The History Next Door

Neighbors, a new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, starts in a peaceful, familiar middle class suburb, home to Richard, a black upwardly mobile professor and his white wife, Jean. As the play opens, a family of minstrels, black face and all, moves in to the adjacent tract home. The neighbors have come to town to mount their traditional minstrel show as if they’ve traveled straight out of 1850...