Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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move even further from his own. In addition, the whole production apparatus, including the director and potentially a whole range of contributing artists working on scenery, lighting, sound, costumes, and so on, will provide yet other views of reality and fresh “voices” in the articulation of the produced play.24
New contexts always create, according to Carlson, a “fresh perspective on an inherited expression, the play and its performance tradition.”25 Yet performance contexts, which can include a different time period than that of the dramatic text and/or radically different approaches to theater-making, vary widely, as do the levels of “freshness”—or staleness, as the case may be—of productions of the same play. Thus, one must distinguish conventional productions, those that attempt to reproduce the (often realistic) play in ways intended by the author (and genre), from more experimental work that opens up interpretive possibilities. Experimental theater companies such as the Wooster Group, for example, will often foreground (rather than conceal) theater’s signifying processes in order to complicate dramatic representation, which is never as simple or transparent as many spectators assume.
Dramatic realism, on the other hand, limits a production’s ability to help audiences gain new insights. Rather than creating a performative environment that explores and makes visible the dialectical tension between past and present, actor and character, realism smooths over such tensions while helping to perpetuate the (apparently stable and thus unchangable) status quo. Indeed, realistic dramatic form, even moreso than a work’s content—radical or otherwise—encourages the audience to continue seeing theater, and thus the world, through the lens of hegemonic ideology. As Elin Diamond points out, “Brechtian hindsight” enables us to see that traditional realism
mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guaranator of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of the world.26
Paraphrasing Derrida, Diamond suggests that realism “is mimesis at its most naive—its positivist moment.”27
Revivifying Early O’Neill:
The Postmodern Turn
In order to circumvent realism’s aesthetic and ideological limitations, a contemporary theater company could, like the Wooster Group, radically undermine a dramatic work’s realistic conventions. Such a move could, according to Michael Vanden Heuvel in his book on experimental theater, help to
revivify traditional textuality by incorporating avant-garde idioms and performance strategies as a language within the dramatic text, an idiom appropriate to the theatricalized and transformational sensibilities of the present day.28
Or a theater company could begin with an already experimental text which, due to its “avant-garde idioms,” offers greater potential in itself for the destabilization of conventional representation and thinking. Unsurprisingly, the Wooster Group has—as suggested above—been drawn to O’Neill’s early, more experimental works, which they’ve presented without inserting other written scripts into the plays (as they are wont to do), or radically cutting-up the original, although the Wooster Group still subverts realistic elements and traces that these plays contain.
The Wooster Group productions that utilize more or less realistic texts—such as L.S.D.: Just the High Points, brief sections of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or, in Routes 1 & 9, parts of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, as well as the previously discussed Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Point Judith)—usually feature only brief, cut-up samples of those texts, which the company radically juxtaposes with other texts and performance forms while imploding illusionistic conventions. O’Neill’s early texts such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape—much more theatrical than realistic—remain more amenable, “as-is,” to innovative theater productions, which could help to explain why the Wooster Group has chosen to present those plays, unlike the more realistic plays they’ve worked on, in their entirety.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that these plays can be simply put onstage, unembellished by revivifying performance strategies, in the twenty-first century. The Emperor Jones, for example, features an African-American protagonist, Brutus Jones, whose language—which dominates the play—is sometimes not far removed from turn-of-the-century blackface minstrelsy. Rather than alter the written text, however, the Wooster Group altered how the text was performed by having Kate Valk, a white, female performer, play Brutus Jones. While Valk’s race and gender destabilized conventions of realistic representation, any claims to “authenticity” implied by the dramatic text were further subverted by Valk’s onstage appearance, which included blackface make-up, her neck painted red, and a colorful, clearly non-Western costume from the highly stylized Japanese theater form of Kabuki.
Surprisingly, at least for me, Valk did not see the Emperor’s dialogue as being at all problematic. During a 2013 interview (published in chapter seven), she told me that she’s widely read in African-American literature, of which she’s very fond—she especially likes Zora Neale Hurston’s work—and she views Jones’ language as a “white man’s take,” which she nonetheless finds to be both musical and highly poetic. Positively responding to the play’s dialogue upon first reading the role aloud with the Wooster Group, Valk found the Emperor’s words to be “like an aural hallucination. It was like music to me,” she recalled. Additionally, she experienced a strong attraction to Jones himself: “I felt it deeply that I had to play that character… There was no distance; it was me the first time I read it.” I still assumed, however, that she might have altered some of the dialogue, but when I asked her if she had adhered to O’Neill’s script, she was taken aback: “Of course!” she responded. “It’s like notes of music. Why would I try to play Bach and generalize?”
Surely, Valk’s intimate, even passionate connection to the character and the play’s language had much to do with her tour-de-force performance and the show’s critical acclaim. At the same time, however, the various production elements—such as Valk’s blackface (along with her white, unpainted hands), her non-Western Kabuki costume and Kabuki-like dances, the microphone through which she continually spoke, and the play’s overall mise-en-scène influenced by Kabuki and Noh theater, as well as her gender and race—distanced and undermined realistic conventions of representation by displaying the tensions between Valk and her character, performance and the written script. Additionally, the play’s distancing elements allowed the spectator to partake, like Valk herself, in the pleasure of O’Neill’s text, which would surely be more painful than pleasurable should it be performed today without distancing devices that help the spectator to appreciate the writing, and even blackface performance, as artistic constructions rather than merely as (problematic) attempts at “authentic” representation.
One could also view the Wooster Group’s complex blackface aesthetic, which the company has utilized for other productions, too, most notably Routes 1 & 9, as a way of foregrounding the unpresentable, a perspective that would align the company’s production of The Emperor Jones with a concept of postmodernism developed by Jean-François Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that the postmodern
puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.29
While the playing of Brutus Jones in blackface could be read as a “bad form” in “bad taste,” the sordid history often associated with blackface minstrelsy could short-circuit, in the audience, potential collective feelings of nostalgia for the past. Ironically, however, Valk’s brand of blackface performance—played with impressive artistry by a woman in a strange-looking robe, speaking into a microphone on a stand—helps to distance and thus make palatable, and even enjoyable, O’Neill’s seemingly unpresentable dialogue. Moreover, the virtuoso, Obie Award-winning actor Valk—who understands O’Neill’s writing sensuously, as an artist who performs it night after night in front of an audience—strongly believes that the dialogue possesses powerful aesthetic value. And her assertion seems to be supported by the numerous laudatory reviews