Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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presence (a white women in blackface and Kabuki attire playing a black man written by a white dramatist), makes it difficult, if not impossible, to judge the play in conventional ways. According to Lyotard, such resistance to judgment is common within the work of the postmodern artist:
the text he [or she] writes, the work he [or she] produces [or performs] are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work.30
The antithesis of dramatic realism and its apparently stable, ideologically secure referents, postmodern performance resists simple categorization.
A primary means of destabilizing categories, which brings us back to Brecht, is the use of quotation that interrupts and short-circuits conventional, taken-for-granted processes of signification. As Walter Benjamin observes in “What Is Epic Theater?”: “interruption…is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context.”31 Through Valk’s highly stylized, blackface-Kabuki presentation that undermines the play’s normally stable referents, her performance acts as a continual quotation device which interrupts the conventional context(s) of O’Neill’s play, including its presumed claims to “authenticity,” as well as other conventional/constructed contexts, such as gender, race, and even blackface minstrelsy itself.
Thus, unlike the written script of O’Neill’s drama, or even a new-yet-conventional production of The Emperor Jones, the Wooster Group’s performative deployment of quotation is able to set aside, in a way (within quotation marks, but without erasing), the play’s and the production’s more negative aspects while enabling spectators to appreciate other elements of the work, including, especially, Valk’s performance. At the same time, the production’s numerous ironies and its undercutting of empathy strongly encourage the spectator to think, actively, although perhaps in less directed ways than Brecht’s epic theater, in order to find meaning within a performance whose carnivalesque excess upends and complicates so many familiar rules and categories. In fact, “those rules and categories are what the work of art itself [and thus the audience] is looking for.”32
Characters Adrift: Drama of the Inarticulate
While the expressionistic bookends of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape remain the best known of O’Neill’s early experimental plays, his dramatic innovations that will forever alter American drama begin with his earlier, one-act “sea plays” of the nineteen-tens, often referred to as the S.S. Glencairn Plays (and presented by the Wooster Group/New York City Players as Early Plays). Eschewing the prevalent exclamatory language of the stage of the period, O’Neill achieves a breakthrough for American drama—which had long been considered derivative of European drama and decidedly second-rate—by creating characters whose language is, unlike his own, “low colloquial.” Up until that time, low “vernacular language [on the stage] was used entirely for comic purposes.”33 But with Bound East for Cardiff (written 1914; produced 1916)—the piece which first excited the Provincetown Players about working with the then-unknown dramatist—O’Neill begins to utilize low-colloquial language in ways that will reinvigorate American playwriting. As Jean Chothia observes,
O’Neill finds in the speech of the uneducated man a model through which he can show unaccommodated man locked in to himself but unsure, because of the limitations of the communicative faculty, of what the self is… He uses an individual’s inarticulacy to explore the wider inarticulacies of the human condition.34
O’Neill’s motley, international crew of sailors forever adrift at sea, as well as his searching protagonists of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, embody, through their fragmented, slang-filled language, inarticulate ways of being, as well as the difficulty of making sense of an increasingly complex, modern world. Thanks, in large part, to his early plays populated by stammering, inarticulate, lumpen-proletarian anti-heroes, O’Neill is largely responsible for creating, by the mid-ninteen-twenties, an American stage that is “changed beyond recognition.”35
Although O’Neill’s dramatic dialogue would utilize more standard forms of American English after The Hairy Ape, the playwright remained aware that he could never quite master such language, in spite of his efforts. In a frequently cited passage, Edmund, young O’Neill’s stand-in in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, laments to his father in the drawing room of their New London, Connnecticut home that he lacks facility with poetic language:
The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do.36
Unsurprisingly, and in spite of the dramatic power of O’Neill’s more inarticulate characters, critics often view this passage as a confession by the playwright which, in turn, supports their assertions that O’Neill can’t write effective dialogue. Yet the playwright, unlike Edmond, believed that a writer’s limitations with language were more related to the historical moment than to personal shortcomings. O’Neill wrote in a letter to Arthur Hobson Quinn, for example, that his play Mourning Becomes Electra would have been stronger if he had been able to provide it with “a great language.” Such language eluded him, he informed Quinn ten years after The Hairy Ape, because
I haven’t got that. And, by way of self-consolation, I don’t think from the evidence of all that’s being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time. The best one can do is be pathetically eloquent by one’s moving dramatic inarticulations.37
Today, the legacy of O’Neill’s dramaturgy of the inarticulate—especially pronounced in his early works of the nineteen-tens and up through The Hairy Ape—can be found in innovative plays by more recent generations of American dramatists. Since O’Neill is now so fully identified, however, with the relatively articulate dialogue of his late realistic plays, especially Long Day’s Journey Into Night, few theater scholars or artists readily recognize the connections between the low-colloquial dialogue of O’Neill’s early plays that transformed American playwriting “beyond recognition” and later dramas-of-the-inarticulate such as (to name only a few) Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, Shepard’s True West, Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, or Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, whose Stanley Kowalski has much in common with (the more theatrical) Yank, the brutish protagonist of The Hairy Ape.
Epilogue
Although O’Neill is still a major figure of modern drama, the immense diversity of his extensive body of work has been given short shrift. Admittedly, not all of the dramatist’s numerous plays were successful, and some are even—especially by today’s standards—somewhat plodding. Yet O’Neill’s wide-ranging oeuvre—throughout which the dramatist experiments with a myriad of aesthetic strategies, in works from twenty minutes to four-plus hours long that include historical epics, dramas with masks, plays based on myths, Freudian theory, expressionism, philosophy, Greek tragedies, the Bible, and his own life—is, if nothing else, worthy of further exploration, both artistically and scholarly. Unfortunately, however, his great, later works of realism too often overshadow the formal innovations of his early, experimental plays, which—when performatively re-invented by companies such as the Wooster Group—possess the potential to hold the stage effectively, even today.
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