Personal Theatrical Musings on Performances

Monday, January 12, 2009

"The Emperor Jones" by the Wooster Group at the Goodman Theatre on January 10 in Chicago


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?

Sunday, January 11, 2009

?Macbeth" at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on January 9, 2009


One of my favorite scenes in CST's new production of "Macbeth" is one in which Macduff's cousin comes to tell him that his family has been murdered. In the scene, the stage is bare. Macduff and Malcolm (the murdered's king's son who has fled to England) are strategizing when the news comes. The cousin who delivers the news is heavy hearted and sad as is Malcolm in hearing it. Macduff, as you might imagine, is devastated. I've seen this scene done a number of times and mostly seen it played unconvincingly as shock followed by sadness. in those instances, it feels like a scene intended only to deliver a bit of news that the audience needs to know. In this production, I saw moments of sadness that were very convincing. As the same time, even in this one scene, it went in and out of being convincing.

For me, all of "Macbeth" was like this. There were moments when what was happening on stage was unusually well done and authentic and times when actors seemed merely to be speaking their lines in ways that they think they're to be spoken. Karen Aldridge, who continues to wow me as an actor, gave a fantastic performance as Lady Macbeth. In her fist scene, in which Macbeth returns from victory, she is turned on by his new acquisition of power and gives him quite a loving. The connection between power and sexual excitement is established and Lady Macbeth's later taunting of Macbeth for not being a "man" when he shies away from murder for the sake of power makes more sense than I've seen it in most other productions. Or at least brings a different dimension to it. The "out, out, damn spot" scene is sad and scary. In the hands of Aldridge this scene feels fresh, like something I hadn't seen in quite that way before.

Macbeth is far less convincing. The actor, Ben Carlson, has a fine pedigree (having performaed a lot at the famous Shaw festival) and is, I assume, a very good actor. His performance here, however, wasn't careful enough. So much of this play is overwrought with emottion and here played at such a high pitch that there seems to be no nuance in the delivery of lines. Carlson is a steamroller. Macbeth's feelings about what he's doing shifts around constantly, from fear to anger to paranoia to happiness to fear to anger to paranoia, and this is not carefully tracked in Carlson's performence. Macbeth, of course, has the famous soliloguy about sound and fury signifying nothing and Carlson delivers it in a flat staccato that almost gets thre but never does. Smartly, he slows it down but doesn't bring meaning to the lines as convincingly. Compared to the almost equally famous Lady Macbeth's "out, out, damn spot" lines, his delivery was much less convincing.

When the play opened, the stage was a stark grey. I thought that might mean a production in which bells and whistles would give way to a careful treatment of the text. Thirty seconds into the play, though, I realized that wasn't going to be true. The art design is largely grey and black and takes its cue from S&M and seedy club culture. At times, this works very well. As the play opens, though, the voices of the three withches are electronically layered and echoed so that I couldn't understand what they were saying. Later in the show, though, when lady Macbeth is losing her mind she thinks she sees the bodies of Lady Macduff and her children hanging bloody. Light momentarily illuminate the bodies hanging upside down high at the back of the stage for a quick moment and it sends shivers up your spine. The contrast between the start grey and white of the set and this small spot of reds and pinks is effective. There are times when the stage effects of the production detract from the script and times when they enhance it.

All of this is to say that what happens is often exciting but also inconsistent. The direction never brings the elements of the production into a cohesive whole. There is a lot I liked a lot about this production and much that left me flat. The ideas in it work very well at times and there are times when the production has such integrity that I wish more care had been taken. having said all that, I liked it more than most straight productions of "Macbeth" I've ever seen.