Ben
Brantley

December 8, 2014

Since pretty much every word that’s spoken in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s new play is subject to skeptical scrutiny, we may as well start with its title. That’s War. And, yes, a proper World War (the second one) figures in this contemporary family drama, which runs through Saturday at the Yale Repertory Theater, which commissioned the play. But Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins isn’t talking about armed combat. Nor is he discussing the sort of classic conflicts of the soul that lyrical types like to call “the war within,” or not in any traditional way. What is waged in this imperfect, thoughtful and truly thought-provoking play, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is the daily struggle of people trying to define and deny their connections according to the elusive concept known as race. This means that what we have is inevitably a war of words. But words, in this case, aren’t weapons to be aimed confidently at the opposition. They are just as likely to explode in the hands of their wielders, leaving them fallen and stunned. Within the last few years, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, 29, has established himself as one of this country’s most original and unsettling dramatists on the subject of … . There, you see, I’m at a loss for words, because Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins convincingly insists that we don’t have the vocabulary to deal with the slippery complexities of what it means to be African-American, or black, or Black, or a person of color. And by the way, none of those categories are satisfactory by his terms.