Actors to wear blackface for 'hackle-raising' new play

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/jan/04/actors-black-up-neighbours-hightide

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An "incendiary" play at this year's HighTide festival in Suffolk is to feature actors in blackface despite recent calls for a boycott of theatres that continue to employ the practice.

Last year, playwright Bruce Norris withdrew the rights to a German production of his Olivier award-winning play Clybourne Park after learning that a white actor had been cast in a black role and the creative team planned to "experiment with makeup", something that the theatre subsequently denied. In October, Norris called for a "zero-tolerance position" on the technique of "blacking up".

However, in May, HighTide and the Nuffield theatre will present the UK premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's comedy Neighbours, which requires black actors in blackface to play a family of minstrel performers.

When the play was first seen off-Broadway three years ago, it was dubbed "hackle-raising", "pure sensation" and "one of the most sustained shocks of this theatre season" in the New York Times.

The festival's artistic director Steven Atkinson, who will direct the new production, said it was "one of the best new plays I've read in six years of running HighTide".

"It's a progressive, intellectual drama that looks at identity, specifically contemporary African American identity," he continued. "The real innovation of this play is not just that it addresses head-on a contemporary taboo – the past popularity of blackface – but it's what the Americans call 'form forward'. It's a play that's bold in content as well as how it's told."

Neighbours shows two black families living side-by-side in "post-racial" America. One, the Crows, are black entertainers, who perform a rendition of Sister Sledge's We Are Family in the first act; the other is a unit of mixed-race suburbanites.

Jacobs-Jenkins has become a controversial figure in American theatre. After Neighbours became a <em>succès de scandale</em> in New York, he was forced to step in to direct his own adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon four months later after the original director quit over creative differences.

The other premieres at the HighTide festival are likely to prove less controversial, and include Verity Bargate-winner Thomas Eccleshare's Pastoral and Smallholding by Chris Dunkley.