Читать книгу Experimental O'Neill - Eugene O'Neill - Страница 7

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 institutional structure except the role of emperor organizes the island’s social and political life. Finally, his imperial superiority—his sense of American exceptionalism and being civilized in comparison to the ignorant “black trash” that he feels he dominates so easily—begins to crack near the end of the first scene when he first hears “the faint, steady thump of a tom-tom, low and vibrating.”51 (See p. 68.)

Part of the play’s inspiration may spring from Adam Scott, a black bartender at Holt’s Grocery in New London, Connecticut. He seems to be a model for many of Brutus Jones’ religious and social attitudes and beliefs,52 although probably not for his speech. Black friends in Greenwich Village, Jamaican sailors O’Neill knew, and “his readings on Toussaint L’Ouverture and Henri Christophe”53 were important as well, just as they no doubt were in the creation of the urban setting of the young gangster Dreamy in The Dreamy Kid. But most accounts credit the key source of the play as a story O’Neill heard sometime after July 1915, told by circus man and friend Jack Croak about the Haitian military strong man and short-termed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam (25 February–27 July 1915). Sam apparently claimed that only silver bullets could kill him and he carried a revolver loaded with them in order to, should the need arise, kill himself. He publicly executed his predecessor and over 160 followers, but only six months later, angry protesters pulled him from the French Embassy where he had fled for asylum, killed him, and left his body in the street to be torn apart by an angry mob. On Sam’s death, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the US Marine Corps to invade and occupy Haiti, where they stayed until 1934. The play’s setting on an island “as yet not self-determined by White Marines” signals O’Neill awareness of the US occupation.

O’Neill also almost certainly used the flamboyant King Henri Christophe—named president in 1807 but, more importantly, ruler of Northern Haiti from 1811 to 1820—for other aspects of Jones’ character. Not Haitian by birth but from the Caribbean island of Grenada (in some accounts, St. Kitts), Christophe was apparently apprenticed or sold into sea service and later arrived in Haiti as a young man. Rumors place him fighting with French units in the American Revolutionary War, and he was a restaurateur and hotelier at the time of the Haitian Revolution. Dictatorial, arrogant in his creation of monuments and the trappings of European-styled nobility, but also innovative in education and economics, Christophe was partially paralyzed in 1820 and shot himself—numerous accounts claim that, in fact, he fired a silver bullet—to avoid capture and public humiliation. Apocryphal or not, these stories bind Henri Christophe, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, and Brutus Jones to the need to create the pretense of invincibility.

Also like Henri Christophe and, nearly one-hundred years later, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, Brutus Jones dresses impressively: “He wears a light blue uniform coat, 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.”54 (See p. 58.)O’Neill continues by saying that the costume is not “altogether ridiculous,” and that Jones carries it off with style.

Ceremonial and lodge dress were still common early in the twentieth century. In addition to seeing his actor-father onstage in outlandish costumes, O’Neill perhaps also saw him dressed in lodge regalia for ceremonial events. The scene notes for All God’s Chillun Got Wings that place an African mask to the left of the rear wall, place to the right of the wall “the portrait of an elderly Negro dressed in outlandish lodge regalia…adorned with medals, sashes, a cocked hat with frills…as absurd to contemplate as one of Napoleon’s Marshals in full uniform.”55 Henri Christophe himself dressed as a Napoleonic figure, but this portrait represents a successful African-American businessman, the deceased father of Jim and Hattie Harris (to Ella, “his Old Man—all dolled up like a circus horse”56), although it could reasonably be the ceremonial dress of Marcus Garvey, whose presence in the United States after 1915, and his movement back and forth between Jamaica and New York that was related to his political and business ventures, attracted the attention of large segments of the African-American community, as well as US law enforcement agencies. Hattie Harris speaks much like a Garvey initiate—“We don’t deserve happiness till we’ve fought the fight of our race and won it!”57—and issues of race and racial inequality play foundational roles in The Dreamy Kid and The Emperor Jones, as much as in All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

In the mid- to late-nineteen-twenties, New York saw the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, but in 1919-1920, when O’Neill worked on The Dreamy Kid and The Emperor Jones, the specter of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 cast its shadow over all of urban America. In the earlier work, Dreamy’s killing of a white man becomes a death sentence at the end of the play as he visits his dying grandmother. Pullman car porter Brutus Jones receives a twenty-year sentence for killing the dice-cheating porter Jeff, but he flees the country to avoid what he sees as certain death after striking and presumably killing the white guard who whipped him as he worked on the chain gang.

Sheaffer and the Gelbs emphasize the role that the forests O’Neill knew—the tropical rain forests of Honduras and a dark, northern forest close to his boyhood home in New London—played in his conceiving the action of Brutus Jones’ flight. The tropical forests of Honduras could certainly provide a model of the forest into which Jones plunges, but island rain forests exist in the mountainous centers of the islands, and crossing to reach an opposite coast seems far-fetched in terrain where maroons lived hidden for years and wandering tourists would sometimes lose themselves for weeks. Thus Jones’ plan to reach, in just one night, the opposite coast and a French gunboat that will take him to Martinique defies geographical logic. But perhaps another factor can be gleaned from O’Neill’s Honduras experiences: he also must have been aware that William Walker, an American lawyer, adventurer, slavery advocate, and the one-time (1856-1857) President of Nicaragua, was executed in Honduras in 1860.

So where is Jones’ island? Perhaps the only way O’Neill could get Jones to the imaginary Congo was via an equally distorted vision of the Caribbean. For cultural and political reasons, such a community of “natives” could not be located in the US. Thus the obvious corollary would be the just invaded and occupied Haiti, geographically the western half of the island of Hispaniola, but still a large and heavily populated land mass. Its majority to this day speaks Kreyol (“dier lingo”), its history records tumultuous and often violent political upheavals, and then as now, it was stigmatized by phantasmagorical Hollywood misconceptions of Vodun, zombies, and black magic. Yet from independence onward Haiti has maintained social structure, urban centers, and a political bureaucracy. Its formerly enslaved peasants would not have resembled the “native” image created by the loin-clothed Old Lem and his tribal followers. No Caribbean space, all colonies or ex-colonies of European powers, provided such a population at the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century. Historically, African-West Indian citizens, and especially those immigrating to the US, have received better educations on their home islands than the majority of African-Americans in the US. Writers and scholars such as Claude McKay (Jamaica), Arturo Schomburg (Puerto Rico), and C.L.R. James (Trinidad) provide a sample of the Caribbean contribution to the Harlem Renaissance.

On the one hand, O’Neill was exceptionally attuned to the issues of race and racial politics of the first decades of the twentieth century, perhaps more so than any other European-American writer of his day. On the other hand, The Emperor Jones requires the creation of an imaginary, Conrad-like “heart of darkness” in Jones’ and the audience’s minds that primitivizes (or “Congolizes”) the Caribbean—the space of hoodoo and voodoo and the “ha’nts” that spook Brutus Jones as he moves back through time and space to his “primitive” origins. In fact, the selection of the Congo, as opposed to the rest of West or Central Africa, as the place to root Jones’ fantasy seems to remain another apocryphal curiosity.

Notions of Caribbean otherness were perhaps less arbitrary. In the wake of the Spanish-American War and the US occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the US sent photographers and writers to justify the takeovers and document the need for colonial guidance.58 Furthermore, in the early twentieth century, anthropological contact with and writings about previously unknown traditional societies in the Kalahari Desert, elsewhere in Central and Southern Africa, and in New Guinea reinforced notions of primitive-versus-civilized peoples. In the early nineteen-nineties, performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco demonstrated that these ethnographic attitudes continued to persist in the popular imagination when they displayed themselves before gullible audiences in the US and Europe as the caged “natives” of a previously undiscovered Caribbean island.59

2. The Play

Edward Gordon Craig’s The Theatre Advancing is frequently cited as an aesthetic factor behind the play. Craig advocates a return to dance, pantomime, puppets, and masks to create the “magic” of ancient theater arts.60 The specific use of character masks to denote varying social and psychological selves plays a critical role in O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (1925). A degree of masking, as well as pantomime and human puppetry (discussed below), appears in The Emperor Jones, but O’Neill’s presumed knowledge of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,61 Part One of Strindberg’s Road to Damascus, and experimental German Expressionist plays, such as Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, seems even more consequential.62 Undoubtedly the play’s structure derives from these or similar symbolist or expressionist “journey” plays that take a solitary character from station to station in a linear or circular procession without the traditional supports of well-made dialogue or an organic plot structure. No American examples were available at the time O’Neill wrote the play, but like the paintings on display in the Armory Show, information about European avant-garde theater–especially of Expressionists such as Oscar Kokoscha, Walter Haseclever, Ernest Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Frank Wedekind—began to appear in the US immediately following the Great War. Numerous accounts cite The Emperor Jones as the first example of American Expressionism.

The play’s first and longest scene consists of static dialogue between the Emperor Brutus Jones and the Cockney trader Smithers. It reveals nothing of Jones’ upbringing or early life, but does provide conventional exposition of the violence of his recent past, his imprisonment and escape, his arrival on the island, and his meteoric rise to emperor. Jones arrived on the run but gains stature by helping with Smithers’ “crooked” and “dirty work.” When the gun of Old Lem, the local leader hired to murder Jones, misfires, the quick-minded Jones creates the myth that only silver bullets can kill him. That clever twist seals his position as emperor. The pearl-handled six-shooter he subsequently carries holds five lead bullets for his enemies and one silver bullet for himself. Thus, should his plan to escape go bad, like those of Christophe and Sam, Jones can turn myth into reality.

In spite of that romantic stance, Jones is a model of tyranny and corruption. He becomes rich by sucking the local population dry with taxes and bribes, at the same time that he deprecates the people as cowering, stupid, superstitious, “bush” and “woods niggers.” At the first scene’s beginning, he thinks he has six more months before they rebel; by its end, with the stables empty, Jones, in full uniform with a Panama hat cocked on his head, is on his way to the forest to escape by foot while pursued by drumbeats.

Scene two opens where the plain before the Great Forest ends. Jones, who enters exhausted, is unable to unearth the food and water he has hidden there. He panics and, as the drumbeats intensify, begins to lose grasp of his shaky Baptist Church beliefs. In the growing darkness of the forest’s edge, Little Formless Fears cloud his imagination and mock him. He shoots his first lead bullet to disperse them and regains some confidence before plunging into the forest. The third scene reveals a clearing in the forest in which the figure of the Pullman porter Jeff, who Jones had killed years earlier with a razor, appears to roll a pair of dice. The pace of the drumbeat increases and Jeff’s dice click with each roll as he mechanically repeats his puppet-like action, oblivious to the approach of the now hatless Jones in his torn uniform. Jones asks, “Is you—is you—a ha’nt?,” spends a second lead bullet to make Jeff disappear, and then “plunges wildly into the underbrush.”63 (See p. 79.)

Station to station, little goes according to Jones’ plan. Scene four discovers a wide road in the forest. Jones enters panting and worn down, his uniform disheveled. He discards his useless spurs and asks his Baptist God to shield him from more “ha’nts.” A chain gang of black prisoners enters and creates a mechanical mime show of swinging picks and shoveling. The white guard carries a rifle and a whip and motions to Jones to join in the gang’s work, which he does. The guard approaches, lashes Jones with his whip, and turns away. Jones attacks the guard with his shovel but quickly finds his hands empty. So he spends his third lead bullet, only to find himself lost again as the forest moves in around him.

Social reality and personal history dissolve at this point. He now races backward into cultural and racial memory. Scene five opens on a large clearing with a dead tree trunk in the center that resembles an auction block. Jones enters with his shoes and clothes in shreds. He asks the Lord for forgiveness for killing Jeff and the guard and, again, to keep the haunts away. As he jettisons his destroyed shoes, he notices a crowd of Southern planters, an auctioneer, and spectators, as well as a group of enslaved Africans to be sold. In the “dumb show” that ensues, the auctioneer appraises Jones’ physical qualities, reducing him to an enslaved body, inferior and less than human, capable strictly of manual labor and mindless force. The silent bidding begins. Caught in the nightmare of being sold on the block, Jones shoots twice, which leaves only the silver bullet in the chamber of his revolver.

Scene six, the next step backward toward Africa, is the shortest of the play. The forest has stripped Jones down to torn pants that look like a “breech cloth” and encloses him in a space “like the dark, noisome hold of some ancient vessel.”64 (See p. 86.) Two rows of swaying, shackled bodies become visible. They moan in unison and sway with the roll of the ship at sea. Jones tries to shut out the vision but ultimately takes his place as part of the rocking, wailing chorus. As the light and the voices fade, he struggles to move deeper into the forest, and the drumbeat becomes louder and more persistent.

The historical and literary treatments of the Middle Passage (from the early sixteenth through the first half of the nineteenth century) create an archive as devastating as the twentieth century’s Holocaust: capture, sale, slave-holding fortresses, diseases, sexual exploitation, torture, purposefully overcrowded transport vessels, the deaths of hundreds of thousands at sea, all leading to arrival in the Americas and the repetition of the same conditions of holding pens, auctions, and death sentences as enslaved laborers on New World plantations. Thus scene six presents a condensed version of more contemporary works, such as Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (staged 1967) while, even in its brevity, providing a glimpse of the impact that Derek Walcott records in the poem “Laventille” (about a Port of Spain favela, published 1965): “Something inside is laid wide like a wound, / some open passage that has cleft the brain, / some deep, amnesiac blow. We left / somewhere a life we never found, / customs and gods that are not born again, / some crib, some grille of light / clanged shut on us in bondage…”65 If a Kurtzian sense of “the horror, the horror” exists, the hold of the slave ship would be its most appropriate location.

In scene seven, the still wailing and trance-like Jones arrives at the riverbank (presumably the Congo). Instead of the joy of homecoming, fear overcomes him and he again asks the Lord to protect him. The Congo witchdoctor (described earlier) begins his performance and “croon” to the intensifying drumbeats. The mime drama he acts out signifies Jones’ role as the sacrificial victim who must pay for his sins. Terrified, Jones asks for “mercy on dis po’ sinner” as the witchdoctor summons a huge crocodile from the river. Now nearly possessed, Jones “squirms” on the ground toward the beast. The drums reach their most hypnotic intensity, and the witchdoctor shrieks in “furious exultation.” Suddenly Jones again prays to “Lawd Jesus,” awakens from the trance, and fires the silver bullet into the eyes of the crocodile. He is left prostrate on the riverbank with only the sound of the tom-tom.

The Formless Fears, Jeff, the chain gang, the auction block, the slaver’s hold, and finally, the sacrifice: all are products of Jones’ imagination, his panicked nightmare of slipping from the privilege of American civilization and power which, in spite of his position on the lowest rung of the social ladder, has been ingrained in him. Instead of embracing his racial past, he fears sliding back to the heathen savagery of the Congo origins he has been taught to fear as a personal “heart of darkness.”

Scene eight returns the action to a more concrete social reality. It begins with Smithers’ assurances that no one can catch the wily Jones, and Old Lem’s certainty that he will be caught. Lem guarantees that assertion by revealing that he and his followers spent the night molding silver bullets to end Jones’ charmed life. Smithers admits reluctantly that Jones may have lost his way and circled back rather than crossing through the forest. Shots are fired, and the divested body of the ex-Emperor Jones, now no different than those he called “black trash,” is carried onto the stage. Smithers asks, “Where’s yer ‘igh an’ mighty airs now, yer bloomin’ Majesty?,” and the play ends with his last comment, “Silver bullets! Gawd blimey, but yer died in the ‘eighth o’ style, any ‘ow!”66 (See p. 93.)

Although still compelling, The Emperor Jones can make for awkward contemporary reading: “Lem is a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type, dressed only in a loin cloth”;67 (See p. 90.) Jones “is a tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded negro of middle age. His features are typically negroid, yet there is something decidedly distinctive about his face—an underlying strength of will, a hardy, self-reliant confidence in himself that inspires respect”;68 (See p. 57.) whereas O’Neill describes Smithers as “a tall, stoop-shouldered man about forty. His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam’s apple, looks like an egg” with yellowish skin, “small sharp features,” and a pointed nose turned red by too much rum.69 (See p. 55.)

O’Neill established his descriptive ethnographic style even earlier. In Bound East for Cardiff, Cocky describes his undesirable New Guinean sexual partner as a “bloomin’ nigger. Greased all over with coconut oil, she was… Bloody old cow, I says.”70 (See p. 260.) Cocky returns to describing New Guinean “cannibals” in The Moon of the Caribbees while the crew of the Glencairn anchored off an unspecified West Indian island await the arrival of the rum woman—Bella—and three other “West Indian Negresses.”71 (See p. 228.) Instead of the beat of the drum, a “melancholy negro chant, faint and far-off, drifts, crooning over the water.”72 (See p. 229.) Cocky finds Bella “bloomin’ ugly…like a bloody organ-grinder’s monkey,” and when challenged by Paddy, Cocky calls him “A ‘airy ape.”73 (See p. 237.) Two of the women who come onboard for the officers are described by Driscoll as “two swate little slips av things, near as white as you an’ me are.” When the four other women enter, the scene note indicates, “All four are distinct negro types. They wear light-colored, loose-fitting clothes and have bright bandana handkerchiefs on their heads.”74 (See p. 241.) The Dreamy Kid demonstrates similar racialized character descriptions—“negresses” with a wizened (Mammy) or round (Ceely) face or a “young good-looking negress, highly rouged” (Irene), or Dreamy, who is a “well-built, good-looking young negro, light in color.”75 Brutus Jones uses “nigger” both self-referentially and as a pejorative to describe African-Americans such as Jeff or the island “natives” he has duped into making him emperor. Although a slightly up-scaled version, Smithers shares much of the same vocabulary and attitudes about race as Cocky in the sea.

Even though it sounds better when spoken than when read, the dialectal nature of the language makes the play more difficult to perform in a contemporary context. For that reason, perhaps, Charles Gilpin, the African-American actor who first acted the role in 1920, began to alter some of the lines, over O’Neill’s strong objections. O’Neill may have attempted to transcribe the speech of Adam Scott or other black acquaintances, but Jones’ speech probably also records standard stage language for black-faced white actors on the professional stage and even contains traces of minstrelsy. Scene seven begins: “What–what is I doin’? What is—dis place? Seems like I know dat tree–an’ dem stones—an’ de river. I remember—seems like I been heah befo’. (tremblingly) Oh, Gorry, I’se skeered in dis place! I’se skeered. Oh, Lawd, pertect dis sinner!”76 (See p. 80.) This random sample, less pronounced than other usage in the play, shows the dropped consonants, non-standard vowel substitutions, faulty verb agreements, and particularly the “d” substituted for the voiced “th” of this, that, and them. It creates a sense of a substandard rather than a local or “creolized” variety of English, with its own grammar and morphology. The use of short phrases such as “Gorry, I’se skeered..!” and again “I’se skeered” sounds sing-songy and hieratic, and taken together, these aspects of language create a voice for Brutus Jones that 1920 New York theater audiences found compelling, but one that does not necessarily represent actual speakers. Even O’Neill’s successful efforts to capture authentic speech patterns of others suffer with the passing decades. His sailors, farmers, workers, and Broadway bums, whether Cockney, Swede, Irish, New Englander, etc., sometimes make contemporary audiences wince. Yet in spite of the verbal awkwardness, the structural brilliance, vibrant rhythm and movement, sensuous form, and intensity of focus still distinguish The Emperor Jones, the first artistically significant play of the American theater.

The play’s most vital aesthetic counterpart is The Hairy Ape. In it the seaman Yank, reconfigured from earlier plays, becomes ungrounded, confused, and ultimately defeated in an unfamiliar urban forest of the real and imaginary demons that pursue him. In a dialectical sense, the issues of The Emperor Jones relate principally to race oppression and racialized cultural identity, whereas The Hairy Ape focuses on class, economic status, and weak identity formation as a result of the lopsided accumulation of wealth and power by the very few. Yet the plays can be viewed as nearly matching bookends: how a system reduces a black character, on the one hand, and a white character, on the other hand, to a strictly corporeal condition as disposable human excess. Yank’s “heart of darkness” is not the hold of a slave ship but the stokehole–once part of his illusion of power—of a steamer that turns him into a human machine. A vision of whiteness in the form of the ultra-rich Mildred Douglas unhinges Yank’s sense of self-worth and sends him on a journey to recapture his humanity. Unlike Jones, who refuses to embrace his “West Indian” brothers as equals, Yank meets his death in the arms of a caged gorilla that he imagines as his next of kin.

Both plays are curiously reflected in both form and content in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), which also examines race, power, colonialism, and cultural identity. The working out of the differences between the African-Caribbean Makak (meaning monkey), who comes from the forest of Monkey Mountain, and the in-town colonial authority of the mulatto Corporal Lestrade parallels some of the differences between the Africanized Old Lem and the Americanized Brutus Jones. Inside a Strindberg-like “dream play” structure, the poor charcoal vender Makak rises to become the prophet of his race. Jailed because his seizure in Alcindor’s bar resembles drunkenness, he escapes through his dreams to an imagined Africa and eventually beheads the White Witch (or goddess) that pursues him. Yet what he executes is not a person, but whiteness as a Western, European-American construction that requires its obverse but equally artificial construction of blackness in order to guarantee its economic and political domination and its false sense of racial, moral, and cultural superiority. When released from his cell at the play’s end, Makak returns to his mountain home content with being himself and no longer plagued by the mask of whiteness.

O’Neill cannot go so far. For him, all humans can be stripped of the patina of supposed civilization and superiority, but it is easier to strip Brutus Jones (or Yank) because the patina is thinner and the character closer to his “primitive” roots. Thus in theory, whether it is Old Lem and his soldiers in loin cloths, the Mannons of Mourning Becomes Electra, or the Tyrones of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, all correspond to a common humanity: “O’Neill was not trying to demonstrate that the American black is only a short step from his African ancestors; he was suggesting something more universal—that an apprehensive primitive being lurks just below the surface of all of us.”77 The same argument applies to Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, at least until Chinua Achebe deconstructed it as a racist Eurocentric text.78 In his poem “The Fortunate Traveller” (1981), Derek Walcott redefines the phrase “heart of darkness”:

Through Kurtz’s teeth, white skull in elephant grass, the imperial fiction sings. Sunday wrinkles downriver from the Heart of Darkness. The heart of darkness is not Africa. The heart of darkness is the core fire in the white center of the holocaust. The heart of darkness is the rubber claw

selecting a scalpel in antiseptic light, the hills of children’s shoes outside the chimneys, the tinkling nickel instruments on the white altar…79

In Walcott’s sense, the too brief scene six in the slave hold should be the “heart of darkness” for the African-American Brutus Jones. It is not because he has been forced to see himself as the negative reflection of whiteness. Thus even if O’Neill’s choice of Brutus Jones aims toward universalism and a common core of shared human sensibility and intelligence, a racialized sense of cultural difference remains visible in the character’s too-swift return to a misplaced “horror” on the banks of the Congo.

3. Conclusion(s)

To avoid misunderstanding, I find The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape to be among O’Neill’s greatest plays, and two of the most important plays of the US theater of the twentieth century. It’s a large claim, but no other plays cut as swiftly or as deeply to the cerebral cortex of the American experience–“the sickness of our time”—as the product of the toxic and unresolved issues of slavery and racial-ethnic difference and, linked at the hip, the cultural arrogance of imperial desire and the greed of investment capitalism. Expressionistic in form, they take major steps toward the dialectical fragmentation of form that characterizes Brecht’s Epic Theater and link the experimental impulses of the late nineteen-tens and early nineteen-twenties with the resurgence of radical theater and performance forms in the US from the nineteen-sixties onward. Whether crocodiles or gorillas, African-American dialect or the clanking, rough, and repetitive speech of the stokehole, both plays challenge the creativity of contemporary directors and actors.

This essay only examines the challenges in The Emperor Jones. Unlike Langston Hughes in The Emperor of Haiti (1930), about Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first emperor, Trinidadian C.L.R. James in Toussaint Louverture (1934; as well as his historical study The Black Jacobins, 1938), Derek Walcott in his early play Henri Christophe (1948), and Aimé Césaire in The Tragedy of King Christophe (1968), O’Neill portrays a more imperial notion of the existing social and political conditions of the Caribbean. In his defense, the cultural imaginary of the United States viewed Haiti (and possibly the rest of the Caribbean), then invaded and occupied, as wild and ungovernable. Given those circumstances, audiences accepted that an ex-Pullman porter and escaped convict could arrive there (or a similar Caribbean space) with nothing and climb rapidly to the post of emperor.

Yet The Emperor Jones departed radically and dynamically from the conventionality of the New York stage of the era to be equaled only by O’Neill’s other experimental plays of the nineteen-twenties. The brash visceral image of the kinesthetic disrobing of a black male body marks the scene-by-scene action of the play. Thus by performing Brutus Jones, Charles Gilpin, and later Paul Robeson, assumed iconic stature, in a theatrical context, not unlike that of boxer Jack Johnson a decade earlier, when he defeated Jim Jeffries in the prize-fighting ring. For that reason, perhaps, even with the passage of time an unprecedented dignity resides untarnished in Jones’ character. The sense of indictment also still rings true: all of Jones’ attitudes and beliefs, his sense of American superiority, as well as his fear of his African past, reflect a system of cultural oppression—the “imperial fiction” of Walcott’s description—that transcends the limitations of language and the Eurocentric vision that portrays the Caribbean and Caribbeans as primitive, uncivilized, and ungovernable.

The Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones, the most notable production of the play, perhaps of any O’Neill play, of the past two decades, began performances in 1993 and crisscrossed the globe until 2009. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, the staging features Kate Valk, a European-American woman in blackface, acting the role of the escaped African-American convict-cum-emperor on a West Indian island. Valk’s completely black face harkens back to minstrelsy, when even dark-skinned performers fully blackened their faces, or to New Orleans Mardi Gras crews such as King Zulu that cover natural skin tones with deeper black and contrasting white eyes, or to the cross-dressed (men as women) Locas of Caribbean carnival traditions who use black shoe polish to further darken their skin. Her dress is not Napoleonic or lodge regalia but a dress: an elaborate multi-colored, multi-layered jumper or Kabuki kimono of sorts that also resembles the dress of the Pitchy-Patchy character of Jamaican Jonkonnu. She dances with Smithers, a male performer who wears similar attire, in the opening scene and at intervals throughout the play. Perhaps more important, Valk speaks all the lines as written—“dis,” “dem,” “dat” included—with an astounding vocal-tonal and interpretive range that combines the facial antics and gestures of minstrelsy, a ringing falsetto, chanting, guffaws, and the guttural rasping of survival against overwhelming odds. It creates tragedy and then farce, as Marx would have it, or vice versa, as Dario Fo might have it, but both at the same time. This process, according to Charles Isherwood, “transform[s] Brutus Jones into a flailing doll being yanked toward destruction by unseen hands. That Ms. Valk is somehow able to infuse this artfully outlandish performance with a poignant sense of entrapped humanity is remarkable. In fact it’s nothing short of sorcery.”80

Does this post-Brechtian “deconstruction” save or destroy The Emperor Jones? In the Wooster Group production the play becomes play, a metaphorical space of signification in which the character’s fantasies and dreams—much like Makak’s in Dream on Monkey Mountain—have meaning without requiring precise correlatives in social and historical reality. On the one hand, the distancing or “alienation effect” created by a woman performer with a hyper-blackened face conflates race and gender and aligns Jones’ acceptance and reproduction of oppression with similar issues of patriarchy and women’s rights. On the other hand, the construction of Brutus Jones as a product of systemic brutalization reassumes centrality in the universal form that O’Neill originally intended but only partially achieved because of the racialized sense of difference that still characterizes the “heart of darkness” of American society.

O’Neill’s experimental plays such as The Emperor Jones invite such creative intervention to unearth and re-enact the inner-tension of the competing oral-scribal and visual-kinesthetic texts of an astonishingly complex theatrical palimpsest that mirrors the synaptic structure and flaws of contemporary American life.