The Curse of the Chameleon: A Comparison between Brutus Jones and James Tyrone

Well I felt that Brutus Jones is a chameleon and he could do what he needed to do and depending on who he was talking to, he can talk the way he needed to talk, to get what he wants.

—John Douglas Thompson

In the theater, there is often reference to something called the "Aha!" moment. It occurs most often, if the actor is lucky, at some moment in the difficult period of rehearsal when one piece of theatrical business, perhaps a line reading or an exchanged look with another actor, suddenly brings the role and/or play into clear relief. When it happens, subsequent rehearsals become more pleasurable and creative. Such a moment came to me during my attendance at the recent "O'Neill in Bohemia" conference when the great actor John Douglas Thompson gave the answer quoted above to Professor Garvey's observation that he had varied the dialect of his character during the performance. He could just as well have noted that neither he nor the character he played in the award-winning production of The Emperor Jones was West Indian. As a classically trained American actor, he has often been called upon to vary his mode of speech according to the need, just as, as he suggested, the former American Pullman porter Brutus Jones was serving his need to control his subjects on the island. As I reflected on this comparison, another quotation resounded in my head: "I got rid of an Irish brogue you could cut with a knife."¹ James Tyrone, like Thompson, is speaking of the adjustment he made to play the great classical roles. At this moment, I realized that there was a more substantive link between this early success of the young O'Neill and the last great success of the mature O'Neill.

We rightly emphasize O'Neill's Irish roots as one reason for his identification with the outsider, but I believe more attention should be paid to O'Neill's theatrical roots. His father was a famous actor, a "star" in the dominant medium of his time, the theatre. However, to operate in that medium, like O'Neill senior, James Tyrone had to channel his creativity into playing a role: the leading actor. And to attain the status of "star" he had to play a role—Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo—that is far more limited and fantastical than the challenging roles of Shakespeare's plays. After doing so, he found himself a highly paid slave to his "fan base." Like all actors, his talent is in convincing his audience that he is something he is not. The playwright underscores this by his depiction of the domestic James, a husband who, faced with his wife's return to addiction, goes out and gets drunk. Brutus Jones is in a comparable position. In the past he "played" the grossly subservient role of a Pullman porter to satisfy the wealthy middle-class white passengers. While his status appears more elevated at the point we encounter him, he, in fact, still has to play a fantasy role, marked by his garish setting and the myth he has created around the silver bullet. He is no more a real emperor than Tyrone is a count.²

Both men are aware that their roles have a finite shelf life. The audience eventually moves on, and they will be left alone and lonely. Both Tyrone and Jones stress the squirreling away of money as one consolation. In each play, the playwright renders his contempt for this solution by demonstrating Tyrone's foolish spending on worthless property and the ironic use by Lem of Jones' stash to melt silver for bullets.

The other way they deal with their diminishing power is through clutching at lesser audiences. Mary Tyrone points out: "All he likes is to hobnob with men at the Club or in a barroom." The Club, of course, is the actors' hangout. But Tyrone clutches at strangers passing by as well. The Chatfields, Connecticut aristocrats, pass by in a car and give a polite bow, "and he bowed back as if he were taking a curtain call. In that filthy old suit I've tried to make him throw away."³ Mary, at least, realizes he is wearing the wrong "costume."

Brutus Jones is more self-conscious about the limited time for his role: "I ain't no fool. I knows dis Emperor's time is sho't. Dat why I make hay when de sun shine."⁴ His situation is also more desperate since his "audience" is about to turn hostile. Also, unlike Tyrone's audience, who at least had some sense that he was an actor playing a role, Jones' subjects believe his powers are real and want to defeat the tyrant.⁵ The only one who knows that Jones is acting is Smithers, which explains the peculiar relationship between the two. Smithers is dishonest, shrewd rather than intelligent, and a coward; he is the one person to whom Jones can reveal his tricks without fear. He is not a "fan" in the normal sense of the term, since he is clearly resentful and fearful of the man, but in the end, he is begrudgingly admiring as he gazes at the dead body of Jones and says, "Silver bullets! Gawd blimey, but yer died in the 'eighth o' style, any'ow!"⁶

If, as I have suggested, both men are essentially actors playing roles, then we can read the context of their performances in terms of the stage setting, costume, and props. The opening setting of The Emperor Jones is in sharp contrast to that of Long Day's Journey Into Night. The backdrop of the first is defined by "a vista of trees" and "thick groves of palm trees." There is only one furniture prop, a throne "painted a dazzling, eye-smiting scarlet."⁷ Jones can convincingly play the emperor in this environment. By contrast, the setting in which Tyrone operates is deliberately homely. Tyrone is trying to play the family man, not the actor. It is significant that every time he puts on his actorly airs, as described above, he is offstage, and when the family situation becomes unbearable he leaves this setting to go to the bar to drink and, perhaps, play the celebrity. Jones by contrast is forced out of his setting into a hostile jungle that becomes increasingly claustrophobic and abstract.⁸ At the end of both plays, usually through effective lighting, all the characters, James Tyrone included, are isolated from any real environment. The realistic justification in both cases is the encroaching night, but the conceptual justification is that both are revealed as radically inauthentic performers.

Tyrone's shabby costume, so loathed by Mary, has already been mentioned. At the end, though, she sees only the heroic figure she married:

he was handsomer than my wildest dream, in his make-up and his nobleman's costume that was so becoming to him. He was different from all ordinary men, like someone from another world.⁹

Compare this to the playwright's description of Brutus Jones' initial costume:

He wears a light blue uniform sprayed with brass buttons, heavy gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold braid on the collar, cuffs, etc. His pants are bright red with a light blue stripe down the side. Patent leather laced boots with brass spurs, and a belt with a long-barreled, pearl-handled revolver in a holster complete his make up. Yet there is something not ridiculous about his grandeur. He has a way of carrying it off.¹⁰

The last two sentences put a tremendous demand on the actor attempting to realize this character because the costume described could be one made for a nineteenth-century operetta. But it does suit the role he has taken on. As the play progresses, however, this costume is torn from him by the encroaching woods.¹¹ By the end of the play, he is as inappropriately "costumed" as Tyrone.

In the last quotation, an important prop is mentioned, the revolver. Eventually, we learn that this prop contains a smaller, but more resonant prop: the silver bullet. Even in a small theater such as the Irish Rep, the bullet can barely be seen, but it is key to the fate of Brutus. The equivalent object, which is key to the fate of Tyrone's character is "that Goddamned play I bought for a song."¹² In a production of Long Day's Journey I directed at Nassau Community College a few years ago, I had a copy of the play placed on a desk pedestal and, when the actor playing Tyrone made his confession to Edmund, he took it up in his hands, sometimes handling it with affection and sometimes angrily fingering it. I believe that the important relationship of these props to the characters to whom they belong is that, in each case, the characters believe the objects represent their good fortune, their salvation even. In the end, however, the fantasies they betoken—Jones' invulnerability, Tyrone's career-securing role—prove to be their undoing. Rather than guarantee their power over their respective audiences, they become the means by which those very audiences secure power over them. In the case of The Emperor Jones, the playwright gives us something of a surprise ending as Lem reveals to Smithers,

My mens dey got um silver bullets. Lead bullet no kill him. He got um strong charm. I cook um money, make um silver bullet, make um strong charm, too.¹³

In the case of James Tyrone, his audience forces him to narrow his ambition and chain him to a role that drains him of his talent and creativity:

They [the audience] had identified me with that one part, and didn't want me in anything else. They were right, too. I'd lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard.¹⁴

Though each man believes he is protected by his chameleon-like ability to play a certain role, ultimately the inability of James Tyrone and Brutus Jones to deal with the true reality of their audiences destroys them.