Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill

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      In Walcott’s sense, the too brief scene six in the slave hold should be the “heart of darkness” for the African-American Brutus Jones. It is not because he has been forced to see himself as the negative reflection of whiteness. Thus even if O’Neill’s choice of Brutus Jones aims toward universalism and a common core of shared human sensibility and intelligence, a racialized sense of cultural difference remains visible in the character’s too-swift return to a misplaced “horror” on the banks of the Congo.

      3. Conclusion(s)

      To avoid misunderstanding, I find The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape to be among O’Neill’s greatest plays, and two of the most important plays of the US theater of the twentieth century. It’s a large claim, but no other plays cut as swiftly or as deeply to the cerebral cortex of the American experience–“the sickness of our time”—as the product of the toxic and unresolved issues of slavery and racial-ethnic difference and, linked at the hip, the cultural arrogance of imperial desire and the greed of investment capitalism. Expressionistic in form, they take major steps toward the dialectical fragmentation of form that characterizes Brecht’s Epic Theater and link the experimental impulses of the late nineteen-tens and early nineteen-twenties with the resurgence of radical theater and performance forms in the US from the nineteen-sixties onward. Whether crocodiles or gorillas, African-American dialect or the clanking, rough, and repetitive speech of the stokehole, both plays challenge the creativity of contemporary directors and actors.

      This essay only examines the challenges in The Emperor Jones. Unlike Langston Hughes in The Emperor of Haiti (1930), about Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first emperor, Trinidadian C.L.R. James in Toussaint Louverture (1934; as well as his historical study The Black Jacobins, 1938), Derek Walcott in his early play Henri Christophe (1948), and Aimé Césaire in The Tragedy of King Christophe (1968), O’Neill portrays a more imperial notion of the existing social and political conditions of the Caribbean. In his defense, the cultural imaginary of the United States viewed Haiti (and possibly the rest of the Caribbean), then invaded and occupied, as wild and ungovernable. Given those circumstances, audiences accepted that an ex-Pullman porter and escaped convict could arrive there (or a similar Caribbean space) with nothing and climb rapidly to the post of emperor.

      Yet The Emperor Jones departed radically and dynamically from the conventionality of the New York stage of the era to be equaled only by O’Neill’s other experimental plays of the nineteen-twenties. The brash visceral image of the kinesthetic disrobing of a black male body marks the scene-by-scene action of the play. Thus by performing Brutus Jones, Charles Gilpin, and later Paul Robeson, assumed iconic stature, in a theatrical context, not unlike that of boxer Jack Johnson a decade earlier, when he defeated Jim Jeffries in the prize-fighting ring. For that reason, perhaps, even with the passage of time an unprecedented dignity resides untarnished in Jones’ character. The sense of indictment also still rings true: all of Jones’ attitudes and beliefs, his sense of American superiority, as well as his fear of his African past, reflect a system of cultural oppression—the “imperial fiction” of Walcott’s description—that transcends the limitations of language and the Eurocentric vision that portrays the Caribbean and Caribbeans as primitive, uncivilized, and ungovernable.

      The Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones, the most notable production of the play, perhaps of any O’Neill play, of the past two decades, began performances in 1993 and crisscrossed the globe until 2009. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, the staging features Kate Valk, a European-American woman in blackface, acting the role of the escaped African-American convict-cum-emperor on a West Indian island. Valk’s completely black face harkens back to minstrelsy, when even dark-skinned performers fully blackened their faces, or to New Orleans Mardi Gras crews such as King Zulu that cover natural skin tones with deeper black and contrasting white eyes, or to the cross-dressed (men as women) Locas of Caribbean carnival traditions who use black shoe polish to further darken their skin. Her dress is not Napoleonic or lodge regalia but a dress: an elaborate multi-colored, multi-layered jumper or Kabuki kimono of sorts that also resembles the dress of the Pitchy-Patchy character of Jamaican Jonkonnu. She dances with Smithers, a male performer who wears similar attire, in the opening scene and at intervals throughout the play. Perhaps more important, Valk speaks all the lines as written—“dis,” “dem,” “dat” included—with an astounding vocal-tonal and interpretive range that combines the facial antics and gestures of minstrelsy, a ringing falsetto, chanting, guffaws, and the guttural rasping of survival against overwhelming odds. It creates tragedy and then farce, as Marx would have it, or vice versa, as Dario Fo might have it, but both at the same time. This process, according to Charles Isherwood, “transform[s] Brutus Jones into a flailing doll being yanked toward destruction by unseen hands. That Ms. Valk is somehow able to infuse this artfully outlandish performance with a poignant sense of entrapped humanity is remarkable. In fact it’s nothing short of sorcery.”80

      Does this post-Brechtian “deconstruction” save or destroy The Emperor Jones? In the Wooster Group production the play becomes play, a metaphorical space of signification in which the character’s fantasies and dreams—much like Makak’s in Dream on Monkey Mountain—have meaning without requiring precise correlatives in social and historical reality. On the one hand, the distancing or “alienation effect” created by a woman performer with a hyper-blackened face conflates race and gender and aligns Jones’ acceptance and reproduction of oppression with similar issues of patriarchy and women’s rights. On the other hand, the construction of Brutus Jones as a product of systemic brutalization reassumes centrality in the universal form that O’Neill originally intended but only partially achieved because of the racialized sense of difference that still characterizes the “heart of darkness” of American society.

      O’Neill’s experimental plays such as The Emperor Jones invite such creative intervention to unearth and re-enact the inner-tension of the competing oral-scribal and visual-kinesthetic texts of an astonishingly complex theatrical palimpsest that mirrors the synaptic structure and flaws of contemporary American life.