One of This Year's MacArthur "Geniuses" Is Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose plays are marked by their originality of expression, provocative ideas and upending of history, has been announced among the 23 fellows selected this year to receive the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grants." 

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

In singling out Jacobs-Jenkins, the MacArthur Foundation noted:

"Many of Jacobs-Jenkins's plays use a historical lens to satirize and comment on modern culture, particularly the ways in which race and class are negotiated in both private and public settings. Although the provocation of his audience is purposeful, Jacobs-Jenkins's creation of unsettling, shocking, often confrontational moments is not gratuitous; these elements are of a piece with the world he has established on stage and in the service of the story he is telling."

 That goes to the heart of what is so special about his work, but what is so hard to express. In plays like Neighbors, Appropriate, An Octoroon and Gloria, he takes American culture and history -- including the history of theater -- and complicates it, tossing it in the air and remaking it before your very eyes. Oh, I see, you say to yourself. That's not what I thought going in. It looks different now... The theatricality of his expression reshapes your imagination. And isn't that what theater is for?

If Neighbors and its "minstrel show next door" is outrageous and shocking, Appropriate is more subtle in the way it puts our country's dark racial history front and center, An Octoroon is both funny and clever as it reworks an old piece of Americana, and Gloria moves to the work place to look at a different kind of dysfunctional family. They're each different, probing and insightful.

And they make Branden Jacobs-Jenkins a perfect "genius" to celebrate.

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter Receives MacArthur "Genius" Grant

Samuel D. Hunter

Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright originally from Idaho known for his "moving portraits of unlikely protagonists," is part of the 2014 class of "fellows" awarded $625,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The MacArthur Foundation fellowships, often called "genius grants," are awarded annually to a group of artists, scholars, scientists and other innovators deemed worthy of recognition and support.

At Playwrights Horizon in New York, Shuler Hensley starred as the 600-pound outcast at the center of Hunter's best-known play, The Whale. That production earned Hunter a Drama Desk Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play as well as Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play. Hensley played Charlie, a morbidly obese online writing instructor working with the novel Moby Dick in both personal and professional contexts. In Chicago, Dale Calandra took on the role in a Victory Gardens production called "beautifully devastating" by Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones.

The play paints Charlie as a sensitive, intelligent person stuck inside pounds and pounds of flesh. As he tries to mend his broken relationships with his ex-wife and daughter, he is only too aware that death is right around the corner for him due to physical problems caused by all that excess weight.

A newer play, Rest, is in performance at Victory Gardens Theater till October 12. Like The Whale and A Bright New Boise, Rest is set in Hunter's native Idaho. This time, he focuses on a soon-to-be-shuttered retirement home in the middle of a blizzard, when the last three residents and a skeleton staff try to cope with snow blowing off their doors. Victory Gardens calls Rest "a tender and heartbreakingly funny play about life's unexpected beginnings and endings." You can see more about Rest here, on VG's Facebook page.

Hunter received an undergraduate degree from New York University in 2004, an MFA from the University of Iowa in 2007, and an Artist Diploma from Juilliard’s Playwrights Program in 2009. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an ensemble playwright at Victory Gardens. In addition to Victory Gardens and Playwrights Horizon, his plays have been produced at venues like South Coast Rep, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Old Globe, and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.