“Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
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Annette J. Saddik
is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Literature at the City University of New York (CUNY), with a dual teaching appointment at The Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in Theatre and New York City College of Technology Department of English. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century drama and performance, most notably the work of Tennessee Williams, and has published four books as well as numerous essays. Her most recent monograph is
Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer (2015). She is currently working on a new book on the grotesque, which explores the ambiguous figure of the clown as a site of resistance and transformation. Saddik lectures and advises on productions both nationally and internationally, participates regularly in audience “talk-backs” for Broadway and Off-Broadway performances, and serves as performance editor ofThe Tennessee Williams Annual Review .
Abstract
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, explores the history of Black representation in the theater and, subsequently, the performance of Black identity in the US through its depiction of a complex and contradictory minstrelsy that cannot easily be classified as satirical or subversive. Generating what Jacobs-Jenkins has called “wrong laughter” through contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence, Neighbors engages the unstable space of the comic grotesque in order to open up pathways for something new to emerge. In this play, the figure of the clown – a grotesque outlaw who moves between, within, across, and beyond boundaries – becomes a key destabilizing figure as the grotesque body becomes a site for transformation through its contradictions, oozing inconsistency and excess, and allowing a potential space for regeneration and renewal through instability and failure when the stable and the rational have failed. In its embrace of clowning and the comic grotesque, Neighbors questions the stable notion of “community,” particularly in terms of racial and historical identity, and exposes the contradictions of closed constructions, creating a space beyond the boundaries of rational discourse that may begin to engage a more complex reality.
About the author
is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Literature at the City University of New York (CUNY), with a dual teaching appointment at The Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in Theatre and New York City College of Technology Department of English. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century drama and performance, most notably the work of Tennessee Williams, and has published four books as well as numerous essays. Her most recent monograph is Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer (2015). She is currently working on a new book on the grotesque, which explores the ambiguous figure of the clown as a site of resistance and transformation. Saddik lectures and advises on productions both nationally and internationally, participates regularly in audience “talk-backs” for Broadway and Off-Broadway performances, and serves as performance editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Acknowledgements
- Articles
- Introduction: Theater and Community. Poetics, Politics, Performances
- Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction
- The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre
- The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage
- “You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
- Community and Manipulation in the “Parallel Worlds” of Tim Crouch
- Dissensual Performances of Race and Community in Claudia Rankine’s The White Card and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
- Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
- Mary Kathryn Nagle in Conversation with Nina De Bettin Padolin and Ilka Saal
- The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster’s Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches’ “Zoomie” Last Gasp (WFH)
- Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class
- “Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
- Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?
- Reviews
- Avra Sidiropoulou, ed. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2022, 276 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £35.99 (paperback), £32.39 (ebook).
- Michael Meeuwis. Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, vi + 144 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £38.99 (paperback), £35.09 (ebook).
- Nicola Abram. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii + 224 pp., $109.99 (hardback), $109.99 (softcover), $84.99 (ebook).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Acknowledgements
- Articles
- Introduction: Theater and Community. Poetics, Politics, Performances
- Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction
- The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre
- The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage
- “You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
- Community and Manipulation in the “Parallel Worlds” of Tim Crouch
- Dissensual Performances of Race and Community in Claudia Rankine’s The White Card and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
- Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
- Mary Kathryn Nagle in Conversation with Nina De Bettin Padolin and Ilka Saal
- The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster’s Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches’ “Zoomie” Last Gasp (WFH)
- Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class
- “Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
- Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?
- Reviews
- Avra Sidiropoulou, ed. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2022, 276 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £35.99 (paperback), £32.39 (ebook).
- Michael Meeuwis. Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, vi + 144 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £38.99 (paperback), £35.09 (ebook).
- Nicola Abram. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii + 224 pp., $109.99 (hardback), $109.99 (softcover), $84.99 (ebook).
