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" How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white? "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Black And White
People
Language
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" Theater is an old thing. It's thousands of years old. TV isn't. Film isn't. We're doing a really old thing. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Theater
Old
Film
" 'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
History
Relationship
Writing
" I'm not a really firm believer in theatre that is 'about anything.' I don't think theatre can be about anything other than the people who show up and the value that they hold. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Show
Up
People
" I actually don't read the press. All the writers I admire were significantly reclusive, and I'm still trying to figure out how they got to a place where they didn't have to talk to press. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Got
Trying
Talk
" The first theater subscription I ever bought was the August Wilson season at Signature. I remember thinking a whole season to one playwright was a great way for a master to do a victory lap. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Remember
Thinking
Way
" 'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!' "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
My Life
Love
Life
" I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Writing
Control
Gold
" I identify as queer. I just don't know what any of these labels mean. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Mean
Any
Just
" I feel like I'm put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it's not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Theatre
Work
Writing
" I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Me
Sit
Writing
" I was 23 when I wrote 'Neighbors,' and I definitely look back at it now and cringe a little bit. I was trying to understand what drama was. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Back
Understand
Trying
" I have this thing called hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies. It's incredibly rare. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Rare
Hereditary
Pressure
" I have a borderline-embarrassing obsession with pop music. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Music
Pop Music
Pop
" At the end of the day, most people just want to be valued. They want to feel they have put their time to something that will seem to have been of value when they die. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
People
Time
Day
" You get better at the thing you do by having to explain it to someone else. That, I think, totally makes my work stronger. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Think
Work
You
" I don't hate people who colour-blind cast, but I hate people who colour-blind cast and pretend that they're not, who pretend that these bodies on stage don't actually carry specific meaning. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Stage
Pretend
Meaning
" All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Look
Two
Way
" I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
I Am
Subject
Through
" I spent summers with my mother's parents in Arkansas, where religion felt very present. My grandmother was Baptist, and my grandfather was Methodist. Double Southern whammy. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Grandfather
Mother
Parents
" My mother had a wall of degrees in our house, and she would walk me up to the wall and say, 'When you have this many degrees, you can tell me what to do.' "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Mother
Me
Say
" I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Here
Moment
Always
" The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people project their problems onto me or something. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Me
Writing
Problems
" My dream was always to have an experience where an audience member would turn to another audience member, a stranger, and be like, 'What did we just go through?' And, like, kind of begin to talk. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Audience
Dream
Experience
" I wrestle in a big way with August Wilson's work in that I at times admire it and at times feel infuriated by it, which is weirdly more influential than loving someone entirely. "
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Feel
Someone
Loving