An Octoroon

By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by David Reed Winner of the 2014 OBIE Award for Best New American Play

Judge Peyton is dead, and his plantation Terrebonne is in financial ruins. Peyton’s handsome nephew George arrives as heir apparent and quickly falls in love with Zoe, a beautiful octoroon. But the evil overseer M’Closky has other plans—for both Terrebonne and Zoe. In 1859, a famous Irishman wrote this play about slavery in America. Now an American tries to write his own.

“[A] wildly imaginative new work by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. An Octoroon simultaneously gives us [Dion Boucicault’s] great melodrama and its contemporary reverberations. [The play] might induce vertigo, but it insists that making theater can be the best way to talk back to history.” –The Village Voice

An Octoroon is presented by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.
An Octoroon had its World Premiere at Soho Rep
Sarah Benson, Artistic Director / Cynthia Flowers, Executive Director
Subsequently produced by Theatre for a New Audience
Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director
Henry Christensen III, Chairman / Dorothy Ryan, Managing Director
at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, NY, in 2015.