An Octoroon

The Playwright is left unnamed, but he represents Dion Boucicault, the playwright who wrote The Octoroon. When he appears in the Prologue, having died in 1890, he seems to have been summoned into being by BJJ. While Boucicault was once an internationally popular Irish playwright, his plays haven’t endured, and he is all but forgotten. When the Playwright appears in the Prologue, he is, in a sense, an extension of BJJ. When BJJ drinks, the Playwright feels drunk. BJJ gives himself a wedgie, and the Playwright struggles to pull it out. There is both a primal animosity between the two and a cooperative connection that arises after the Prologue.

The Playwright plays the role of Wahnotee, the Indigenous stereotype, in redface, just as Boucicault did in the original production, complaining that there are no Indigenous people around to play the part without acknowledging the Indian Removal Act, which had, in Boucicault’s time, kicked Indigenous people off their land. In Act IV, when BJJ is explaining and summarizing due to limited resources, the Playwright is helpful, offering his expertise on melodramatic structure. The Playwright is a ghost that haunts BJJ, a formative influence on American theater that must still be reckoned with, even if his name is seldom remembered.

The Assistant is described as Indian, although BJJ notes that the term is open to interpretation. If he is Indigenous, his presence makes a statement, as the Playwright opts to don redface rather than cast his racially appropriate assistant as Wahnotee, although Wahnotee is even more of a racist stereotype than the enslaved characters. Instead, the Assistant takes on the characters of Pete and Paul, both of whom are enslaved, which means that the Assistant may or may not be in blackface.

The Assistant doesn’t speak often outside of his assigned roles, which require him to maintain a heavily exaggerated dialect, but by the time the auction occurs in Act III, after the humiliating show of Pete (played by the Assistant) singing and dancing on the auction block, he asserts that he is sick of being enslaved. Whether he is speaking as himself or Pete, it isn’t a role that he can simply walk away from, either in the play or if he were a real-life enslaved person.

Zoe is the “octoroon” of the title and the misfortunate character whom original audiences were given to pity. She is the daughter of the late Judge Peyton, the enslaver of Terrebonne, and an enslaved woman who is never named and whose fate is never mentioned. The word “octoroon” is an outdated, racist term used to refer to someone whose ancestry is one-eighth Black. These designations based on blood quantum were used legally to outline rights and restraints. Of Boucicault’s characters, Zoe is the least changed in BJJ’s adaptation, but he manages to change the world around her enough to make her nearly as insufferable as she is loveable and pitiable.

She has been raised and educated by white people, and she is under the mistaken impression that she has been freed. But although she is legally Black, she talks down to the enslaved people and insults them, even kicking Pete to make him get to work. She speaks about her Blackness as a poison running through her veins, a lesson she surely learned from the Peytons during her upbringing. Her invisible Blackness—marked only by a tinge of blue in her nailbeds and eyes—is certainly what keeps her from fully living the life of a white woman, a life that has been held out to her as a promise but never fulfilled.

In the original melodrama, Zoe’s discovery that she isn’t free and faces the auction block presents her plight as more dramatic and serious than that of the other enslaved people who are also being auctioned. Notably, the adaptation looks away from Zoe after she steals the poison, focusing on Minnie and Dido rather than a young woman who decided to poison herself for a man who decided she would be better off dead.

Dora Sunnyside is a neighbor of the Peytons, an heiress who falls in love with George. She performs white womanhood by trying (and failing) to make herself seem delicate and ethereal, at least while George is looking. She assumes that George is attracted to her too, attributing his disinterest to shyness and modesty, certainly never imagining that he could be in love with Zoe. George notices that most of the neighbors talk down to Zoe, and Dora is no exception. She sometimes confides in Zoe but quickly turns on her anytime she speaks.

In the original melodrama, Zoe kills herself to remove an obstacle to George falling for Dora, and it seems at the end of the play that George and Dora will be together. According to social convention, Dora is the proper match for George, and dead women don’t continue to pine. In An Octoroon, Dora exits crying after learning that George loves Zoe. She returns to bid on Zoe and loses, suggesting that she has forgiven George, but the adapted play doesn’t bother to tie up their stories, decentering the white characters to tell the story from a new perspective.