Berkeley Rep Adds AN OCTOROON to 2016-17 Season

Today, Berkeley Repertory Theatre revealed that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Obie Award- winning play, An Octoroon, will be the seventh and final production in its upcoming 2016-17 subscription season. The West Coast premiere of the reworking of the mid-19th-century play will be performed in the Peet's Theatre in June 2017.

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the Obie Award for his radical, incendiary, and subversively funny riff on Dion Boucicault's once-popular 1859 mustache-twirling melodrama. Judge Peyton is dead, and his plantation Terrebonne is on the brink of foreclosure. George, the high-minded heir apparent, falls for the lovely Zoe, who's one-eighth black. But the bigoted plantation queen has eyes for George, and the dastardly overseer M'Closky plots to keep Zoe and Terrebonne for himself. A spectacular collision of the antebellum South and 21st-century cultural politics, An Octoroon is "This decade's most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today," says the New York Times.

"This is the perfect play to close our season," says Michael Leibert Artistic Director Tony Taccone. "If you look at the schedule as a whole, you will discover diverse voices and a breadth of talent that Berkeley Rep audiences have come to expect from us. What Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has created with An Octoroon meets our shared standard for works that challenge as well as entertain us. It's no surprise that this play was one of the hottest tickets in New York last year."

An Octoroon (director to be announced) joins the previously announced 2016-17 season, which includes It Can't Happen Here, based on Sinclair Lewis' 1935 classic novel adapted by Taccone and screenwriter Bennett S. Cohen and helmed by award-winning director Lisa Peterson; Jeff Augustin's The Last Tiger in Haiti, a co-production with La Jolla Playhouse and directed by Joshua Kahan Brody; and the return of Kneehigh with the U.S. premiere of 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, in association with Kneehigh and Birmingham Repertory Theatre and helmed by Emma Rice. After a successful Broadway run, the irreverent comedy Hand to God, directed by David Ivers, will have its West Coast premiere; Roe, a new play by Lisa Loomer and a coproduction with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Arena Stage, will be performed next spring; and Monsoon Wedding, a brand new musical directed by Mira Nair based on her 2001 hit film will play on the Roda Stage just in time for wedding season.