If you thought Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” was a provocative poke at race relations, wait till you see off-Broadway’s “An Octoroon.”
A black actor puts on whiteface to play a plantation owner, a white actor dons blackface as a craven black servant and a Native American in a headdress dances wildly to hip-hop.
And there’s more — for example, female slaves gossiping like girlfriends at the beauty salon while they sweep a sea of cotton balls off the floor. They chat about meeting a hot guy at “a slave mixer over by the river” and huff that “everyone finds the way you act kinda ghetto.”
The entire time you’re torn between laughter and queasy discomfort.
OK, so it’s a little unclear what Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the show’s 29-year-old African-American playwright, is trying to say. But “An Octoroon” — brilliantly directed by Sarah Benson — is so energetic, funny and entertainingly demented, you can’t look away.
Earlier this year, Jacobs-Jenkins gave us another kind of play entirely, the fine, traditionally crafted family drama “Appropriate,” in which a white Southern family confronts its cumbersome heritage.
“An Octoroon” is also set in the South — Louisiana, to be exact — but that’s where any similarities end.
The show roughly follows the plot of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 hit play “The Octoroon,” in which two white masters, nice George and evil McCloskey (both played here by Chris Myers), compete for the beautiful, mixed-race Zoe (Amber Gray, late of “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812”).
To the Victorian-melodrama twists and turns Jacobs-Jenkins adds a hodgepodge of slang, songs and references — plus a hearty helping of attitude.
There it’s hard to beat Marsha Stephanie Blake and Jocelyn Bioh’s hilarious house slaves Dido and Minnie, who handle their lowly status with sass and determined optimism: Minnie thinks it’d be great if a steamboat captain bought them so they could coast “up and down the river, looking fly, wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics.”
There are pockets of raw emotion as well, usually from Zoe, a tragic figure prone to statements like, “My race has at least one virtue — it knows how to suffer.”
At times, Jacobs-Jenkins and Benson overdo it. In case the narrative isn’t shocking enough, they also throw in a giant Br’er Rabbit, a horrifying projection and even a live score for solo cello (by César Alvarez).
But overall, the show’s constant surprises are bracing. When even a set change can make theatergoers gasp, you know something special’s going on.