‘Octoroon’ laments, bursts and rebuilds our theater

Did the show find daring, smart ways to lambaste prejudices of and oppression by white people — but without sounding so angry as to put off that same demographic, the one most likely to make up the majority of its audience?

Did it create authentic, multidimensional characters of color, while also bestowing the same honor on its white characters, even the racist ones?

Within the first few moments of “An Octoroon,” whose West Coast premiere opened Friday, June 30, at Berkeley Rep, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins not only answers those questions with startling originality, he also exposes the questions themselves as condescending, and more important, limiting.

[...] though this production is gorgeously designed, with performances that are crisp, thoughtful and charged with enough potential for anarchy to keep things always a little (or a lot) dangerous, it’s how Jacobs-Jenkins tells his story that most dazzles.

The show plays gleeful havoc with Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama “The Octoroon,” about Zoe (Sydney Morton), a woman on a financially imperiled Louisiana plantation who is one-eighth black and thus, because of the one-drop rule of the time, forever tainted, forbidden from marrying George, the white man who loves her (played by Lance Gardner, in whiteface).

At rise, BJJ (also Gardner) is in an undershirt and briefs on an almost naked stage, introducing himself as a “black playwright,” lamenting, as he dons the whiteface he’ll need later, how even if he tries to write a play that’s not about race, theaters will inevitably market him that way.

[...] if in one moment you laugh at the over-the-top conceits of melodrama — its poses codified into tableaux, its clownish facial expressions rendered all the more grotesque by footlights — in the next they manipulate you.

The genius of “An Octoroon,” though, is that it’s not just Zoe, George and the plantation’s slaves (Afi Bijou, Jasmine Bracey, Afua Busia and Amir Talai, all scene-stealing, whether channeling their best Hattie McDaniel or using contemporary inflection) with whom you sympathize.