Over 15 years of critical and popular acclaim in Europe and the US

“Riveting, haunting, altogether astonishing” The New York Times

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New York-based The Wooster Group, “one of the finest, richest, most fascinating theater companies of our time” (The New York Times), is known for its radical stagings of classical texts. Its production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones premiered in 1993 and over the following 15 years received critical and popular acclaim throughout the US and Europe. O'Neill's play tells the story of Brutus Jones, a black railroad porter and prison convict turned monarch of a West Indies island. Confronted with revolution, he flees from the natives he has exploited; during his escape his past haunts him and ultimately leads to his doom.

The Emperor Jones was long considered problematic and virtually unplayable, but The Wooster Group's interpretation successfully relocates the play in a contemporary context while holding on to the dark qualities that first unsettled audiences in the 1920s. 

Elizabeth LeCompte's striking production features a Bessie and OBIE award winning cast, unusual props, unique voice projection and dynamic sound effects that work mysteriously with the performers to create a haunting drama.

The Empress Jones
The Wooster Group plays with race and gender in O’Neill’s early work.

by Hilton Als

Imagine this: Your mother is a junkie and your father is a broken-down actor. You are reared in an atmosphere of deception and artifice. You have an older brother who, in an attempt to win your father’s alternately hard and sentimental heart, tries to become an actor too. What he lacks in ambition he makes up for in bitterness, guilt and drink. You write poetry that owes a great deal to Baudelaire. You are drawn to the sea, which for a time, at least, allows you to cast off the angry ghosts you call your family and whose tainted blood is your own. You leave home, first for Central America, then for South America, first for one wife and then for another, and another. There are children—testaments less to your urge to procreate than to your desire to establish a model family that does not include your parents or your brother. Wives, children, security: each, in the end, is a mere buoy in the great salt sea of your imagination.

Our country’s premier poet of the water, the New York-born playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) confined a number of his doomed, anxious characters to boats and islands — relatively small spaces that not only serve the dramatic tension that is a hallmark of his style but also lend a mournful edge to his characters’ monologues, the best of which sound like songs sung by landlocked sailors. Equal to O’Neill’s fascination with the sea is his obsession with masks. He uses them not just as props but as shields with which his characters defend the illusions they have piled up in the effort to become themselves.

Race, too, can be a kind of mask. In the Wooster Group’s current production of O’Neill’s 1920 expressionistic The Emperor Jones, the astonishing Kate Valk plays the title character—“a tall, powerfully built, full-blooded negro of middle age” — in blackface. Formerly a Pullman porter, Brutus Jones travels to an unnamed island in the Caribbean as a stowaway; he becomes the island’s “Emperor” when some “bush niggers” see him dodge a bullet in a showdown with another man—an escape that they attribute to his magical powers. In fact, the power that Jones is most interested in is economic. To Smithers, a cowardly colonialist who envies his success, Jones says, “Dere’s little stealin’ like you does, and dere’s big stealin’ like I does.” He goes on:

For de little stealin’ dey gets you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’ dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks. (Reminiscently) If dey’s one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman ca’s listenin’ to de white quality talk, it’s dat same fact. And when I gits a chance to use it I winds up Emperor in two years.

Created when segregation, not to mention lynching, was still in effect, Brutus Jones survives as a black man by listening to “white quality talk” and learning to oppress blacks himself. On the island, he is no longer the hunted; he’s a gatherer of prey.

Nowhere in the definitive 1962 biography O’Neill do the authors, Arthur and Barbara Gelb, indicate that their subject was especially attuned to black life in America. (The most realistic black character in O’Neill’s oeuvre is Joe Mott, in the 1939 play The Iceman Cometh.) But we do know that O’Neill was particularly taken with the marginalized—with the detritus washed up on the shores of the sea of life. This interest is what the director of The Emperor Jones, Elizabeth LeCompte, focuses on here. By casting Valk in the title role, instead of, say, Jeffrey Wright, she adds another dimension to the play; she equates the female with the black outsider, and she allows Valk to embody the two central themes of American drama: sex and race. By mercilessly exploiting language that the NAACP would find incendiary now—Valk speaks in a different register as she pronounces the “des”, “dems”, and “dats” that pepper Jones’s speech—LeCompte also addresses the long-standing controversy surrounding the text. Charles Gilpin was the first Brutus Jones, when the play premiered, at the Playwrights’ Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1920. By all accounts, Gilpin was a gifted actor, but he drank. The titanic Paul Robeson stepped into the role in 1924, as part of a package with O’Neill’s interracial, bourgeois-minded drama All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Robeson was reportedly disturbed by what he perceived as racism in The Emperor Jones. (W. E. B. Du Bois did not share his view; he wrote, at the time, that O’Neill was “bursting through” black stereotypes onstage and giving the audience “Negro blood.”) However, Robeson needed work, and roles for black actors were scarce; his performance in New York and in a London production was likely one of those little soul murders that many black actors must withstand if they’re to work at all. LeCompte doesn’t comment on the racism of O’Neill’s language or ideas by underlining them with a strident moral stance. Instead, in ways that are both brave and sweetly foolhardy, she makes it clear that Brutus Jones is a white man’s idea of a Negro. Along the way, she wrests a great performance from Valk, which is, in some sense, an homage to the many black actors before and since Robeson who have had to perform “blackness” in order to be seen.

Replacing the costume that O’Neill proposed for Jones—“light blue uniform coat, sprayed with brass buttons, heavy gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold braid on the collar, cuffs, etc.”—with African-and Asian-inspired robes, LeCompte treats The Emperor Jones as a monologue of sorts, excising entire passages from O’Neill’s text. Seated in a wheelchair, with microphone in hand, and Smithers and two tiny palm trees behind her, Valk pays no attention to the technicians who are onstage to her right, projecting images overhead. She talks and talks, barely shifting in her chair. She conveys Jones’s rage, wit and wiles mostly through her voice and her eyes, the whites of which are made all the whiter by the thick black make-up that coats her face like a minstrel-show nightmare. From time to time, Valk stretches her red lips in an exaggerated grimace. It’s a shock to see her at first. The full historical horror of her presentation is heightened by Smithers’s snide voice (he’s the more “female” character here) and by the distant music and electronic beeps that punctuate Jones’s speech—a stand-in for the drumbeats that pursue Jones as he tries to escape across the island after hearing that the “natives” are planning an uprising against him. In a sense, Valk plays Jones as a politician: her stentorian voice and posture recall those advocates of ideology we once believed in. And her fate, like that of many of the politicians who fail us, is decided at the hands of the people. When a red blotch is drawn across Valk’s white shirtfront, the gesture speaks louder than all the words that have cascaded from her mouth.

LeCompte’s condensed version of The Emperor Jones, which lasts a shattering 60 minutes, acts as a kind of coda to the Wooster Group’s controversial 1981 show Route 1 & 9. In that piece, most of the actors appeared in blackface and used routines that were made famous on the chitlin’ circuit as a jumping-off point for their improvisations (one of which involved ordering from a fried-chicken take-out place). After the premiere of Route 1 & 9, the National Endowment for the Arts revoked the Wooster Group’s funding. And one can see why: the Group’s audience is largely white. Were the actors making fun of blacks, or just crapping on the artistically limited notion of political correctness? Watching video clips of that performance, one misses the sad irony that LeCompte brings to this production. Here she poses the question: Minstrel shows, avant-garde theatre, is there a difference? And can we not learn from both elements of the American theatrical tradition? Just as the Playwrights’ Theatre provided a home for O’Neill’s early work, the Wooster Group provides a home for its contemporary interpretation. In the end, their version of the work is not so different from O’Neill’s: they show us the sea of deception and pretense we all swim in, while searching for the self that is waiting there at the water’s edge, if only we could see it.

Reproduced with permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd., London on behalf of Copyright © Hilton Als, 2006. This piece originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Hilton Als is currently a theatre critic for The New Yorker. He has been a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe.