An Inspiring Failure

Sometimes, failure can be as stimulating as success. The Tale of Jemima Canard, a world premiere by longtime actor/first-time playwright Brandon J. Simmons, is a failure—but it’s a dynamic, imaginative, interesting failure. Simmons clearly has a burbling mind that wants to shatter clichés. Just because he whiffed this one doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t keep swinging.

Jemima Canard begins with the seed of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, a 1908 children’s story by Beatrix Potter. Potter, for those who didn’t grow up with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail or The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was a British children’s author who published stories about anthropomorphic animals and illustrated them with watercolors. (She was also an amateur mycologist, but her work was rejected by the Linnean Society because she was a woman. The Society issued her an official apology in 1997.) On the night I attended, one man said to his seatmate: “I was basically raised by Beatrix Potter.”

Potter’s story concerns a duck named Jemima whose eggs keep getting confiscated by a farmer’s wife. The hapless heroine waddles off into the woods, looking for a safe place to lay her eggs and falls in with a sly, hungry fox who says he knows the perfect out-of-the-way place. Jemima Puddle-Duck is a sinister story but it ends happily.

Simmons’s Jemima Canard is a sinister story that ends horribly, with Jemima sexually battered, the fox brutally slaughtered, and all kinds of nasty adult trouble. Simmons follows Potter’s lead by making his characters hybrids—they’re part human and part animal (signified by the occasional furry tail or reference to keen senses of smell). They’re also, implicitly, part slave. This is where Simmons blows his source material into a kaleidoscopic mess of tragedy.

Beatrix Potter is a character in his play. She’s running a farm, and all of her farm-animal characters are her slaves. Her wild-animal characters are outlaws in the woods, preying on both “Miz Potter” and the slaves. Plus there’s a subplot about the real Beatrix Potter being raped as a young girl, and her writing the relationship of Jemima and the fox as a way of exorcising her real-life trauma.

This may sound like a nightmare of didacticism, but Simmons takes an impressively light hand to these perilous politics. At first, the production seems like a menacing antebellum fantasia—lace curtains rimming the proscenium, Southern accents, and mournful talk among the slaves about a half-witted woman (Jemima) whose children keep getting sold off to other farms. Some characters cover their noses with little pale triangles and some with little black caps, which is mildly confusing at first. (Is that a race distinction? No: We later learn that they distinguish the hounds from the fowl.) The story spills out from there, with the gentleman predator fox, the thuggish double-agent badger, and the farm animals who both respect/fear Miz Potter and want to rescue poor Jemima from those woodland bastards.

Potter’s original was all about animals, but Simmons charges his version with race politics, which is a shrewd bit of literary archaeology. Potter was an English farm owner and, though she wrote children’s books, she swam around in 19th-century obsessions about American slave culture. Some of her first illustrations, drawn for her own enjoyment, were of the Uncle Remus stories. Her first attempt at a book was modeled on the 1899 best-seller Little Black Sambo. And the name “Jemima” was popularly known to white folks at the time as a mammy-type character from minstrel shows. (The progenitor of the syrupy “Aunt Jemima” was a woman named Nancy Green who was born a slave in Kentucky and later hired to cook pancakes as a publicity stunt at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.) In his Jemima, Simmons follows Potter’s metaphors of farm animals who don’t have control over their own lives to an interesting and bizarre logical conclusion—Potter’s children’s stories might just be conscious or subconscious texts about the predicaments of American slaves.

Sadly, the script seems more like a sketch than a story, both stiff and baroque. It overthinks, never getting beyond intellectual/­artistic exercise and into the heat and blood and guts of real drama. The characters remain pale, thin abstractions—ideas about personalities instead of actual personalities. The direction, by Carys Kresny, exacerbates the problems of the script. In one scene, a slave-fowl named Rebecca gives a sloppy kiss to a slave-hound and then moves to give him a blowjob before he calls it off—but the two of them go through the motions in a thoroughly uncomfortable manner, like a pair of middle schoolers making out on the dance floor in a gym for their friends’ benefit. Every scene suffers from the same stiffness.

These are failures by the writer and the director. (You can’t blame the actors for being cardboard when they’re living in a cardboard factory.) Not a single moment of The Tale of Jemima Canard gets past its concept and into life—but the concepts are extremely promising. Here’s hoping that Brandon J. Simmons keeps writing, gets out of his head a bit, and gives us a story that will knock us on our asses.