that 10 years ago. It was pre 45, pre Black Lives Matter, pre any of this. I was just somebody writing a play about white family dramas. It's just intense to see it have a different resonance in the world, and I wish I understood why.

Kai Wright: What have you seen that's different in the audience response from then and now?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: The thing about audiences that the bigger they are, the more vivid their reactions. This is the biggest audience I think the show's ever had. Hearing them, their reactions are far more on the end of the spectrum than in the middle. There's a ton of laughter in the play.

Kai Wright: It's funny.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, but it's funny than I thought. It's funny than was 10 years ago, and that's unique. I've had so many people this iteration come up to me and go, even if they don't like the people they go, "That's my family."

Kai Wright: Wow.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Like I'm Bo, I'm Frank, I'm Tony. People are identifying in a much more intense way. Whereas I think 10 years ago, there was a lot more suspicion of me as a Black playwright, and people, they just came in with their backs up and unwilling to open themselves up to the depiction of humanity on stage. I'm feeling people be in the game more and being in the story more.

Kai Wright: I have to ask you which people? Are we talking white people, Black people?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Majority, yes. Our ticket prices were so high initially that we witnessed-- this is the irony of it, right? Is that the supply and demand of it pushes things into a number that people just can't reach. I have had a lot of amazing Black audiences members come up to me and say it has been very different, and who are like deeply moved in almost a spiritual way by it. I hear the word ancestors a lot. [laughs] I hear people reading into the symbols of the cicadas in a different way. Reading into the ending, which I don't want to spoil with the set event, and locking into the material elements of the production in a way that wasn't happening 10 years ago.

It feels like this play is just having-- it's like almost getting the definitive production 10 years later. That's a wild experience.

Kai Wright: Branden's whole career as a playwright could be described as a wild experience. One that has always been caught up in his personal wrestling match with how the world receives him specifically as a Black person, and how he understands himself just as an artist.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I really didn't start writing plays proper till I was in college. I used to write like fiction, because I was a books person, and I had this pretty traumatic moment of being racialized when I was about 19. I brought a short story I'd written into a class with a very famous writer, a very lovely man. You workshop the story, and then at the end, he said something like, "I guess my final question is what race are these characters?" It actually kicked up what I would now recognize having now been a teacher, an interesting conversation that this teacher just fumbled.

It was generational. It was a weird moment. I want to say this is like 2004 ish, around then. This whole argument began around me about whether or not it mattered if I marked the race of the characters inside the story. Keep in mind, I'm someone who'd been reading since I was young, almost never read a book by a white author in which people talked about how comma white. It wasn't ever like Jane Eyre comma white, you know what I'm saying? [chuckles] I was very confused because writers come to writing usually by being readers, which means that you have this very private relationship to your imagination, it starts from your early age, and which you feel safe.

You are a writer because you enjoy reading. Reading satisfies you, it pleases you. You don't feel othered inside your own mind. This moment happened, and became a huge fight that I was like, "That seemed to be happening around me." I felt really crippled by it. I never wrote another story again.

Kai Wright: Oh, no.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, but I still was a writer and I had this impulse the next semester to take a playwriting class. I took a player class, a guy named Robert Sandberg, and it was like a revelation. It was totally a revelation because I didn't feel I had to answer the question of a character's identity because the actress's body did that work for me. I would write all these plays that actually borrowed something called the comedian tradition, which is this Italian form of comedies that relied on stock characters.

I was very obsessed with the theater history of it. I wound up understanding that that comedia, that idea of stock archetypes, you can actually track a history of it moving into the American context, and it becomes minstrelsy. There was also an amazing woman named Daphne Brooks, a professor, a performance scholar now at Yale, who taught a class when I was there on African-American theater. She made this very provocative comment at the top where she said, "I could either start this class with minstrelsy or I can start with Uncle Tom's Cabin. I'm going to start with Uncle Tom's Cabin."

That really haunted me because I was like, "What's the version where we start with minstrelsy?" I had this notion of I wanted to write a play that somehow encompassed all of Blackness in American theater, so I could never have to write that again. I never want to write that play again or something.

Kai Wright: It's quite an ambition.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Quite an ambition. Listen, I'm like 21 here. I'm really thinking that I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to crack this code.

[music]

Kai Wright: The play he wrote became his first public production, and it caused quite a stir. Coming up, Branden's introduction to the weird, confounding public conversation about race and art.

[music]

Regina: Hi, I'm Regina, a producer here at Notes from America with Kai Wright. I hope you're loving this episode. As you know, we cover a lot of issues and ideas on this podcast, and we don't want to do it without you. Having your questions, stories, and experiences in the conversation is so important to us. Let me tell you how to be in touch. In the show notes of this episode, there's a link that takes you to our website, notesfromamerica.org, where you can record a message for us. Plus, our inbox is always open at notes@wnyc.org. You can write us, or even better, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to us there. That's notes@wnyc.org. I'll be looking there for a note from you soon. Thanks for listening.

[music]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright, and I am talking this week with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He's a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a MacArthur Genius grantee, and his play, Appropriate, is up for eight Tony Awards later this month. He wrote the show more than a decade ago as part of a suite of work in which he was, as he puts it, trying to make sense out of the nonsense of race. That journey began with his very first publicly staged show, a play called The Neighbors. He wrote it in his early 20s in an absurdly earnest effort to encapsulate the full history of Blackness depicted in American theater all in one show.

The show was about two families living as neighbors in a fictional college town. One of them was a very contemporary, forward-looking, mixed-race family, and the other was a family composed of challenging stock depictions of Black people played by a group of Black actors wearing Black face, drawing on the minstrel tradition. You enter the public conversation as a playwright doing Blackface?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, correct. Which, it would always interest me. Blackface always surfaces. It's like a ghost in the machine of our pop culture. Someone's always going to be popping up doing Blackface, and we're going to say something about it. I always thought it was interesting because it was like we were mad at the paint, but not the person who put it on. That's somehow what we wanted to get rid of was this practice of putting paint on your face, but actually that stopped you from really wrestling with, "What is this practice and where did it come from?"

There's, of course, this brilliant book by Eric Lott, now a classic called Love and Theft, where he really breaks down the origins of blackface and what the emotions and affects around it as a practice and a genre. What engendered it? What made it so popular? It did spin out a lot of important archetypes that still live inside of our culture, including the mammy archetype, which came directly out of English music hall where they love to put a man in a dress, but we just put a blackface on them, and it's a different story here. There's Jim Crow, there is Zip Coon, which are these two stereotypes and depictions of Northern and Southern "Negro".

There's Topsy, who comes directly from Uncle Tom's Cabin. She's a character in that. How she moves in and out of culture as this rascally wild child. It's always gendered female.

There's a character named Sambo, who was his own distillation of racial attitudes towards native Africans. It was wild and interesting to me, but nobody wanted to hear about it from me, apparently, because I am obsessed with history. Which it took me a while to realize that not many people are obsessed with history.

[music]

Kai Wright: Branden staged his obsessive look at the history of minstrelsy at the Public Theater, which is a hugely influential off-Broadway theater in New York. It's where shows ranging from A Chorus Line to Hamilton started off, and at the same time, home to a lot of experimental work like Branden's. This meant that critics were definitely going to take notice of this show. Even before it opened, a debate began over its value and its worth.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: It was crazy. It was such a controversy. The reactions were actually so fascinating to me. One of them was this-- There was this gentle-- A lot was being made of the fact that I was a Black playwright, capital B--Black playwright. Literally within two words of my name, my race would have to show up. I had been coming up with a lot of different playwrights of different backgrounds who wasn't having that happen to them. I'm like, "What is this critical practice of racializing the author immediately before you can begin to do the work of talking about the work." It was the encounter with a double standard that I just kept thinking about.

Kai Wright: What did you take from that experience of you're fascinated by this history and you want to put it on stage, and next thing you know, you're in the New York Times being debated? How did that shape you as a writer and what came next in your life?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: There were a couple of things. One thing I really began to understand, what an audience is, because the audience is, to me, the most radical element in the theater because it's the one thing you actually can't control. You can't really control who shows up to your play. You can charge them $1,000. People who don't have $1,000 can't go, but anyone can show up. When I hear people talk about white audiences or not white audiences, I'm like, "You're misreading what an audience is." It's anyone who shows up. What would happen from night to night, I swear to God, would be the reactions to the show would vary based on the diversity of the crowd, how spread out people were. If we had more people of color on one side than not on another.

Kai Wright: How physically spread out people were.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: It would be a very antagonistic evenings because, again, you have that experience in the audience where you're hearing people laugh going, "I'm not laughing. Who's laughing over there?" Just that experience of being outside and in, it stokes up other affects and feelings that you have to think about, because I began to obsess over seeding plan, like premium seeding versus the cheap seeds and what's happening when you do that. Who's gathered in what group in this mob and who's hearing what or saying what. That was very important to me.

I also began to see how the ecosystem of meaning-making in and around theater and how critics are a part of that, how marketing departments are a part of that at theaters, who actually is accountable or not when something goes right or wrong. I learned so much about how meaning gets made around. It's not just the play, it's how the play interacts with the community it's inside of. You know what I mean? I learned a lot about genre, and I learned that because I didn't know it at the time, but I was doing this genre work.

I was looking at minstrelsy and having to understand, "What's different about that audience then versus now that makes us not okay? What did that audience need to see? What were they used to seeing? What was shaping their way of seeing that made this a palatable form of theater versus where we are now?" That really kicked off the next couple of plays I wrote, which includes Appropriate, where I wanted to historicize the things that we associate with different forms of theater, different kinds of theater.

[music]

Kai Wright: Branden's experience with the play, Neighbors, did not chase him out of theater, thankfully. He went on to write Appropriate, and he went on to write two plays that became finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. As Branden and I finished our conversation, I asked him about one of those works called Gloria. It's a story set in a magazine back in the early aughts, and it's another story about inheritances in a way. A group of employees stretch across the generations, and they're all trying to figure out, what is this institution that we work in, that we've built together? What's our place in it?

They're all distrustful of one another, convinced that the others are somehow stealing their moment, their opportunity to shine in a fraught and rapidly shrinking industry. Each of them turns their most skeptical eye at the youngest workers. As one character says at one point, "Youth is a weapon." I asked Branden about that line.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: In some ways, the most dangerous time and most important time in someone's professional life is when they're young because they're going to set the terms of what the future inherits. They also have time.

Kai Wright: [chuckles] To do so.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes. That's what people don't have who've been loving their job for 30-odd years in their cubicle. They don't have the time to change much around them. They don't have time to seek revenge. [laughter] That was always the interesting, especially back then, I hear it everywhere, there's always this idea people haven't paid their dues yet. They hate a young upstart despite they could be the most talented person, they could know as much as you could. They could actually have been working since they were like 11.

You think about Taylor Swift, she's working since she was 11. Of course, she's a trillionaire [laughs]. She's been doing this for a really long time. People always want to control youth because they realize they have the time to get everything they want and I don't.

Kai Wright: My time is up.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: My time is up. I've got to sit here and construct this whole idea of you got to pay dues. I got to create a culture in which you got to suffer before you can actually exercise your gifts and that happens everywhere in every industry. I think what happens is, even I'm having a moment now where Lila Neugebauer who directed my play and I were both for a very long time the youngest colleagues we had [chuckles] and we got nominated for Tony Awards and we looked at each other. We're like, "Are we the establishment now?"

Kai Wright: I'm not. I hate to break it to you.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, it turns out maybe-

Kai Wright: In fact, you are.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: -nightmare because you build a whole identity of yourself around being the runt. I look back over my shoulder and I look at my students who are coming up behind. I was just in a competitive category for an award with one of my first students.

Kai Wright: Oh, wow.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I can see how that can start to mess with you. [chuckles] I think of youth as a weapon in the sense that this is why people oppress youth movements is that they actually have the resource to get a program across and that's why you're going to have to listen to them.

Kai Wright: All of the characters across all the generations or many of the generations are represented in Gloria in this workplace. Like I said, they're all distrustful of one another. They're all reflecting on their moment of being the upstart youth and they're all asking this question of like, "Is any of this worth it?" I just wonder, as you think about that show in today's context what comes to you?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I came out of academia into the workforce in publishing. I remember going to work for the first time and sitting in this cubicle and having nothing to do. I could not understand. I literally went to my boss and I was like, "Am I supposed to just sit here?" [laughter] She was like, "Yes. You're supposed to sit your body there for eight hours even if you have nothing to do, you need to just sit there." That idea that I had to put on clothes, make some dirty laundry happen, leave my house, pick up my little 90-cent coffee from the Bodega, get on a train, be on that train, sit there, and just be in a space in Times Square for eight hours--

Kai Wright: Because it was good for you.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, with nothing to do with my life force. I'm eating food, I'm imbibing calories. I'm not expending those calories. I just could not wrap my head around that and I think now about how most people work from home because they realize [chuckles] they don't need to sit in that cubicle.

Kai Wright: People have that exact thought dawned on millions of people in 2020.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Exactly. Why am I going to this place to sit and do what I could do right here at my kitchen table? People becoming very aware of how their time is their resource. That's what Gloria to me ultimately about is people feeling like they maybe bought a bill of goods and trying to figure out how to spin it into meaning for themselves. That's what everyone's asking now, and I think this was really the big legacy of the Pandemic is like, "What is my life for? What am I supposed to do with living?" You know what I mean? Is it about glory? Is it about something else?

[music]

Kai Wright: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, this has been a wonderful time.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: It's already over. Oh my gosh.

[laughter]

Kai Wright: I thank you so much for spending time with us.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Thank you. Such an honor to be here.

[music]

Kai Wright: Branden's play Appropriate is up for eight Tony Awards later this month. It runs on Broadway through June 30th. Notes from America is a production of WNYC Studios. Follow us wherever you get podcasts and on Instagram @noteswithkai. This episode was produced by Regina de Heer. Theme music and mixing by Jared Paul. Our team also includes: Katerina Barton, Karen Frillmann, Suzanne Gaber, Varshita Korrapati, Matthew Miranda, Daniel Perez, Siona Petros, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. I'm Kai Wright, thanks for spending time with us.

[music]

 

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