Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has endured his share of mortifying moments in his journey to the American stage. There was the night in his early twenties when he met Tony Kushner at a birthday party and stood for so long in awestruck silence, pretending to text, that Kushner pityingly encouraged him to have a good time. Or the day he misspelled “heifer” in a spelling bee, earning so much mockery from friends of his mother’s, he told me, that “I almost had my race card taken away.” Two of his first plays stumbled into scandals before they even opened, with one of them leaked to and subsequently eviscerated in the Times. But the cake-taking incident occurred during a brief flirtation with performance art, when Jacobs-Jenkins appeared before his family in blackface.
“My mom was there,” he told me recently. “My kindergarten teacher was there. My brother and sister were there.” He closed his eyes and laughed into his steepled hands. The happening was part of an experimental-art festival in his home town of Washington, D.C., and took place in a former bathroom at a shuttered school. His mother had caught word of it online, and by the time he recognized her voice among the dozen or so spectators it was too late to stop the show. Jacobs-Jenkins spent the next half hour performing mimelike routines face-to-face with each member of the audience, lip-synching as machines spewed fog and a sample from Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” played on a loop: “Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, oh-no-no.”
Denne historien er fra January 15, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra January 15, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.