Abstract

This chapter presents melodramatic audience participation in Dion Boucicault’s 1859 The Octoroon as part of the prehistory of immersive theater that is more frequently associated with modernist and especially postmodern performance than with the supposedly conservative, sentimental genre of melodrama. When Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins adapted Boucicault’s melodrama in his controversial 2016 play, An Octoroon, he recognized that melodrama was rarely used to promote transformative politics, but it developed strategies for involving audiences in political questions. For this reason, melodrama appeals to contemporary playwrights like Jacobs-Jenkins, who are deeply engaged with antiracist politics but refuse the tendency to offer solutions or easy answers. Nineteenth-century melodrama is part of the overlooked history of immersive or site-specific theater, and theater artists from Jacobs-Jenkins to George C. Wolfe, Lin-Manuel Miranda to Claudia Rankine, turn back to the participatory conventions of melodrama for their own political theater work.