the emperor awakens
by Douglas Messerli
Eugene O’Neill The Emperor Jones / performed by The Wooster Group in a video of
1999, stage performances in Hong Kong and Chicago in 2009, and early
work-in-progress performances in New York from 1992
It will be hard for many
theater-goers, surely, to watch any version today of Eugene O’Neill’s early
success, The Emperor Jones. Not only
is the central figure, Brutus Jones, presented as a vain and foolish black who
has temporarily hood-winked the citizens of a Caribbean country, but he speaks
in a dialect right out of minstrelsy, that uses the “n” word too many times to
count. The first few sentences out of Jones’ mouth says it all:
Who dare whistle dat way in my
palace? Who dare
wake up de Emperor? I'll get de
hide frayled off some
o' you niggers sho!
The Wooster Group production from
the 1990s and the early years of the new century, at least saved its audiences
from having to spend an hour with this wincingly painful language coming out of
the mouth of black man; in their production, a woman, Kate Valk, plays Jones.
But she does so, dressed in a garish imitation of a Japanese emperor’s robe
like something out of The Mikado,
while in blackface.
It’s almost as if Wooster director, Elizabeth LeCompte, were taunting
the liberal and conservative correct-thinking fates. Surely the NEA critics of
Reagan’s day might have had a hissy-fit if they’d seen this show.
Miraculously, however, the Wooster group and Kate Valk, in particular,
have created a work that not only questions the very values of O’Neill’s
original, but that actually touches both our intellects and our hearts,
partially restoring the intentions of O’Neill’s original. By layering the
various levels of white bigotry that has made Brutus Jones such a
self-destructive being, we discover his real humanity sometimes hidden by both
the original text and the theatrical interpretations of such a figure. Valk
majestically takes on this character with all the crazed enthusiasm of the
characters in Jean Genet’s The Blacks,
and in her interchanges with the sometimes garbled video presentation of “his”
white “partner,” Smithers (William Dafoe in the video version and Scott
Shepherd and Ari Fliakos in staged versions) speaking an equally exaggerated
British brogue that presents him as a kind of Japanese-inspired pirate, Jones
reveals his knowledge that any royalty bequeathed him is only temporary.
The decision to have Jones played,
accordingly, by a woman in blackface is brilliant in its Brechtian positing of
that character. But to successfully navigate the obvious pitfalls of the
language you need the brilliance of someone like Valk.
Hooting (“Hah-Hah-Hah,” in seeming imitation of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire) and hollering,
by turns; seriously terrified by his fate and comically mocking his whole
ridiculous “reign,” the Emperor of this work runs the gambit of emotional
expressions. Valk is at once a peacock and a wide-eyed child-on-the-run,
terrified of being caught and lynched. His own myth, that he can be killed only
with a silver bullet, makes him a kind of vampire, which, in fact, he has been
playing, sucking the blood from his own kind.
If Valk’s performance, as Charles
Isherwood, has argued in The New York
Times is legendary, she is supported fortunately by excellent company
actors in Dafoe, Shepard and the multi-gifted Fliakos, but by the memorable
costumes and the delicious score of composter David Linton..
LeCompte’s eccentric direction is not to be ignored. It’s hard to
explain it, but a short dance by the Emperor and his hit-man Smithers, in which
they enact a kind of synchronized Kabuki mime, brought tears to my eyes. The
Samurai-like warrior clearly is courting his (female-male) Emperor. Even the
stage-extra figure, controlling the rolling executive chair of the Emperor’s
throne, later gets into the act
The video, which I watched was first shown, apparently, in 1999. But the
same DVD contains performances from 2009 at Chicago’s Goodman Theater and the
Hong Kong Arts Festival, as well as early work-in-progress performances at The
Performing Garage in October 1992. I preferred the taped performances to
Christopher Kondek and Elizabeth LeCompte’s video. Both the Goodman Theater and
Hong Kong performances were wonderful, but perhaps because of the needs of the
audience, Valk more clearly enunciated her words in the Hong Kong performance,
giving the role much more clarity. But perhaps, having by then seen so many
versions, I simply heard it with more comprehension. Seeing this production so
many times, however, is a reward for anyone truly interested in American
theater.
Los Angeles, March 13, 2016
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2016).
