The Playwright Has a Few More Changes

He remembers it as one of the moments that led him to choose playwriting over performance. Having recently graduated from a master’s program at N.Y.U., Jacobs-Jenkins was attempting to excavate the legacy of stigma attached to Blackness onstage. He saw himself in the lineage of artists who explored the afterlife of racist imagery, and of avant-garde performers who dissected the construction of identity by defamiliarizing their own. Yet his brother laughed. His former teacher looked terrified. His mother never spoke of the day again. Only the principal of his Afrocentric elementary school—where he’d once appeared in a Black-history pageant as Martin Luther King, Jr.—managed to find words for the occasion. “First, I want to say we are so proud of you,” she told Jacobs-Jenkins. Then she asked a question: “When will we see you on Broadway?”