forward to their new lives on Captain Ratts’ boat. Deconstructions Through Brechtian elements such as direct address, Jacobs-Jenkins explores "the idea that you could feel something and then be aware that you’re feeling it". Melodrama Jacobs-Jenkins researched Boucicault heavily while working on An Octoroon and found an unfinished essay at the New York Public Library saying that theatre is a place for dramatic illusion—the most believable illusion of suffering—and catharsis. Present in An Octoroon is the illusion of suffering and actual suffering. Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. Brooks' idea is that melodrama is about binaries and opposites, where there is always good and bad with no gray area. This led Jacobs-Jenkins to see doubles and pairs in Boucicault's play, through relationships between characters e.g. Pete is Paul's grandfather. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. Jacobs-Jenkins looks at the consequences of putting oneself onstage in their own work, if it is a real self or a fake self, which Jacobs-Jenkins embodied himself in the roles of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts. The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. Following the act three climax: the plot lines must converge, the moral is made clear, and the audience has to be hit with a "theatre trick" which overwhelms the audience with technical elements. Rather than execute this, the actors explain and act out what happens. BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice. Stereotypes By presenting characters in whiteface, blackface, and redface, Jacobs-Jenkins can look at "blackness and how to represent social constructs onstage that are so tied to a specific culture of nation." This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. Development and production history Jacobs-Jenkins developed his take on The Octoroon while he was a Dorothy Strelsin Fellow at Soho Rep in the 2009/10 season. An Octoroon had a workshop production at Performance Space 122 from June 19 – July 3, 2010, featuring Travis York, Karl Allen,