By BEN BRANTLEY

The fallen emperor has been returned to glory.

It’s not that things turn out any happier for the ill-fated title character of Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” as the last hours of his life are played out at the Irish Repertory Theater, where Ciarán O’Reilly’s inspired revival opened Sunday night, starring a wondrous John Douglas Thompson.
 

John Douglas Thompson plays the title role in Eugene O’Neill's "The Emperor Jones."

Once again Brutus Jones, the African-American island despot, is cruelly and systematically stripped of his majesty, his dignity and all the finer traits that separate man from beast. But in the play that bears his name, an ember of real magnificence has been uncovered and fanned, gently and artfully, into a blazing flame.

Set in a fluid, shadowy dreamscape, through which Mr. Thompson moves like a thrashing sleeper in a nightmare, this “Emperor” digs into recesses of the every-mind, setting off Jungian echoes of universal resonance in a work often perceived as a dated portrait of the black man’s burden. While much of Mr. O’Reilly’s production occurs in near-darkness, I can’t think of another show (in what has been a mostly lusterless theater season) that burns brighter.

This act of illumination is a pinnacle in the rethinking of O’Neill’s short, brutal play, which spent decades moldering in that corner cupboard reserved for embarrassing works by great writers. Though it electrified New Yorkers (including Alexander Woollcott of The New York Times) when it opened in 1920, “The Emperor Jones” came to seem shocking for all the wrong reasons in later years.

 

John Douglas Thompson in O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” directed by Ciarán O’Reilly.

Here, after all, was a portrait of an African-American man who, briefly endowed with power, was forced to crawl backward through the phases of civilization, talking all the while in the thick “sho’ nuff” dialect of minstrel shows. When the avant-garde Wooster Group performed the piece in the 1990s, a white actress (the superb Kate Valk) played Jones in blackface. And the production became a stinging depiction of black culture perceived through a white world’s distorting, contemptuous and uneasy gaze.

I thought that the Wooster Group’s fiercely articulate interpretation might be the last word on “The Emperor Jones.” Then I saw Thea Sharrock’s fine, confrontational production at the Gate Theater in London in 2005. (It later transferred to the National.) Set in a sand-floored box that suggested a safari hunter’s pit for big game, this “Emperor Jones” (starring Paterson Joseph) was played with great anger and no irony. It exuded the painful desperation of a man ensnared like a hounded animal, twisting in a trap forged by years of repressive history.

Ms. Sharrock’s version invested “The Emperor Jones” with a visceral immediacy that suggested the upsetting impact it must have had in the 1920s. Mr. O’Reilly’s interpretation retains that charge of power, but also elicits the poetry and haunting musicality in O’Neill’s text.

Making exquisite use of dreamlike masks and puppets (by Bob Flanagan) and an aural backdrop (by Ryan Rumery and Christian Frederickson) that seems to originate in your own head, this “Emperor Jones” is quieter and stealthier than any I’ve seen. Its eerily lowered voice makes the case for the play as a study in the black hole of unconsciousness (a subject just entering the mainstream conversation in the era when it was written, and one that fascinated O’Neill).

A shivery whisper runs through this production as Jones, a former railroad porter and convict, descends into primal fear: It says that the wall between human reason and animal instinct is far frailer than we like to pretend. This tin-pot emperor, forced to retreat into the jungle when his subjects rise up against him, is no sociological specimen. He becomes what we’re all scared of turning into, when adrenaline floods us in moments of raw anger or terror.

That’s partly because Mr. Thompson makes it impossible not to identify with Jones. An impressive Othello last season (both for Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., and Theater for a New Audience in New York), this brawny actor has a naturally commanding physical presence, with a rich baritone voice to match. But these assets are only a small part of what makes his Jones so compelling.

This Emperor is from the beginning a figure of subtly mixed, potentially explosive elements, kept in tenuous balance. Like any successful ruler, of a business or a country, he’s smart enough to know that power is largely a matter of show. “Ain’t a man’s talkin’ big what makes him big— long as he makes folks believe it?” Jones asks Smithers (the excellent Rick Foucheux), his Cockney henchman, in the opening scene.

But there’s apprehension within this self-awareness, the sense that Jones’s isn’t always comfortable in his grand, imperial postures. His anger comes too quickly, and when he cracks his whip for show (a motif with a harrowing echo in a later scene), you feel he’s losing control. This is a man daunted as well as delighted by the outsize shadow he casts, and he reminds us that recent history is full of examples of tyrants made freakish by power.

As Jones divests himself by degrees of his crown, his boots and his shirt, Mr. Thompson seems to go even further, showing us the skull beneath the skin and the furiously beating heart within the rib cage. In the reading, the late sections of the play can seem painfully allegorical, as Jones is confronted by specters not only of his own criminal past but also of a collective cultural past that embraces a slave auction and mystical tribal ceremonies.

But the forms that Mr. O’Reilly and his creative team give these phantoms, including an early set of apparitions identified in the script as “little formless fears,” have the disturbing beauty—and internal logic—of a symbolist painting.

Every aspect of design—Charlie Corcoran’s set and Antonia Ford-Roberts’s costumes, Brian Nason’s transfiguring lighting and Mr. Flanagan’s living puppets—feeds into a complete vision of interior doubts erupting into a dominating external life. By the end of Jones’s journey he is beyond controlling even his physical movements, a process reflected with anguished precision in Barry McNabb’s enriching choreography.

I don’t want to be too specific about the visions that this production conjures up as we follow Jones, almost against our will, into dementia. They surprised and rattled me, and I imagine they’ll have the same effect on you. But let me say that though I’d never thought of it before, “The Emperor Jones” turns out to be a perfect Halloween entertainment for grown-ups. As this magical production makes clear, O’Neill, a man of many demons, understood all too well that everyone is his own boogeyman.