Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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Название: Experimental O'Neill
Автор: Eugene O'Neill
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Кинематограф, театр
isbn: 9781940207872
isbn:
Today, the legacy of O’Neill’s dramaturgy of the inarticulate—especially pronounced in his early works of the nineteen-tens and up through The Hairy Ape—can be found in innovative plays by more recent generations of American dramatists. Since O’Neill is now so fully identified, however, with the relatively articulate dialogue of his late realistic plays, especially Long Day’s Journey Into Night, few theater scholars or artists readily recognize the connections between the low-colloquial dialogue of O’Neill’s early plays that transformed American playwriting “beyond recognition” and later dramas-of-the-inarticulate such as (to name only a few) Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, Shepard’s True West, Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, or Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, whose Stanley Kowalski has much in common with (the more theatrical) Yank, the brutish protagonist of The Hairy Ape.
Epilogue
Although O’Neill is still a major figure of modern drama, the immense diversity of his extensive body of work has been given short shrift. Admittedly, not all of the dramatist’s numerous plays were successful, and some are even—especially by today’s standards—somewhat plodding. Yet O’Neill’s wide-ranging oeuvre—throughout which the dramatist experiments with a myriad of aesthetic strategies, in works from twenty minutes to four-plus hours long that include historical epics, dramas with masks, plays based on myths, Freudian theory, expressionism, philosophy, Greek tragedies, the Bible, and his own life—is, if nothing else, worthy of further exploration, both artistically and scholarly. Unfortunately, however, his great, later works of realism too often overshadow the formal innovations of his early, experimental plays, which—when performatively re-invented by companies such as the Wooster Group—possess the potential to hold the stage effectively, even today.
Chapter 2
Caribbean Interrogations
of The Emperor Jones
Lowell Fiet
The action of the play takes place on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines. The form of native government is, for the time being, an Empire.38 (See p. 54.)
Returning to Eugene O’Neill and The Emperor Jones brings my career full circle. I read the collection Nine Plays,39 introduced by Joseph Wood Krutch, during my secondary schooling. O’Neill and Krutch followed me through my undergraduate and graduate studies over forty years ago. My first post-PhD publication analyzed A Touch of the Poet,40 and the second revisited themes of Krutch’s “The Tragic Fallacy.”41 However, my interests shifted increasingly to studies of Hispanic Caribbean and then trans-Caribbean drama and performance. This essay locates O’Neill’s innovative genius in creating The Emperor Jones (1920) in circum-Atlantic crosscurrents and establishes a loose genealogy that extends from plays such as Bound East for Cardiff (1914), The Moon of the Caribbees (1917), and The Dreamy Kid (1918) that precede The Emperor Jones, continues through to The Hairy Ape (1921) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923), touches more contemporary West Indian plays such as Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), and finally reaches the Wooster Group’s version of the play (first performed in 1993) with female performer Kate Valk in blackface. These “Black” plays feature, or at least reference, African-American, Caribbean, African, and/or Pacific-Aboriginal characters. Although not African-American, Yank in The Hairy Ape shares fundamental identity issues with the black characters Dreamy, Brutus Jones, and Jim Harris.
1. The Context
Cultural and political factors contributed to the race-conscious environment in which O’Neill created these plays. Ethnographic displays of African art were available in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century. The large collection of the American Museum of Natural History derives, in part, from a 1907 gift of Congolese art made by King Leopold II of Belgium, and the Buffalo Museum of Science and Hampton University Museum had collections of Congolese art before 1910.42 However, “[t]he year 1914 was a turning point for African art in America. As a direct result of the 1913 Armory show, it was pushed to the forefront of the New York contemporary art scene due to its recent role as primary catalyst for avant-garde creativity.”43 Photos and exhibits staged by Alfred Stieglitz and other avant-garde luminaries “powerfully positioned African art as an active participant in the modernist era.”44 If O’Neill did not attend the International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show), his intellectual and painter friends certainly did, and he worked and lived in the environment of creative excitement that juxtaposed works by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, and others with newly arriving objects of sculptural art via France from Africa. For Alisa LaGamma, “Americans viewed these traditions as ciphers for the conceptual shift that their own art world was undergoing”—“a new way of seeing art”45—rather than the veneration of ancestors tied to their origins in equatorial Africa.
O’Neill uses African art, masks, and cultural performance in a broader context that reflects racialized memory, characters’ notions of identity and “belonging,” and the tensions of individual, racial, class, and cultural difference. The iconic mask in Jim Harris and his wife Ella’s apartment in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (written in 1923) is the clearest signal of O’Neill’s intent: “In the left corner, where a shadow lights it effectively, is a Negro primitive mask from the Congo—a grotesque face, inspiring obscure, dim connotations in one’s mind, but beautifully done, conceived in a true religious spirit.”46 The mask remains open to differing interpretations, depending on the race and background of the viewer. Later in the play Hattie, Jim Harris’ activist sister, describes the mask to Ella: “It’s a mask which used to be worn in religious ceremonies by my people in Africa…it’s beautifully made—a work of Art by a real artist—as real in his way as your Michael Angelo.”47 Ella fears the mask and eventually kills it (rather than her African-American husband) with a large kitchen knife.
Yet, in the work of O’Neill, the evidence of the impact of Africa and African art began in The Emperor Jones. Charles P. Sweeney (1924) quotes O’Neill as saying, “One day I was reading of the religious feasts in the Congo and the uses to which the drum is put there; how it starts at a normal pulse-beat and slowly intensifies until the heart-beat of every one present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drum.”48 Other presumed Congolese elements of the play include the “Congo witch-doctor”: “wizened and old, naked except for the fur of some small animal tied about his waist, its bushy tail hanging down in front. His body stained all over a bright red. Antelope horns are on each side of his head, branching upward.”49 (See p. 88.) He holds a bone rattle and a charm stick with cockatoo feathers, and glass beads and bone ornaments adorn his entire body. Perhaps this vision also derived from the same unnamed reading on cultural practices in the Congo or, like the mask in the Harris apartment, from sculptural representations on display in New York from 1914 onward.
Another source frequently cited is O’Neill’s familiarity with ritual descriptions in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1899). According to Louis Sheaffer, “both the novelist and the playwright [are] telling the same story: the nightmarish disintegration of a man, an outsider, in an aboriginal land of omnipresent terror.”50 How close the Eurocentric imaginaries of Conrad or O’Neill (as well as those of the unnamed anthropologists or ethnographers O’Neill is cited as having read) came to creating representations that approximate the aesthetic and efficacious elements of ritual ceremony in the Congo remains debatable.
The dusk to dawn journey that returns Brutus Jones to an imaginary African “heart of darkness” takes place on a supposed West Indian island. Yet demographic accounts of post-emancipation Caribbean peasantries contradict the envisioned population of loin-clothed “natives.” Jones claims to have learned a few words of “deir lingo” or Creole language—Haitian Kreyol, perhaps—to help him rule, but no other bureaucratic or СКАЧАТЬ