Shamelessly Dramatic

In the plays of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, ugly feelings find sophisticated forms.

- By Julian Lucas. Photograph by Maciek Jasik

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.”