At some point in his teen years, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins developed a fear of inviting people over.
“They wouldn’t know what to do,’’ recalled Jacobs-Jenkins, then an honors student at a Catholic prep school in Washington, D.C. “White friends, black friends, Asian friends, everyone. I would welcome them to my house, and they would see these, like — just a wall full of mammies, and they would freak out.’’
The mammy dolls, like the signs saying “Colored Only,’’ belonged to his parents’ collection of what he called “black memorabilia’’: a cache of objects imbued with racist history. To Jacobs-Jenkins, now a 26-year-old playwright with a degree in anthropology from Princeton University, these were the cause of occasional childhood nightmares, but they were also part of his everyday life.
“So I actually feel very comfortable around these images,’’ he said the other day by phone from Berlin, where he recently finished studying on a Fulbright grant.
The images that populated his home and his dreams now populate his play, “Neighbors,’’ which opened last night at Company One. Jacobs-Jenkins, who is black, said that when he wrote it in 2007, he intended it to be “the raciest race play that ever raced’’ and the last play he would ever write about the subject: a piece that poses uncomfortable questions about the labels of blackness and whiteness, about miscegenation, about perception and identity.
A collision of styles, it sets what he described as a “post-August Wilson’’ drama against “the beginning of black theater, which is minstrelsy,’’ a form that emerged in the first half of the 19th century with white performers in blackface makeup. They embodied whites’ degrading notions of blackness, played for laughs. Black minstrels, also wearing blackface, later joined the tradition.
In approaching this sensitive territory, Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t exactly tiptoe. The script’s first racial epithet — a word this newspaper does not print — is fewer than 20 lines in. Some of the characters speak in the kind of dialect that was Stepin Fetchit’s stock in trade. The majority of the characters’ names, and many of their traits, are borrowed from archetypes steeped in bigotry.
As “Neighbors’’ begins, the Pattersons — Richard, a black professor; Jean, a white stay-at-home mom; and their 15-year-old daughter, Melody — are getting new neighbors, the Crows. Mammy; her three teenagers, Sambo, Jim, and Topsy; and her brother-in-law, Zip Coon, are performers, and their act is called the “Crow Family Coon-A-Palooza.’’
In blackface throughout the play, the Crows are racist stereotypes brought to life, though it is only Richard who is bothered by their close proximity. Zip strikes up a friendship with Jean, whose newfound efforts to discuss race with her husband go nowhere, while Melody falls into an adolescent romance with Jim, the stage manager of his family’s act and the namesake of his late father, Jim Crow Sr.
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