"Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds": Cross-Dressing, Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones

Introduction

When Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones was first performed in 1920, it was hailed as an important landmark for the representation of race on the American stage. For featuring a central black character and for actually casting a black actor to play the role, O'Neill and his work were seen to be radically progressive in an era of widespread blackface minstrel practice on the stage. O'Neill's play – which tells the story of Brutus Jones, an African American Pullman porter who escapes from a chain gang and becomes the emperor of a Caribbean island – was hailed as a masterpiece for its expressionist investigation of the complexities of race and identity. O'Neill offered his white audiences a sympathetic and powerful African American protagonist, played by a black actor at a time when the representation of blackness on the stage was reserved for whites in blackface. O'Neill's place in the history books as an important figure in the history of African American emancipation seemed a sure thing.

Over seventy years after Eugene O'Neill wrote his play, the Wooster Group, an avant-garde collective theatre company based in downtown New York, performed his play and simultaneously deconstructed the historical legacy of the text.² In the Wooster Group's 1993 production of The Emperor Jones, the black male lead role, Brutus Jones, was played by the actress Kate Valk, in blackface, while Smithers, the white Cockney trader in the play, was played by Willem Dafoe, in a cosmetic approximation of a white Kabuki mask. Both actors were dressed in costumes akin to Kabuki robes and performed three Kabuki style dances during the course of the production. The set was a bare white box, and the only objects used were a television monitor placed upstage, two microphones on stands through which the actors spoke, and a large chair on wheels, which was covered with brown fake fur. Michael Feingold summed up the production as a "parade of dislocations and seeming irrelevancies [which] not only animate […] O'Neill's play but enrich […] it" (137).

Critics received the production rapturously, favourably comparing the Wooster Group's interpretation of the text with O'Neill's original play, arguing that "Elizabeth LeCompte's staging of The Emperor Jones is both great and outrageous" (Feingold 137). Writing in the New York Press, Jonathan Kalb's reaction was typical:

[H]ere is a classic play that is virtually unperformable in 1990s America in the manner the author envisioned in 1920.[…] Unfortunately, performed today as written (that is with earnest and realistic emotion by a black actor), the cunning yet superstitious and uneducated Jones too easily comes off as a racist stereotype.

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And, in the New York Times, Ben Brantley suggested that

America has long passed the point where a straightforward production of The Emperor Jones, with a black man delivering O'Neill's dialectical speeches as written, could be other than embarrassing. Yet the drama remains fascinating and it would be a shame to consign it to the shelves of unplayable plays.

According to these critics, a performance of O'Neill's play at the end of the twentieth century demanded a revisionist approach to save it from the unacceptably racist implications of the text. While The Emperor Jones had been hailed as a progressive masterpiece at the beginning of the twentieth century, by the 1990s, the Wooster Group were only able to relieve the racism of the play by using blackface in their production, a performance practice for which they had been roundly criticized twelve years previously, in their production Route 1&9³ These historical contradictions were manifold in the Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones, and not only formed a backdrop to their production but also played a central role in the group's representation of race, gender, and the "Orient" on the stage.

The reception of the Wooster Group's production of The Emperor Jones demands an investigation into why it had become not only acceptable, but preferable, to use blackface in...