Definition Theatre Company has snagged the rights to the Chicago premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, the company announced this afternoon.
Jacobs-Jenkins’s Obie Award–winning 2014 work is a deconstruction of a 19th-century plantation melodrama by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, whose racial and sexual politics get a thoroughly modern excavation. (Jacobs-Jenkins writes both Boucicault and himself into the play as characters.) The playwright, who is 32, was named both a MacArthur “genius” fellow and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016. His work has previously been produced in Chicago by Victory Gardens (Appropriate) and the Goodman Theatre (Gloria). For a young non-Equity company like Definition to nab An Octoroon, which Time Out New York’s Helen Shaw wrote “cemented Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in his position as a star playwright with serious things to say,” feels like a big get.
But Definition, founded just a few years ago by a group of University of Illinois graduates, has shown a healthy knack for forging strong alignments. The company has already worked with established directors like Chuck Smith and Michael Halberstam, and had its highest-profile success last year with a co-production with The New Colony, Byhalia, Mississippi, which was picked up by Steppenwolf Theatre Company for a remount following its sold-out run at the Den Theatre. Definition has also recruited an “artistic advisory board” filled with boldface names, two more of which it added today: former Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey and actor-director Phylicia Rashad.
An Octoroon is being produced in association with the Goodman, according to an announcement, with Chuck Smith, a Goodman resident director, at the helm. It will run July 21 to August 20 in the Richard Christiansen Theatre at Victory Gardens, where Definition has become a resident company. Casting and other information remains to be announced.
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