On a Far-Away Island
By Martin Harries
The Emperor Jones
By Eugene O'Neill
The Wooster Group at
St. Anne's Warehouse
38 Water St., Brooklyn
Box office: (718) 254-8779
On December 28, 1920, Alexander Woollcott reviewed
The Provincetown Players's The Emperor Jones, which had transferred
from its smaller venue on Macdougal Street to the much larger Selwyn
Theatre: "Of course Charles Gilpin continues to give his amazing and
unforgettable performance as the quondam Pullman car porter turned Emperor
on a far-away island." Now that the Wooster Group's Emperor Jones
has made the move from the Performing Garage in 1998 to St. Ann's Warehouse
in 2006, one can echo Woollcott: "Kate Valk continues to give her amazing
and unforgettable performance as the quondam Pullman car porter turned
Emperor on a far-away island." There are many things to be said about
the differences that this echo conceals, and I have learned much from
reviews of and essays about the 1998 production by Michael Feingold,
Jonathan Kalb, Ben Brantley, and Aoife Monks. These writers are especially
compelling about the ways Valk's highly stylized handling of the role
of Brutus Jones unsettles the complex performance history of O'Neill's
play, a role that helped to establish the career not only of Gilpin
but also of Paul Robeson.
I am especially interested, however, in the way
the last words of Woollcott's sentence still fit: The Wooster Group's
Brutus Jones is also a "quondam Pullman car porter turned Emperor on
a far-away island." Critics have pointed again and again to the ways
this production reveals race to be a masquerade, how Valk's performance,
with its stereotyped minstrel intonations, embodies, in Charles Isherwood's
phrase, "a simulacrum of a stereotype." This Emperor Jones
becomes the theatrical realization of arguments about the performative
nature of race that have roiled the academy and, arguably, been the
basis of mass cultural works from Dave Chappelle skits to Spike Lee's
underrated Bamboozled and onward.
But where is this "far-away island"? The Wooster
Group only continues the erasure of other political contexts that have
marked productions since 1920. O'Neill's text sets the stage with a
remarkable direction describing the location of The Emperor Jones:
"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." Each of these sentences turns on
a paradox: self-determination turns out to be determination by U.S.
military power; "native government" takes a form perfected by the West,
Empire. To emphasize these contradictory formulations is not to suggest
that the Wooster Group continues the tradition of missing O'Neill's
political acumen, but to emphasize that the play is itself not only
a fiercely problematic staging of "race." It is, more narrowly and even
more troublingly, a play about the possibility of African-American self-determination,
a play about politics.
"Playing a man falling prey to atavistic fear
bred in his bones by centuries of history," writes Isherwood, "Ms. Valk
performs with a fearlessness that commands something akin to awe." On
the one hand, O'Neill's stage direction registers deep suspicion of
the idea that occupation by "White Marines" can provide the basis of
self-determination. On the other, the play is the symptomatic expression
of a rather different "atavistic fear": the white fear of black rule.
It is as though The Emperor Jones translates the perceived
political threat of black rule into a tragedy of atavism that decrees
that black self-determination can only be comic.
Valk, speaking to Jones's Cockney sidekick, Smithers
(played the night I attended by Ari Fliakos), intones a passage that
clearly articulates Jones's theory of power:
Dere's little stealin' like you does, and dere's
big stealin' like I does. For de little stealin' dey gits 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.
As in the opening stage direction, the "form
of native government," here, more or less, kleptocracy, turns out to
be a version of what Jones learned while serving as a Pullman porter
and listening to white men talk. Knowledge of the basis of power in
theft becomes the knowledge necessary for seizing power on this unnamed
island. Valk delivers these lines, as she does the whole text, with
the intensely discomfiting intonations of the minstrel show and its
mass cultural successors in radio, film, and television: Amos and Andy
play Papa Doc and Baby Doc. But the alienating equipment of the production
-- the Kabuki elements in costuming and performance, the television
monitor, the microphones, the soundtrack -- give the audience no clue
about how to think about Jones's theory of power. Jones claims he has
simply put U.S. theory into practice. Is this theory of state power
as kleptocratic cronyism a canny reading of power, or is it as cartoonish
as the figure who utters it? Are we supposed to see this West Indian
political crisis as atavistic, as a fall back in time, or is it the
exaggerated picture of a contemporary crisis, quintessentially American
at heart? (Is this why the Wooster Group has chosen to revive the production
in 2006?)
To ask that the Wooster Group offer some easily
legible political lesson would be silly. But the discomfort the production
provokes is not only the result of its "fearless" transcription of a
long history of stereotyped representation. (Or representations: Smithers,
too, is a cartoon Cockney.) It also stems from the Wooster Group's perpetuation
of the longstanding white American myth of black power so tragically
misguided that it becomes comic, or so comically misguided that it becomes
tragic. One might argue that the production subversively undermines
this myth just as it explodes the fixity of race imagined as a set of
behaviors. But does it?
The play names one of the two locations of black
power arguably central to O'Neill's composition of the play. By making
Jones a former Pullman porter, O'Neill identified -- perhaps without
recognizing it -- a powerful presence in U.S. culture that was to become
a force in the early Civil Rights movement. Even while the duties of
Pullman porters required, historians have argued, a certain minstrel-like
enactment of their supposed happy contentment as servants in elegant
railroad cars, their unusual mobility produced new forms of political
awareness and made them important conduits of information among black
Americans. The other, unnamed location of power returns us to the question
of that "far-away island." Suppose we remember O'Neill's placement of
this island not in some geographical Never Never Land, but in the West
Indies. Suppose, that is, we call this place Haiti.
Haiti was in fact "self-determined by White Marines"
when The Emperor Jones was first staged in 1920, and its history
informs the play's representation of Jones's violent rule and the background
fear of violent popular rebellion. Indeed, a popular uprising against
Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, which ended with the ripping apart
of his body and the parading of the remains, was the pretext for the
U.S. occupation, which ended only in 1934. O'Neill's biographers confirm
what any scanning of recent history would in any case suggest: Haitian
events were among the play's inspirations.
This historical and political context has disappeared
from the Wooster Group's staging of The Emperor Jones. One
might argue -- and Woollcott is evidence -- that it has almost always
disappeared from productions of the play. Surely the Wooster Group's
unrelenting exploration of the production of a stereotype is a triumph;
their re-framing of that production with a set of media at once absolutely
primitive and technologically sophisticated, from blackface makeup to
video monitors, remains startling. Valk's vivid red neck, too, suggests
the white performers of early minstrel shows and the ways that blackface
emerged, to borrow Michael Rogin's phrase, out of white noise. But one
of the frequencies this white noise burlesques is the very idea of black
self-determination. What if the Wooster Group were to tune into that?