Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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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