This leads to another theme in the idea that what is legal is not always right, and what is illegal is not always wrong; the law is not necessarily just. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Obie-award winning play "An Octoroon," at the Gamm Theatre through Feb. 20, pokes at sensibilities, pries at prejudices and pushes at closed gates in a person's mind.
It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Club members can see a different show every night of the week. Jacobs-Jenkins reframes Boucicault's play using its original characters and plot, speaking much of Boucicault's dialogue, and critiques its portrayal of race using Brechtian devices. Boucicaults melodrama was a great hit in its day but is now almost never performed, except possibly as a camp diversion for private amusement. That sense of uncertainty is part of the fun. Jordan Schildcrout Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. The acting swings wildly in technique, from the grotesque (and comically inspired) affectedness of Mary Wiseman as a snooty Southern belle to the wrenching sincerity of Ms. Gray, who created the title role at Soho Rep. And then the female house servants pricelessly played by Maechi Aharanwa, Pascale Armand and Danielle Davenport describe life as 19th-century chattel in the manner of 21st-century African-American girlfriends gossiping. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. She is considered to be property by law, but this is also presented as wrong. [47] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. Bill Demastes [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. 365 Fifth Avenue (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). Wahnotee murders MClosky. In fact, Jacobs-Jenkins hits on so many ideas per minute, you'll wish you had a little more time to catch your breath. The plays opening sequence, however, invites the audience to adopt a critical stance to what they are about to see, especially in those moments when Jacobs-Jenkinss layering of a new meaning over an old motif makes itself most sharply felt, giving Appropriate its revisionist edge. The Crows wear black paint, have huge red lips, and, except for Jim, and Zip in his conversations with Jean, speak with the caricatured dialect and malapropisms of their nineteenth-century originals. Franz and River are startled by the waking of a figure on the couch, who turns out to be Rhys, Tonis son, just as Shelley is startled by Dodge, Vinces grandfather, whom she arouses from sleep. The Octoroon was a controversial play when it debuted, given its focus on slavery when the pre-Civil War United States was engaged in a heated debate over the institution. Sound No. The actor who plays BJJ - in this case, the astonishing Ken Nwosu - goes on to don whiteface and appear as both the heroic George and the villainous M'Closky. Nataki Garrett directed the first production of An Octoroon outside of New York with Mixed Blood Theatre Company in the fall of 2015. An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer, Signature Theatre. He is able to perform only by becoming almost like a man possessed (288). [25] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate. It is an opening that comically echoes the odd, unexpected homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly, who enter an equally bizarre and decrepit living room to the incessant sound of rain at the beginning of act two of Buried Child. Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. Complimentary and Deeply Discounted Shows. This use of make-up reverses the nineteenth-century theatres casting of white actors in blackface to play the enslaved characters and comments ironically on racist stereotypes and the theatrical convention that perpetuated them. As Thomas P. Adler observes, Shepard displays a peculiar power in his highly symbolic family problem plays of allegorizing the American experience, of deflating the myth of America as the New Eden.[37] Jacobs-Jenkins transforms Shepards implied equation of literal and symbolic inheritanceembodied in Appropriate in the photo album of lynchingsinto an explicit and particular indictment of Americas racial and racist history and its present-day consequences. It is in the interstices between adapted work and adaptation, or to use Jacobs-Jenkinss archeological metaphor, in the stratigraphy, that the important cultural and political work of adaptation takes place. Already a member? The unseen album, telling its symbolic story of a long line of corpses (112), of incest and infanticide, prefigures the more shocking album of lynchings and dead black bodies that mesmerizes the Lafayette family in Appropriate. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Kevin Trainor as the bombastic Boucicault, Vivian Oparah and Emmanuella Cole as a pair of closely bonded slaves, Celeste Dodwell as a cracked Southern belle and Iola Evans as the eponymous heroine are all first rate. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). Just because the law forbids or permits something doesn't mean the law is morally right or just. [32] Erin Keane, Review/Family Secrets Fester in Appropriate, 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). The motif of anti-Semitism furthers the plays evocationand excavationof the closed, racist cultural environment that enabled lynchings and is an inheritance the Lafayettes would like to disown. [21] At the same time, as Charles Isherwood of the New York Times notes, Jacobs-Jenkinss contextualization of the performances of these later artists within Topsys act suggests that they too can be seen as just another form of minstrelsy. Grace wants to escapeshe is co-head of the Runaway Plannin Committee (40)and Minnie and Dido at least want to choose the nature of their servitude, supposing that if they can persuade Captain Ratts to buy them to work on his steamboat, they will enjoy a life of romantic adventure. [51] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. It all culminates in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself (ingeniously choreographed by J. David Brimmer). Minnie and Dido realize all the other slaves ran away. Moving from The Octoroon to An, Jenkins suggests that despite the incredibly modern and subversive elements which Jacobs-Jenkins adds to Boucicaults original, this is just another play and that the novelty of racial mixing has worn off and become common now. An Obie award winner, it seemed to confirm the reputation of its author as one of this countrys most original and illuminating writers about race. Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. I can't afford one." They represent for him his worst nightmare about how his white neighbors might perceive him despite his education and professional, middle-class standing: People will see them and . [1] [2] [3]. In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. [41] Bottoms suggests that Buried Child is dealing metaphorically with Americas collective tendency to bury the intolerable memories of its bloody history of slavery and genocide, and so forth (The Theatre of Sam Shepard, 176). Checking on the audiences reactions is a whimsical giant Brer Rabbit (clearly an authorial figure and originally played by Jacobs-Jenkins himself) who wanders through the show at will, staring at the spectators (much as the Crows stare at their audience at the end of Neighbors). In her 1994 essay Possession, she argues that it is necessary to dig for bones in order to locate and recreate unrecorded African-American history. Also, it's incredibly funny. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. A panel of scholars and artists discuss the contemporary relevance and themes of Branden Jenkins-Jacobs play "An Octoroon"Featured panelists are:Dr. Theda Pe. Where Boucicault cleverly uses a photograph of the real murderer of Paul to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Jacobs-Jenkins has to go further to produce a similarly sensational effect for his contemporary audience. This is not the first time Jacobs-Jenkins has grappled with race: His 2010 show Neighbors featured a cast of white actors playing an offensively stereotypical black family. [13] The cast featured Chris Myers as BJJ, in triple roles: the black playwright, George Peyton and M'Closky; Danny Wolohan as Dion Boucicault, Zo Winters as Dora, and Amber Gray as Zoe. Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. [5] Jacobs-Jenkinss innovative work makes possible a fresh and experiential interracial discussion of race relations in Americaa discussion that is much needed in the present tense political climate. 2 (2015). Before he died, the Judge granted Zoe's freedom. The unseen photographs of lynchings in Appropriate anticipate the even more profoundly shocking real-life photograph of a lynching that audiences do see in An Octoroon. Into the familiar dramatic context of this white familys absorption in its own dysfunction Jacobs-Jenkins inserts the photo album as a reminder of the familys and Americas deadly legacy of racism. Adler adds that the nations guilty past in Buried Child might be racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. Jorge Huerta An Octoroon most closely adheres to, though it also transcends, Hutcheons definition of an adaptation as an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art. Neighbors and Appropriate expand the parameters of adaptation in other ways, the former by adapting and recontextualizing an historical form of popular entertainment, the latter by adapting not a particular play, but an entire dramatic subgenre. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original The photograph album in Appropriate is particularly shocking because these photos are to be understood, not only as symbolic representations, but as literal artifacts of American history. Besides race, what are some representations of slaves and slavery that are not complicity with the dominant ideology of this time? In scenes added to Boucicaults play Jacobs-Jenkins humanizes Dido, Minnie, and Grace by giving them distinct backgrounds and personalities and voices, desires, and agency of their own. In A Streetcar Named Desire only an unseen photograph of Belle Reve denotes Stellas past for the people she now lives among in New Orleans, and they are not much impressed. Myers gives a tour de force in his triple roles as the blas black playwright, the charming leading man, and the mustachioed villain. [10] Simultaneous tak[ing] in implies the audiences experiential engagement with what they see and hear; consideration of separate layers (as in archeology) requires Brechtian critical distance and analysis. In Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins puts his own adaptive versions of the minstrel show, the American family play, and Boucicaults melodrama into an edgy but productive dialogue with the forms that he excavates. This strategy produces a general sense of familiarity that, as reviewer Erin Keene, observes, creates a comfort zone for audience members who are then periodically shocked out of their complacencywe know these people, we know this genreby the reemergence of the album.[32] The broadly familiar content of Appropriate is punctuated, too, by more precise allusions that Jacobs-Jenkins chooses to italicize and engage with in order to render visible within the parameters of the white American family play a discourse about blackness. date the date you are citing the material. [45] Similarly, the old slave Pete (in blackface) clearly performs his role as loyal house slave. [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. The auction begins and MClosky aggressively bids on Zoe, winning her. But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. eNotes Editorial. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jims real feelings. Jacobs-Jenkins uses Melody and Jean to introduce the audience to the Crow family as people rather than cartoons. A romantic relationship develops between rebellious Melody and shy Jim Crow, beginning with the awkward tenderness of the moment when Jim gently removes an eyelash from Melodys face (232). Blackface: Does it have a place on the modern American stage? [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. Study Guide! Yet as the production keeps switching approaches, it also finds inklings of validity in each one, including that of Boucicaults original script. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. The Crows, to the best of my knowledge, have always been played by black actors in blackface, although a note in the text states, the ethnicity and/or gender of the actors playing the Crows is not specified.[13] The play combines dramatic realism in the scenes involving the Pattersons with satirically exaggerated blackface minstrelsy. Even more pointed is Minnies advice to Dido, I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job (58), an anachronistic clich that reminds us that Dido, in fact, has no life outside her job. He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a family album that can explain the heritage . [12] Charles Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary: Minstrel Meets Modern, The New York Times 9 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html (accessed 1 May 2017). A theatrical, melodramatic reality is created to tell the story of an octoroon woman (a person who is black) named Zoe and her quest for identity and love. As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her.
He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). [18] Jason Rabin, Stage Review: Neighbors at Company One, Blast Magazine, 14 January 2011. http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/ (accessed 27 April 2017). [1] George proposes to Dora, but Zoe confesses their love, which turns off Dora. By layering African-American history onto Greek myth, Richard constructs an alternative archeology of seeing to Topsysand Jacobs-Jenkinssexcavation of the minstrel show that is the plays main focus. Topsys Interlude late in the play (labeled Interlude/Interruption [309] to mark its difference from the other Interludes) contributes in a different way to Jacobs-Jenkinss creation of an archeology of seeing in Neighbors. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. Adaptation has increasingly become a major object of study by literary scholars. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. In Buried Child, Halies and Tildens murdered baby (apparently drowned by Dodge, as Franz tries to drown the photos of lynchings) has been literally buried in the soil behind the house. The Art of Dramatic Composition: A Prologue, "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Feel That Thought", "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America', "Amber Gray on 'An Octoroon,' at Soho Rep", "The Octoroon Delayed Opens This Week at PS122", "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Tries to Revive The Octoroon", "Disgruntled Cast Member Issues Invite to P.S.122's Troubled Octoroon", "Soho Rep Reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon to Feature Saycon Sengbloh and William Jackson Harper | Playbill", "Review: 'An Octoroon,' a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race", "BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE | An Octoroon", "Cast announced for An Octoroon at Orange Tree", "Review: An Octoroon (Orange Tree Theatre)", "An Octoroon is taboo ridden, but thoughtful (Shaw Festival)", "Georgia Southern Theatre & Performance to Present "An Octoroon", "2017 Results | Critics' Circle Theatre Awards", For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An_Octoroon&oldid=1138923673, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox play with unknown parameters, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 11:33. Zoe and George are alone, and George confesses his love for her. [15] In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the play this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.[16] The production transferred to Theatre for A New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and ran from February 14, 2015 to March 29, 2015. The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynchingagainst which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the wild and lawless proceeding of lynch-law (51)is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photographs enthralled white gawkers.[50], While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. MINNIE played by an African-American actress, a black actress, or an actress of color. Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. Anyone can read what you share. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie, Jim looks ridiculous, but also amazing (285). Jacobs-Jenkins further makes The Octoroon fit for its twenty-first century theatrical environment through the adaptive processes of transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization described by Genette. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Wegener, About Appropriate, 147. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas', Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. The novel explores the idea of "passing" through the racially mixed character of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman whose aunt informs her that she is one-sixteenth African American. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. At this point the play celebrates the history of African-American entertainment from Josephine Baker, channeled by Topsy in her diamond-studded halter top and banana skirt (309), to artists such as Sister Sledge, Beyonc, and others, whose songs may be incorporated here or may have been used throughout the play as in the New York production of Neighbors. [50] Chase Quinn, Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) about Slavery, Hyperallergic 24 February 2015. http.//hyperallergic.com/185346/laughing-and-crying-and-laughing-again-about-slavery/ (accessed 20 May 2015). *thunder clap*. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors. . Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. Hutcheon also notes the Darwinian implications of the term adaptation. A Theory of Adaptation, 31. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. The evil overseer M'Closky (Myers) desires Zoe for himself and plots to re-enslave her to Terrebonne and buy her at a forthcoming creditors' auction. [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. [53] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something., [54] For Jacobs-Jenkinss knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, About Appropriate, 146. Jacobs-Jenkins is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman. There was excitement when it was announced that Theater for a New Audience would be restaging Ms. Bensons Soho Rep production, but also a certain apprehension. He gives it a try but quickly realizes that getting white, male actors of today to play evil slave owners is not an easy task. date the date you are citing the material. Kevin Byrne Jacobs-Jenkins nods most explicitly towards his sources in American family drama when Rachael, trying to draw her squabbling in-laws back to the topic of what to do about the photo album, says, Can we sit around being casually dysfunctional later and focus for one second? (59). The show pauses to note how the theater used to manipulate its audiences with jerry-built plots and plot-hole-covering sensationalism. That is very much the point of an extraordinary play, first seen at New Yorks Soho Rep, that defies categorisation and that proclaims Jacobs-Jenkins as an exciting new dramatist who questions what it means to be dubbed a black playwright. The evening starts with a confrontation between the two authors. The precise resemblance of the two visual images creates a palimpsestic layering that enables the audience to see the human reality of the black flesh and bones that the now pulpy photos represent. Rather than execute this, the actors explain and act out what happens. Enjoy live events at insider prices. Foster, Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon, Modern Drama 59, no. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. The play, based on a 1859 melodrama by the Irish-Anglo playwright Dion Boucicault, tells the story of a young man who's about to inherit a plantation and falls in love with a woman who is an. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. [40] The photo album in Appropriate, by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. The play reiterates a lot of themes I've heard before, but does it in a fresh way that's both thoughtful and provoking. Its all too easy to slip into a pratfall. Even more thoroughly than in Neighbors and Appropriate, adapted work and adaptation bleed into one another. And forget about running or dancing or hopping like a bunny, as the characters sometimes unwisely attempt in An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss coruscating comedy of unresolved history, which opened on Thursday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. the Vietnam War. Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, 121. [3], Jacobs-Jenkins recommends the play be performed with 8 or 9 actors,[4] with male characters played using blackface/whiteface/redface, and female characters portrayed by actresses that match the characters' race.[1]. In Shepards play Shelly inquires about photographs, again unseen by the audience, that she has found upstairsphotos of a woman with red hair, a woman holding a baby, a farm, corn. An Octoroon, quite appropriately, ends in the dark. Interspersed among the Crows comically fraught rehearsal scenes and the Pattersons emotionally fraught domestic scenes are two lectures on Greek tragedy given by Richard to his students and four Interludes, in which Zip, Sambo, Mammy, and Topsy each in turn performs a grossly exaggerated version of the specialty acts typically included in minstrel shows. AN OCTOROON. The Octoroon was a controversial play on both sides of the slavery debate when it debuted, as both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates believed the play took the other camp's side. BJJ is focused on a play, The Octoroon, but runs into issues staging it because the white actors quit, so he applies whiteface in order to play them himself. "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. But Jacobs-Jenkins finds a good balance between drama and comedy, which shows that he can maneuver previous ideas set by racial thinking to fit his own style while still being respectful to his predecessors. Though Toni denies this accusation and is shocked when later Rhys refers to Rachael as the Jew bitch, her own unreflecting anti-Semitism is apparent when she thoughtlessly says that she is not some kind of shylock (77, 34). Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center Reviewer Chase Quinn observed that the audience at Soho Rep was in an unceasing state of anxiety, as each audience member was left to negotiate for him or herself when and how much to laugh. Caught up into his act, Jim is like a hurricane unleashed, the most incredible thing you have ever seen in your entire life, even though he also shares characteristics with his minstrel forebearseyes bugged out, limbs loose, moving, dancing, mo coon than a little bit (288). Jump-start your essay with our outlining tool to make sure you have all the main points of your essay covered. A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. Mr. Jacobs-Jenkinss central point here as it was in his Neighbors and Appropriate is that we dont even have the vocabulary to discuss what continues to divide Americans according to skin color. 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Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles adaptation. Well-Attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a New wrinkle to theory. Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the Guardian every morning wrinkle adaptation. Being almost entirely recast for the New production, and George confesses his love for.. Avenue ( Psst, it does so in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself ( choreographed... Be lynched on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial will include either 2 or 3.. [ 51 ] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences a! Denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her Starving and! An actress of color Boucicault & # x27 ; s the Octoroon, 152 that of... 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Realize all the main points of your essay covered notes the Darwinian implications of the photo album in Appropriate in!: www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation ( accessed 11 February 2019 ) is morally right or just your essay covered adaptation has less.
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