Closed Theatres and Open Books: Reading and Rereading O’Neill

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES: THE EMPEROR JONES RECONSIDERED

Octavio Solis

Of all the plays I could have selected for a reevaluation of Eugene O’Neill, I had to choose this one. With everything going on in the world around May 25, 2020—George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the stark social/racial inequities laid before us by COVID-19—I had to pick The Emperor Jones. Even as theatre artists are calling for deep-tissue changes in the structures around theatre-making and administration so they more accurately reflect the demographics of people of color, and as Black and Brown writers and artists like myself are clamoring for more opportunities to tell and actualize our own stories on the stage, O’Neill’s curiously dark tale of a toppled tinpot despot inserts itself into the discussion.

The Emperor Jones is one of those works I came to very early in my studies. Back when I was a freshman in college, all of us drama majors had to buy Masters of Modern Drama for theatre analysis class. I still have it on my shelf, this imposing tome with the frayed spine filled with forty-four of the plays that once constituted the modern Western canon. Everything from Ghosts to The Glass Menagerie to The Lower Depths, from Camus’s Caligula to Awake and Sing! to At the Hawk’s Well to Marty and Look Back in Anger and No Exit and, of course, two prominent works of O’Neill’s. The Iceman Cometh was assigned to us, but I felt compelled to read The Emperor Jones on the side. I think I responded deeper to that play back in 1976, though I can’t at the moment say why. I only remember how difficult it was to maneuver around the strange ways in which the author tried to convey both Cockney and African American dialects.

But this time, I consciously chose this play because I happen to own a copy of a bound limited edition signed by O’Neill and handsomely illustrated by Alexander King. I wanted to know what it is I am in possession of and why I regard it as valuable. I thought it was an old chestnut, but clearly, it is still considered a masterpiece of great production potential. Mounted as recently as 2009 by the Irish Repertory Theatre and the Gate Theatre in London in 2005, The Emperor Jones received its most infamous staging by the Wooster Group when it was directed by Elizabeth LeCompte with Kate Valk playing Brutus Jones in blackface. That experimental production was staged frequently from 1992 all the way through 2009. The play continues to fascinate and astound viewers.

When O’Neill wrote this work, he was still basking in the glory of his first Pulitzer Prize win for Beyond the Horizon in 1920. But when The Emperor Jones opened for the Provincetown Playhouse in November of that year, it caught fire immediately. Although the language of the play strives for a realism that was pretty rare for its time in the United States, the mise en scène and the structure of the story itself feels entirely Expressionistic. The unique manner in which we plunge into this haunted man’s soul as he loses himself in his personal jungle is stark and rich with magical theatricality. One feels the organic life of the jungle itself breathing and moving behind Jones, stalking his every move. Although there are demons, ghosts, witch doctors, and apparitions of American slavery moving through the work, it truly feels like this play of eight tautly written scenes is actually one single running monologue performed by Jones. It’s a tour de force for a powerhouse actor, like Charles S. Gilpin, who first performed the role, or Paul Robeson, who followed suit and eventually acted in the film version. Even Ossie Davis performed the role for television.

The story tracks the downfall of Brutus Jones, emperor of some unnamed isle, as he makes his escape from the...