In An Octoroon, the character BJJ laments the plight of being a Black playwright.

I cant even wipe my ass without someone trying to accuse me of deconstructing the race problem in America, he muses in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Obie Award-winning play.

Shortly after, an actor playing Dion Boucicault enters for a drunken tirade. Boucicault is a 19th-century Irishman who wrote The Octoroon, the play on which Jacobs-Jenkins work riffs.

You people dont even know who I am, he slurs, a fecking world-class famous fecking playwright. He goes on to note that every 10 seconds youre reviving some one a Shakespeares bullshits.

While Boucicault isnt the most pleasant or socially conscious messenger, he (and Jacobs-Jenkins) have a point. Each year, when American Theatre releases its list of the seasons Top 10 Most-Produced Plays and Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights, William Shakespeare is set aside because he always comes out on top.

Certainly, neither Shakespeare nor Boucicault faced the same expectations that BJJ describes in his opening monologue. Even so, scholars and movements in Shakespeare studies are currently putting Shakespeares plays in conversation with systemic racial inequality in America. If the theater is, as playwrights like Jacobs-Jenkins hope, a space to catalyze political change as well as entertain, what role does Shakespeares centuries-old canon play in the theaters relationship to racial justice movements today, if any? How might we read, produce and perform Shakespeares plays in ways that center Black lives?