This is a perplexing one. I liked this show very much but more for its performative elements than what I took away from it, which is to say that I loved sitting through it but not sure what the actual text in the play added up to.
"The Emperor Jones," by Eugene O'Neill, is about a black American man who escapes prison and flees to an island where, having convinced the natives that he's supernatural, he exploits them and amasses a fortune. It opened to rave reviews in 1920 and Paul Robeson starred in the 1924 revival. Eventually, it lost favor -- I don't know if that's because audiences began to think of it as racist or because it didn't hold up well.
The Wooster Group's production is truncated. There are only three characters: Jones, a tradesman, and someone who repositions the set and props and occasionally dances with them. From this production, I don't have a good sense of what the play in its entirety might be. It left me with an impression of the play rather than a knowledge of the script. My sense of it is that it's a play about an oppressed man who, when given the chance, oppresses others, suggesting that anyone who has access to power is capable of corrupting it. In this case, a black man in Jim Crow America goes to the Caribbean and oppresses other blacks. Like so many other Western imperialists, he uses the natives' belief in the supernatural to make them afraid and bend to his will. As his day of reckoning comes, however, his past returns in the shape of a "haunt" and destroys him. It's a true enough thing but is presented so succinctly here that I never had a chance to watch the argument develop.
All of this, of course, takes a back seat to the performative aspects of this production. The lead is played by a white woman in blackface. The tradesman, Smithers, is in kabuki costume. Everything about this productio is deconstructed. The set is bare and its machinations are laid bare for the audience: you see the sound guy you and see the guy arranging the props. He even participates in the action of the play, as if to point out that what happens backstage is indeed a part of a play. The lead's acting and movement are impressive. So is Smithers'. Both have amazing control of their voice and accents. They're incredibly expressive despite the extreme stylization of their accents. Jones' especially leaves an impression because she's imitating our mainstream culture's image what what Black vernacular sounds like (this is the way O'neill wrote his dialogue).
The blackface creates what seems like a never ending series of references that all turn in on one another. Rather than having a black actor play that role, is the Wooster Group suggesting that underneath all such oppression perpetrated by African Americans is a white person (African American slaves who owned other slaves, for example)? Or is this white woman in blackface pointing to O'Neill's authorship of the play and standing in for him- a white man criticizing oppression perpetrated by Arican Americans? The lead characer might be black but behind his crimes is the authorship of white O'Neill. Or does the blackface, like the kabuki, merely point out the layers of masks that we wear, as people and as performers? Or, is it there just to make us uncomfortable?
Even going into this performance knowing that the lead would be in blackface, one is caught offguard by it. One is incredibly uncomfortable at first but that discomfort begins to subsize after a while. In the end, what I think the blackface does is to accuse any white audience member of the continuing existence of the difference between the white "subject" and the colored "other." At the time that this play was a critical and commercial success, I suspect that it was largely seen by whites (though it did provide work for a lot of black actors and continues to do so) who got to look at the problem from a far and have opinions that made no difference in bringing about positive change for the people the natives of this island might represent. Implicit in this is a criticism that those black actors might as well have been white actors in blackface meant to entertain a primarily white audience. As one sits through this production as part of a laregley white audience, one has to wonder how blacks would experience this. Would you be comfortable if your black friends were sitting next to you in the audience? Or, maybe more to the point, is this something you think blacks could ever be comfortable sitting through? And if they would not, why are you sitting there?
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