The Playwright Has a Few More Changes

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.