Emperors Before Gilpin: Opal Cooper and Paul Robeson

In the annals of Eugene O'Neill in performance, the African American actor Charles S. Gilpin has been justly honored for creating the title role in the November 1, 1920, premiere of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. The play marked the first major commercial success for O'Neill and the Provincetown Players and the first time a black actor had played a leading dramatic role in an important and otherwise all-white New York production. Almost overnight, Gilpin found himself the most heralded black actor in America. "The Emperor is played by a negro actor named Charles S. Gilpin, who gives the most thrilling performance we have seen any place this season," wrote Heywood Broun. Alexander Woollcott called Gilpin's portrayal "an uncommonly powerful and imaginative performance, in several respects unsurpassed this season in New York." Kenneth Macgowan found it to be "a magnificent piece of acting . . . the crown to a play that opens up the imagination of the American theatre." The impact of Gilpin's portrayal was unprecedented. Burns Mantle wrote that "within a comparatively short time the town was buzzing with its discovery of him as a really great actor."¹ Gilpin, however, was not the Provincetown Players' first choice for the role. Two African American actors were considered for Brutus Jones before Gilpin auditioned and was chosen for the part: Opal Cooper and Paul Robeson.

Robeson, of course, would go on to future distinction in O'Neill's plays, appearing in a Provincetown Playhouse revival of Emperor Jones in 1924 and the premiere of All God's Chillun Got Wings the same year; he subsequently appeared in Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and All God's Chillun in London and in the 1933 Emperor Jones film. At the time, however, Robeson was a second-year law student with only a single amateur acting credit. Cooper, the first black actor to be considered, was a far more obvious choice to create Brutus Jones. Today Cooper is little known, but in early October 1920, when the Provincetowners first began to seek an African American actor for the role, he was without question the most acclaimed black dramatic actor in the recent history of the American stage. Who was this remarkable actor, and why did he emerge as director Jig Cook's first choice for the role?

Opal Cooper was born on February 3, 1889, in Crowell, Kentucky, and grew up in Chicago. He apparently had some vocal training at the Chicago Musical College, and by 1910 he was singing professionally in the Midwest. An article in the December 1910 Indianapolis Freeman described him as "a tenor of excellent timbre," and the Chicago Defender styled him "the robust tenor." By 1915 Cooper had made his way to New York, where he sang in the musical Darkydom at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Variety noted that "Mr. Cooper has a lyric tenor that were he not colored would land him in very fast singing company." He subsequently toured with the show, and in 1916 he joined the cast of Darktown Follies, a black version of the Ziegfeld Follies. In addition to singing several songs, including "Hoola-Boola Love Song" and leading the company in the finale, "Goodbye Ragtime," he had several speaking roles. By October 1916 he had joined the renowned black bandleader James Reese Europe's Europe Double Quintet comprising "the cleverest colored entertainers known," singing tenor parts and playing banjolin.²

In early 1917 Cooper's career reached a remarkable high point. Ridgely Torrence, a white, Ohio-born, Princeton-educated poet, had written three one-act plays for black actors: The Rider of Dreams, Granny Maumee, and Simon the Cyrenian. It had been arranged for the plays to be presented on Broadway in early April with all-black casts under the auspices of a group called the Colored Players. Robert Edmond Jones, the rising young designer of the "New Stagecraft," directed and designed scenery and costumes; Emilie Hapgood, a prominent society woman who was a vital force in New York's burgeoning "art theatre" movement, produced; and the Clef Club Orchestra, led by...