Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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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.
Chapter 3
The Emperor Jones
A Play by Eugene O’Neill
Written: 1920.
Produced by the Provincetown Players: 1920.
Produced by the Wooster Group: 1993 & 2006.
Characters
Brutus Jones: Emperor
Henry Smithers:A Cockney Trader
An Old Native Woman
Lem: A Native Chief
Soldiers: Adherents of Lem
The Little Formless Fears
Jeff
The Negro Convicts
The Prison Guard
The Planters
The Auctioneer
The Slaves
The Congo Witch-Doctor
The Crocodile God
Scenes
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.
Scene I: In the palace of the Emperor Jones. Afternoon.
Scene II: The edge of the Great Forest. Dusk.
Scene III: In the Forest. Night.
Scene IV: In the Forest. Night.
Scene V: In the Forest. Night.
Scene VI: In the Forest. Night.
Scene VII: In the Forest. Night.
Scene VIII: Same as Scene Two—the edge of the Great Forest. Dawn.
ACT I
Scene I
The audience chamber in the palace of the Emperor—a spacious, high-ceilinged room with bare, whitewashed walls. The floor is of white tiles. In the rear, to the left of center, a wide archway giving out on a portico with white pillars. The palace is evidently situated on high ground for beyond the portico nothing can be seen but a vista of distant hills, their summits crowned with thick groves of palm trees. In the right wall, center, a smaller arched doorway leading to the living quarters of the palace. The room is bare of furniture with the exception of one huge chair made of uncut wood which stands at center, its back to rear. This is very apparently the Emperor’s throne. It is painted a dazzling, eye-smiting scarlet. There is a brilliant orange cushion on the seat and another smaller one is placed on the floor to serve as a footstool. Strips of matting, dyed scarlet, lead from the foot of the throne to the two entrances.
It is late afternoon but the sunlight still blazes yellowly beyond the portico and there is an oppressive burden of exhausting heat in the air.
As the curtain rises, a native negro woman sneaks in cautiously from the entrance on the right. She is very old, dressed in cheap calico, bare-footed, a red bandana handkerchief covering all but a few stray wisps of white hair. A bundle bound in colored cloth is carried over her shoulder on a stick. She hesitates beside the doorway, peering back as if in extreme dread of being discovered. Then she begins to glide noiselessly, a step at a time, toward the doorway in the rear. At this moment, Smithers appears beneath the portico.
Smithers is 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. The tropics have tanned his naturally pasty face with its small, sharp features to a sickly yellow, and native rum has painted his pointed nose to a startling red. His little, washy-blue eyes are red-rimmed and dart about him like a ferret’s. His expression is one of unscrupulous meanness, cowardly and dangerous. He is dressed in a worn riding suit of dirty white drill, puttees, spurs, and wears a white cork helmet. A cartridge belt with an automatic revolver is around his waist. He carries a riding whip in his hand. He sees the woman and stops to watch her suspiciously. Then, making up his mind, he steps quickly on tiptoe into the room. The woman, looking back over her shoulder continually, does not see him until it is too late. When she does Smithers springs forward and grabs her firmly by the shoulder. She struggles to get away, fiercely but silently.
SMITHERS: [tightening his grasp—roughly] Easy! None o’ that, me birdie. You can’t wriggle out now I got me ‘ooks on yer.
WOMAN: [seeing the uselessness of struggling, gives way to frantic terror, and sinks to the ground, embracing his knees supplicatingly] No tell him! No tell him, Mister!
SMITHERS: [with great curiosity] Tell ‘im? [then scornfully] Oh, you mean ‘is bloomin’ Majesty. What’s the gaime, any’ow? What you sneakin’ away for? Been stealin’ a bit, I s’pose. [He taps her bundle with his riding whip significantly.]
WOMAN: [shaking her head vehemently] No, me no steal.
SMITHERS: Bloody liar! But tell me what’s up. There’s somethin’ funny goin’ on. I smelled it in the air first thing I got up this mornin’. You blacks are up to some devilment. This palace of ‘is is like a bleedin’ tomb. Where’s all the ‘ands? [The woman keeps sullenly silent. Smithers raises his whip threateningly.] Ow, yer won’t, won’t yer? I’ll show yer what’s what.
WOMAN: [coweringly] I tell, Mister. You no hit. They go—all go. [She makes a sweeping gesture toward the hills in the distance.]
SMITHERS: Run away—to the ‘ills?
WOMAN: Yes, Mister. Him Emperor—Great Father. [She touches her forehead to the floor with a quick mechanical jerk.] Him sleep after eat. Then they go—all go. Me old woman. Me left only. Now me go too.
SMITHERS: [His astonishment giving way to an immense, mean satisfaction]