In the Wooster Group’s own terms, “O’Neill’s expressionist classic The Emperor Jones tells the story of the unraveling of Brutus Jones, a black American, who takes flight from the island natives he has exploited but is thwarted by his own haunting visions.” The word “unraveling” would seem a permit for the company’s by now familiar deconstructions, evidenced by Kate Valk’s blackface, cross-dress performance of Brutus Jones. Yet, to all appearances, their 1992 production of the play¹ curtailed its wonted experimentation, given that the text is followed quite faithfully, except for a few minimal changes. This is all the more remarkable since The Emperor Jones at the time in several ways was innovative and in the course of its subsequent stage history has been a source of theatrical experimentation.² In one critic’s programmatic statement, “The Emperor Jones, which opened on Nov. 1, 1920, a few months after the death of O’Neill’s father, in many respects drew the line between the father’s theater of the Victorian melodrama and the son’s of contemporary ideology and experience” (Dong-Ho Sohn 1083). This statement is a cue for the critic’s subsequent development of Edward Murray’s well-established argument about the play’s thorough cinematic imagination. Apart from its realistic expository opening scene, the play text very much resembles a scenario outline. Shifting camera-like viewpoints (e.g., the sequence of close up, medium shot, tilt, and pan starting Scene 4), the fade-ins and fade-outs or dissolves opening and closing scenes, not to mention the flashback-like visions: all help to establish a modern spatiality, freed from a fixed naturalistic specificity and make The Emperor Jones eminently adaptable to the new medium which O’Neill was trying to break into with his early screenplays. Ironically, Murray believed that the play’s cinematic imagination and theatrical stylization, its shift from realism to expressionism, rendered difficult screen adaptation, a difficulty that supposedly would have been reduced if the play had stayed within a singularly realistic dramatic mode. O’Neill, however, felt that cinema’s dynamic methods (complemented by an amorphous, shifting set and a hypnotic drum beat, both meant to implicate the audience) made it easier to convey Jones’s mental journey. In fact, his disrobing in sequential scenes dramatically and structurally equals cinema’s technique of conveying motion through a succession of photographic stills. The progressive submission of the flesh-and-blood character to his mental projections even turns him into a character within the second-degree movie of his own imagination (Dong-Ho Sohn 1089-1090).

The Popular Performance Tradition

Such cinematographic effects must not have been lost on the Wooster Group, apart from the closeness of the (re)framing to their own practice, as exemplified in Brace Up! and FinISHed Story, which turned Chekhov’s Three Sisters into an inset play performed by Japanese Geinin or traveling actors. The Wooster Group’s general stage practice is thoroughly intermedial and on this occasion was further influenced by Paul Robeson’s stage performance, which Dudley Murphy adapted to the screen in 1933, and by one of Oscar Micheaux’s movies.³ Adding to the stage production’s intermedial character (now defined less as a reliance on media of mechanic reproduction but as genre-crossing and interdisciplinarity contributing to the work’s show­stopping attractiveness), the Wooster Group also underscored the continuity with melodrama and the minstrel tradition, by way of James O’Neill’s career.⁴ After all, Eugene had toured with his father on the vaudeville circuit, began his dramatic career with a vaudeville sketch, A Wife for a Life (1913), and later made some money with a vaudeville production of In the Zone (1918). The drum beating, ghosts, and witchdoctor spectacle remain indebted to popular drama, next to the tragic internalization of the melodramatic villain, the situation described by Robert Heilman (144) as that where “the hero tries to live in a melodrama” (casting Smithers and Lem into its villains) “and comes to learn that he must live in a tragedy” (Jones’s flaws being his pride, colonialist exploitation, and “primitive” superstition, the irrationality he repressed through his rationalist materialism). Whatever vaudeville influence is carried on into The Emperor Jones, the Wooster Group’s staging of it surely is a motley spectacle combining a sumptuous Kabuki costume, complex soundscape, dance numbers, video imagery, several comedy effects, and cross-gender impersonation.

The earlier minstrel tradition, too, remains part and parcel of The Emperor Jones’s dramaturgy, notwithstanding O’Neill’s ennobling, tragic intentions and his contribution to the emancipation of African-American performers. Often forgotten is that the playwright himself still appeared in blackface next to Louise Bryant and George Cram Cook in the 1916 Provincetown Players production of Thirst at the Wharf Theatre.⁵ And despite their integral function in O’Neill’s play, the natives’ drums (a combination of percussion and electronic beat in the Wooster Group’s production) unwittingly recall the endmen, Mister Bones and Mister Tambo (a.k.a. Mister Drum). As such the Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones only underscores the minstrel show elements haunting O’Neill’s play: from Jones’s racial dialect, naivete and humor opposed to Smithers’s airs of superiority and know-how (as in the “stump speech”), to the traditional injunction triggering the tapdancing in the cake-walk, “Feet, do yo’ duty” (1030), with which the fugitive embarks on his flight upon hearing that the natives stole his horses.⁶

In performance and on video these words were accompanied by fitting stage business with Jones’s boots. While a staple like Jones’s bandana handkerchief (1044) was left out for a plain white one, Valk resorted to the typical “coon style.” Her guttural voice simulation, excessive laughter (“Ha, ha, ha”) and vernacular pronunciation (especially of the first-person-singular pronoun, “I/Ah,” central to this psychodrama), combined with her audible panting from exhaustion after Jones’s hike across the plain or the rolling of her eyes in his moments of distress (after the stage directions on 1048) (with the eye-whites possibly exaggerated with white make-up as in blackface acts): these formed clear indices of the deliberately caricatural, over-acted dimension of her performance (whether that should be considered expressionist or melodramatic). Together they forced the racial stereotype into the open, making it easier to deal with, as in the excess of melodrama, when conventional values are at stake (Brooks 4-5, 11, 15). Apart, however, from being rigorously controlled through the consummate artistry, the caricature was further delineated and checked by a commensurate stylization, reflected, for example, in the graceful choreographies or circular movements across the stage reminiscent of Eastern theater.

Valk’s transvestism can also be fitted into the minstrel tradition and need not necessarily derive from oriental theater, as in the Wooster Group’s Brace Up! and FinISHed Story or under influence of O’Neill’s own orientalism. While minstrelsy was originally aimed at white, northern, working-class men, around the turn of the century male and female impersonators peopled its vaudeville descendant, which increasingly targeted female audiences, too. The male blackface impersonators would often enough take down women in types like the attractive and well-dressed “plantation yellow girl” (or mulatto), a variation on the white “wench,” whose prima donna character perfectly fits Brutus Jones’s self-conscious showmanship (and which Murphy insisted on in the Robeson film through Jones’s self-display in the mirror and changing costumes, connoting his wordly rise). By contrast, the female blackface impersonators often regained a measure of male power and independence by playing the unattractive, masculine “funny ole gal” or the “mammy” to a couple of wild “pickaninnies.” Unlike membership in the choruses of blackface “girl acts,” the “mammy” was a complex part whose nurturing behaviour could veer into a more physical masculine comic style and become charged with hints of illicit sexuality with white stage performers (without the women becoming the erotic object). In addition, popular success often granted these female performers leading functions in the male-dominated profession (Kibler 111-142).

The socio-historical and ideological functions served by the racial masquerade of the minstrel show and its vaudeville descendant are still being debated by critics: from supporting slavery and unifying the white working­class in the face of increasing opposition from liberals and aspiring African­Americans during the Reconstruction, to providing a nostalgic, even libidinous escape from industrialism in an idealized plantation South, tinged with “African” “wildness.” All the same, racial masquerade also loosened received ideas by stirring up controversy (Kibler 114). Combined with transvestism, it countered essentialist thinking, by making audiences aware of the detrimental type-casting, within and beyond depictions of race. For in comic performance, according to Robert Toll, “women, like Negroes, provided one of the few stable ‘inferiors’ that assured white men of their status” ([italics mine] 163).

It is this “stability” which the Wooster Group’s Emperor Jones undid. Foregrounding the remnants in O’Neill’s text of America’s indigenous, popular performance tradition, and generalizing the principle of inversion at the heart of its racial and gender masquerading, the company demonstrated the unstable, homologous positions of the so-called hierarchical and immutable differences underlying the racial (and gender) ideology, exposing the latter as a case of the “primitive” mythological thinking which the black emperor supposedly substantiates. Through the show’s deliberately enhanced theatricality and intertextuality (comprising Micheaux and Murphy), besides some subtle textual interventions, they further hoped to counter the racial implications of the tragic, Jungian and Darwinian determinism permeating the play.

The Wooster Group’s Blackface

Most readers will be familiar with the 40% cutback in funding by the New York State Council for the Arts because of the company’s allegedly racist use of blackface in Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), their 1981 show based on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Savran 10). This, however, did not deter LeCompte from again resorting to blackface in L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (1985), The Emperor Jones (1992), and The Hairy Ape (1995). The difference is that the blackface in Route 1 & 9 appeared parodistic and decontextualized, hence offensive, though LeCompte defended herself with her desire to explore theatrical masks and the lingering racial divide in the US. The blackface for the portrayals of Tituba in L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (exposing Arthur Miller’s stereotyping of an African-American) and Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones, seemed more legitimate, hence were more easily accepted (Aronson 188-189). Besides, Roger Bechtel has argued, short of wearing out their public’s outrage, the Wooster Group’s increasing status and the changed cultural context granted them more license. Regardless of the evolving audience reception, the company’s use of blackface in The Hairy Ape (1995) retrospectively elucidates that in The Emperor Jones (1992), for mirroring its racializing of the white working class. To the extent that Dafoe’s blackface inscribed Yank the stokeholder into the white ideology of racial immutability, it defeated the social improvement to which he is entitled by right of the American doctrines of ethnic assimilation and upward social mobility (but from which he is nevertheless barred by the extent of the social divide).

Determinism

The same racial immutability is posited in The Emperor Jones and clinched by generic, psychological, and scientific accessories. O’Neill’s racial stereotyping is already obvious from the stage directions describing his protagonist as “a tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded negro” with “typically negroid” features (1033), not to mention Lem’s appearance as “a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type” (1060). To some critics (Shaughnessy, Orlandello), Jones’s blackness ends up becoming irrelevant insofar as he not only returns to his racial origins (“seems like I been heah befo” 1057) but also exemplifies Darwin’s general evolution theory in reverse and white colonialist attitudes with a vengeance. But this insight in no way reduces the play’s deterministic teleology.

As has been amply demonstrated elsewhere, O’Neill’s play is underpinned by Jungian psychology and contemporary ideas of racial memory, the collective unconscious, and atavisitic primitive behaviour (Wainscott 43-4; Falk 51-2, 66-71; Wikander 225), next to the popular belief that in the face of death, the crucial moments of one’s past life are reviewed in a mental flash. Yet, the assumption that Jones cannot escape, not just his personal past (the killing of Jeff and the prison guard), but his collective racial past (slavery), too, has all too strongly discriminatory and inegalitarian implications. Hence, it seems necessary to qualify Travis Bogard’s claim that, unlike O’Neill’s experiments with contemporary psychological theory, which in retrospect seem “oversimplified,” “his studies of the Negro American remain vital, and stand as archetypes for playwrights seeking to develop a ‘black drama’” (xv). The questionable immutability of the archetypal concept partly explains why. Such immutability, while in line with American race ideology, is diametrically opposed to the supposed “belief in the multiplicity of human nature” which can be deduced from Jones’s role-playing and O’Neill’s decision to make Jones “as different as possible” (“a thoroughly American black from Chicago”) “from what he was to become” (the exploitative ruler of a Caribbean island) (Hornby 15). The play’s finale gainsays this multiplicity, but the enhanced overall theatricality of the Wooster Group production partly restores it by adding the racial and gender masquerade (performative role-playing) to the character’s existential role-playing (his boisterous theatricality) as well as his racially and culturally determined “passing” (donning the “white” identity of colonialist ruler).

That an African-American and a (not so faithful) member of the Baptist Church (1042) should regress to the superstition and animism of the West Indian natives and their African forebears, may be a nice dramatic irony, making plausible views of the play “as a direct satire on Marcus Garvey’s ‘back to Africa’ movement, a demonstration of the futility of a Pullman porter attempting to survive in the jungle” (Wikander 225).⁷ To others, however, the play is less ludicrous for denying the irreversibility of cultural achievements than offensive for denying African-Americans these very achievements. Jones’s reverse phylo- and ontogenetic development, ending with humanoid apes (going by the description of Lem), flatly contradicts his belief that “What I was den is one thing. What I is now’s another” (1034). In dramatic terms, too, O’Neill rigged the outcome of The Emperor Jones. To begin, his anti­hero is called Brutus, after the slaveowner’s paternalistic custom and the suicidal murderer of Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare’s 1599 play Brutus, in due course, “know[s] [his] hour is come” (5.4.20). Just so, Jones intends to kill himself “when de time comes” (1036). He squanders the silver bullet on the ghostly witchdoctor, but by having named the charm that was to protect him from the natives, provided them with the very means of his undoing. The suicidal overtones of Jones’s death heighten the monomaniac and narcissist character of this expressionist play, staging the frightening visions of a maddened man. They also relentlessly step up Jones’s own responsibility for his death.

In addition, O’Neill mercilessly timed the play. As the Wooster Group production reminds us of by the stage presence of a clock, the dramatic action starts at 3:30 in the afternoon (1040) and ends at dawn the next day. The stage directions of the Modern Library Edition, published by Random House in 1937, specify that Jones arrives at the edge of the plain at “[n]ightfall” and that the forest scenes take place at intervals of two hours, respectively at nine, eleven, one, three, and five. In addition, Jones’s flight is carefully monitored by the drum, beginning “at a rate exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat—72 to the minute” (1041) but relentlessly growing faster and louder until Jones is shot. Never is there any doubt that Jones’s time has come (1033), not within six months (1037), but only when he has spent his silver bullet, the last of six, one for each apparition. The remorselessness of the arithmetic presses home the brevity of Jones’s lease on life, the futility of his flight, regardless of the metaphorical force majeure: his “turn[ing] in a circle” (1061), the “veiled purpose” (1049) of the dirt road through the forest, or the linearity of the railroad tracks (conveyed on video).

By all means possible O’Neill thus seems to enhance the inevitability of Jones’s demise, each and every one of them enforcing the other. Hence the Wooster Group’s need to prevent identification with the protagonist, so as to avoid the audience’s sense of racial doom. Micheaux’s example helped them in this regard, as did the audience’s lingering unease concerning blackface, countering its eventual engrossment (short of identification) as a corollary of Valk’s consummate craftsmanship (Brown 202). Ironically enough, critics of Micheaux felt that his movies all too often emanated a sense of racial doom, focusing as they did on the seamier side of African-American life.⁸ Their concern was legitimate in that the racial masks of the professional minstrel show and vaudeville survived in musical comedies and Hollywood films, thus prolonging their cultural impact.

Micheaux

Murphy’s and scenarist DuBose Heyward’s Hollywood treatment, realistically and chronologically expanding on cues from Jones’s past, at first sight seems less relevant for the Wooster Group’s revival of O’Neill’s condensed, discontinuous, and predominantly expressionist play.⁹ The more since Murphy de-emphasized the race issue by particularizing Jones, by providing a psychological motivation for killing the guard (his being whipped after refusing to do just that to a fellow prisoner) and by cutting the slave auction and Middle Passage, which are tantamount to the character’s atavistic regression (Orlandello 51-65; Murray 16-24). But Micheaux’s 1925 silent classic, Body and Soul, must have been especially appealing to LeCompte, in view of its forming, according to Charles Musser, “a profound reworking and critique of O’Neill’s plays The Emperor Jones and All God ’s Chillun Got Wings.” (91) Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) was the first African­American to head his own film studio. For a long time languishing in obscurity, he is now recognized as a crucial figure in the early cinema’s circuit, parallel to Hollywood, rising towards entrepreneurship in the face of opposition. The son of freed slaves, at one time a Pullman porter (like Brutus Jones), homesteader and travelling salesman of his own novels, Micheaux broke into the movie industry when the film production of his third autobiographical book, The Homesteader (1917-1919), fell through. Between 1920 and 1950 he made some 40 movies, many of them now lost. Whether they were criticized for catering to the black working-class (through their violence and eroticism) or praised for deflating the bourgeois and assimilationist pretensions of the expanding black middle-class (through its personal form of social realism), several of these movies signify a breakthrough in their open treatment of racial politics (Within Our Gates [1919-1920], The Symbol of the Unconquered [1920], Birthright [1924], etc.).

To fully understand the implications of Body and Soul in these racial politics, it is necessary, though, to recapitulate the production history of The Emperor Jones, no matter how well known its facts may be to O’Neill scholars. After all, by reverting to blackface in her production of The Emperor Jones, LeCompte, parallel to O’Neill’s recollection of the African-Americans’ traumatic past (the Middle Passage, slavery) reactivated the play’s early stage history and stormy critical reception, to signal that present-day racial politics may insufficiently have progressed since then. Indeed, when The Emperor Jones premiered 1 November 1920 at the Playwrights’ Theatre, New York as directed by George Cram Cook of the Provincetown Players, the part of Brutus Jones was created by the African-American actor Charles Gilpin (1878-1930). Gilpin played Jones almost continuously for four years and never again enjoyed a similar success. This came about in part through opposition from the New York Drama League, which only rescinded its scandalous refusal to invite the actor to its 1921 annual awards dinner because of adamant protest by O’Neill and fellow artists. Accordingly, Gilpin had his reservations about the personal good the part of Brutus Jones brought him (Gelb 448-9), not to mention that he was still supported by white actors in blackened faces and bodies in the production’s integrated cast (Wainscott 55-6).¹⁰ Still, his performance outside of Harlem meant a breakthrough for African-American actors. This was indicative of the progress they would make in the 1920s and 1930s, amongst others through black repertory companies such as the Lafayette Players, with which Gilpin was associated as a producer since 1916 and whose actors Micheaux employed for his movies. There is no doubt that The Emperor Jones did much to alter the racial politics of the theater by helping to oust blackface. That Murphy’s 1933 movie, starring Paul Robeson, was a financial failure, exacerbated by the distribution difficulties it encountered in the South, Peter Noble considers a measure of the revolution (or scandal, as you will) caused by having a black man play the lead, next to white performers in secondary parts (Orlandello 64).

Robeson (1898-1976), of course, was the younger actor and Columbia Law School graduate who had replaced Gilpin for the 1924 revival of The Emperor Jones. His connection with O’Neill greatly contributed to his fame as a movie actor and concert singer, witness the 1933 stills of him in his Emperor Jones movie costume, taken by Edward Steichen, celebrity photographer and curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.¹¹ Soon enough the racial discrimination which Robeson encountered in the film industry would turn him into a spokesman of African-Americans, and together with his communist sympathies lead to his ostracism at home (Bell 49-58; Gill 35-58). At the beginning of his career, though, he seemed capable of accepting the problematic language of The Emperor Jones (the demeaning “nigger” which had so disturbed Gilpin and may have triggered his renewed drinking) (Gelb 448-49) in return for the freedom given to recreate the part, much along Stanislavskean lines (My Life in Art had just been published in English). Gilpin had set down a deceitful, tormented emperor, perhaps more to the liking of the tragically inclined O’Neill, except that the actor left out the offensive word “nigger.” By contrast, Robeson’s tall stature, deep voice and charismatic sex appeal “naturally” seemed to fit him for the part, which he carried with ease and honest humor. It is Robeson’s uncritical identification with O’Neill’s character at which Micheaux took offence. This was compounded by the racial coding of Robeson’s naked (upper) body, which proved all the more important for a part whose gestural language, in Edward Murray’s argument (18), gradually takes precedence over the verbal.

Body Politics

Robeson’s inscription within a racialized representational practice had begun with his athletic career as a Rutger’s premier football player. It was prolonged in the field of high art, with Nickolas Muray’s “classical” nude photographs and Antonio Salemmé’s Negro Spiritual, a life-size plaster nude depicting Robeson in the classical “praying boy” posture with uplifted arms. As Jeffrey C. Stewart has explained, the modernist twenties were a time when Freudianism, anti-Victorian bohemianism, the increased urban visibility of African-Americans following the Great Migration, and the emergence of intellectuals among them, combined into their valorization as positive (if also thrilling) exponents of an exotic, pre-civilized, “primitive” era. It is “performing the primitive,” claims Deborah Willis (Stewart 7), that got Robeson into the movies (and out of them, too, in protest). Or to return to Stewart: “Robeson’s body was one of the reasons that [he] became identified with The Emperor Jones in the public imagination [. . . it] made him seem more primitive to the white Greenwich Village audience” (139). It could be argued that the commodification resulting from the spectacularization of his body and its promotion into an object for consumption, prolonged the minstrel show’s exploitation of the black male body and slavery’s economics of exchange (even if to Robeson’s own profit). Stewart admits that Nikolas Muray’s art photographs replicated the colonization of the Other by the white public (which included the likes of Carl Van Vechten, who took great interest in such representations) (Stewart 143). Robeson’s popular media images, as Ed Guerrero has argued, were careful constructions “packaged for the gaze of an admiring public” (280), certainly “those shirtless, well-oiled, muscular glimpses of him singing while shoveling coal or busting rocks in The Emperor Jones (1933)” (282).

The upshot is that the racialized reception of Robeson’s stage and screen performances in The Emperor Jones doubled Brutus Jones’s dramaturgical defeat. Indeed, Robeson’s well-built yet potentially threatening, racialized body became acceptable only to the extent that its harmony invoked the classical and mythological models of white western civilization (Atlas, Hercules, David, the human equivalent of gods), as distinct from the more comic connotations of the “dissonant” pantomimic body performance of black vaudeville artists like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (Stewart 154-5). By the same token Robeson’s classical physique was inscribed with standard narratives of the hubristic tragic hero, even before he assumed any specific stage parts like that of Brutus Jones, or was turned into a movie character constantly preening himself in front of the mirror (as in Dudley Murphy’s version) (Orlandello 54-55). The classical sculptural and dramatic containments were therefore indispensable to feminize Robeson’s threatening male body as the spectacle of docile passive beauty (Richard Dyer, qtd. in Kibler 133). That such tragic narratives have never sufficed to contain the threat supposedly emanating from the primitive, sexualized racial Other in the eyes of the white spectatorship only clinches the need for the character’s tragic demise.¹²

The racial coding of Robeson’s body presumably constitutes another reason why LeCompte must have decided to let an overdressed white actress play Brutus Jones, one who never removes the flannel worker’s shirt s/he is wearing underneath the oriental costume.¹³ From the gender perspective Valk’s cross-dressing approaches Mary Ann Doane’s reinterpretation of Joan Rivière’s 1929 concept of the masquerade (Doane 33ff), as no longer women’s anxious, excessive meeting of masculine expectations to ward off retaliation for the illicit appropriation of masculine behaviour and its attendant power, but a destabilization of the male image of femininity (the spectacle of a non-thinking, self-present body).

True, Dafoe appears practically naked as the slave driver in the galley scene (one of the two scenes Murphy cut) but neither does he contribute to the voyeuristic spectacularization to which Robeson was subject. The slavedriver’s sunglasses and the amplified impact of his wide steps (in tune with the rhythm imposed on the slaves) comically subvert his macho-character, like the diaper-like loincloth (in keeping with Jones’s regression, since the actor subsequently doubles as his slaves). Besides, LeCompte must have wanted to turn a woman into the production’s psychological center— dramaturgical and directorial—in opposition to O’Neill’s and Brutus Jones’s male perspectives. In this Micheaux had set the example by promoting Martha Jane into the “focalizer” or “psychological pivot” of his movie (Bowser and Spence 192; Musser 102). He had also foregrounded the sexuality of her male antagonist, Jenkins, by entitling this movie Body and Soul, countering, however, the expected body politics of Robeson’s performance, by refusing to display the character as an erotic, exotic and primitive spectacle (Bowser and Spence 194).

Exploiting not just Robeson’s recent stage success, but also the close ties between stage and early cinema, Micheaux (in Musser’s argument) conceived this movie as a direct rebuttal of The Emperor Jones, even if, barring a few changes, the movie was based on Roseanne (the middle-aged eponymous character and her younger sister Leola having become mother and daughter, named respectively Martha Jane and Isabelle). This unpublished, romantic three-act drama (with Negro Spirituals) was written by a white woman playwright, Nan Bagby Stephens. Exotic and primitive: those were the terms in which the white patrons appreciated the small town revivalist church meeting, taking up one third of the musical play (Bowser and Spence 203). Dudley Murphy was at least more disciplined and to the point when opening his Emperor Jones with a Baptist church meeting, even if the singing paved the way for the showcasing of Robeson’s musical talents, thus providing evidence that Hollywood entertainment surreptitiously perpetuated minstrelsy clichés, in this case the essentialist idea that African-Americans are “natural” dancers and singers.

Under the growing protest against blackface, the original white cast who premiered Stephens’s play in late 1923 at the Greenwich Village Theatre, was replaced by a black one, headed by Gilpin in the part of the corrupt preacher, Cicero Brown, for the Shubert-Riviera production, and by Robeson for the subsequent runs at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and the Dunbar in Philadelphia.¹⁴ Robeson’s slight to Gilpin for replacing him in the part of Brutus Jones (a part he “created”) gains weight, then, as a repeated injustice. Next, Micheaux (whose father-in-law was a minister) had the cheek to engage the aspiring lead and film novice (himself the son and brother of ministers) at a minimal expense, not just to play the part of Jenkins, the corrupt preacher, in Body and Soul, but also to double in the part of his virtuous twin brother, Sylvester. The doppelgänger was a popular cinema convention at the time constituting a great acting opportunity, but in the present case it obviates any plot logic, since the two brothers are living in the same town. Yet, as Musser points out, Micheaux’s “metacritical engagement with O’Neill’s work” (102) had priority over narrative consistency, as in much of the Wooster Group practice. One brother, the honest and successful inventor, Sylvester (Micheaux’s own “invention” and a positive role model based on oft neglected African-American achievements), is a foil to the neurotic Jim Harris of All God’s Chillun Got Wings. The other, Jenkins, takes after Brutus Jones by being an escaped convict from Georgia posing as a preacher, who is granted supernatural gifts by the community, until it rebels and tracks him down in the woodlands into which he has escaped.

Apart from rehearsing a typically American and melodramatic power fantasy at the heart of The Emperor Jones, Micheaux expanded on Robeson’s exuberant sexuality as well as on his (and Micheaux’s own) family members’ religious office. It is an office, which he, in the manner of the popular press and many fellow black writers, chastised in several novels for its authoritarianism, patriarchy and conservatism (see The Conquest, The Homesteader, The Forged Note, etc.) (Bowser and Spence 185-191). Micheaux thus turned the unromantic Jones, contemptuous of the female sex, into a drinking and gambling womanizer, who dons the clerical garb and abuses of his charms and position of trust, thereby transforming the religious devotion of the predominantly female congregation into sexual fantasy. At its center stands Martha Jane, a laundress, who incestuously longs for vicarious satisfaction by proposing that her daughter marry the Reverend Isaiah Jenkins. As a seeming result Isabelle is forced to steal her mother’s savings and is raped. Luckily Martha in the end wakes up from that nightmare, unlike Brutus Jones from his. In addition, a newspaper item, which Micheaux added during the movie’s final editing, announces Jenkins’s escape, prior to his planned extradition to England, an inside joke depending on Robeson’s much advertised appearances in The Emperor Jones at the Savoy Theatre, London around that time. Micheaux’s negative portrayal of the black ministry was severely criticized, among other reasons, for exposing an inner threat to black communities. Still, the form which that threat assumes—the religious abuse from a single, unrepentantly evil man—should have made it more amenable than O’Neill’s underlying white exploitation, internalized in the (male) exploiter and abetted by the native community, whose idolizing of Brutus forms the counterpart to the blind faith of the congregation in Body and Soul.

As if picking up on this idea, Murphy’s hierophantic minister heading the Baptist revivalist meeting prefigures the subservience Jones requires from his enthroned position on the island, as shown in the sumptuous (invented) court assembly, where he humiliates some slaves to impress Smithers. In John Orlandello’s interpretation, the superimposition of the film titles with a tribal dance and its brief overlap with the church meeting functionally equate both religions as “superstitions” abused to subject the people (Orlandello 54-55). A similar tableau emblematizing power relations is set up in Body and Soul through the church matrons’ adoration of Jenkins when seated in Martha Jane’s morris chair during his social visit. Indirectly LeCompte “invalidated” such moments of male authorization (including Martha Jane’s “offer” or “tender” of Isabelle to the minister) by recycling the wheelchair from FinISHed Story and Brace Up! as a mock throne and having Valk sit on the floor in front of it. Micheaux’s central character, Martha Jane, seems briefly empowered when the persecuted preacher in turn kneels to plead with her, yet, as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence have remarked, his submissiveness conceals a renewed incrimination at her shared responsibility, which makes her hide him (Bowser and Spence 200).¹⁵

Mythological Thinking

Murphy’s functional leveling of tribal magic and the Baptist religion finds a further parallel in the Wooster Group’s association of the natives’ tom-tom with the telegraph, as evoked in the layered sound track. By itself the rapprochement implies and underscores the tom-tom’s efficiency as a communication and monitoring device, since it contributes to Jones’s capture. Smithers’s contempt for the natives’ allegedly primitive methods and beliefs is indeed foiled by their practical success, apart from what Claude Lévi­Strauss (1974: 213-234) considers their symbolic efficiency. O’Neill, through Smithers, of course targets the natives’ “primitive” thinking (“la pensée sauvage”), which, in the sense Lévi-Strauss (1962) wanted it to have, that of its underlying codes and structures (the armature or tonal key), is no different from the supposedly more developed thinking of white societies, relying on writing and advanced calculus. That the natives “cook um money” (1061) to fabricate silver bullets at first sight invites ridicule for parrying magic with magic (“make um silver bullet, make um strong charm, too”). But then, silver was believed to possess the magical power to fight evil. What is more, the underlying homeopathic principle has survived centuries of technological progress despite innovations of modern pharmacology (from the Greek “pharmakon,” meaning magic charm, poison, drug). By giving his play a tragic slant, O’Neill also abided with the medical interpretation of the genre, put forward by the likes of S. H. Butcher (245-9, 273), who relied on Aristotle’s Politics to argue that tragedy developed or “brought under artistic law” rituals in which wild and restless music (like that of the tom-tom) had a healing and cathartic effect on those possessed by a religious ecstasy. Ironically, Jones’s failure to exorcize his personal and racial “haunts” with the six-shooter, is set off by the natives’ successful exorcism of their evil spirit, thus restoring the community’s well-being, granted that it remains vulnerable to Smithers’s wrong-doing. Viewed through the lens of O’Neill’s tragic aspirations, the ivy string adorning the wheelchair (metonymically representing the forest¹⁶) combines with the microphone’s shaft¹⁷ into a Dionysian thyrsus, emblem of Jones’s hallucinatory craze and by extension the craze of the masquerade, fed in turn by the natives who worked themselves into a frenzy through music and dance prior to hunting down their prey, much like the maenads tracking down the cross-dressed Pentheus in Euripides’s The Bacchae.

Besides triggering Smithers’s contemptive reaction, Lem’s misnomer— “cooking” for “melting”—also recalls the distinction between the raw and the cooked in South American myths, as analyzed by Lévi-Strauss (1964), in order to establish the passage from nature to culture. (In North American myths, the opposition between nakedness and being clothed heralds the passage, as fits Jones’s initial and final condition.) The “cooking” of the silver, then, figures as a cultural transformation (“elaboration” or “marking”) testifying to the civilized nature of Lem’s “primitives.”¹⁸ The Wooster Group’s “framing” of the term as used by Lem in onstage video footage may indicate their awareness of its anthropological context, countering the play’s apparently negative stereotyping of the Caribbean, even if through some linguistic slip the regular sequence of the hunt and the processing of its catch have been inverted. Similarly, the “cooking” of the money converts the currency into ammunition (from the Latin “munire” or to fortify), whose “ingestion” is as lethal as that of any poisonous or charmed food. Far from confusing food with ammunition, O’Neill’s natives somehow anticipate Lévi-Strauss’s argument regarding totem animals (1962b) which, in Edmund Leach’s translation, are “goods to think with” (bonnes à penser) as well as “goods to eat” (bonnes à manger) (31-32).¹⁹ The red and black throbbing diaphragm appearing on the stage monitor, as if transmitted by an infrared camera, associates the heat of the natives’ “fire,” melting and moulding the silver coins into bullets, the heat produced in the gun “fired” by Jones, and the heat of his blood pumping excitedly through his heart, as it keeps pace with the drum and the runaway train whose accelerating rhythms are mixed into the production’s masterful sound track.²⁰

Catch-As-Catch-Can

The just sketched anthropological scenario pretty much receives closure with the sacrifice of the “catch,” as intimated by Scene 7, in which Jones imagines being fed to the river god in the shape of a crocodile, during a ritual led by a Congo witch-doctor adorned with antelope horns (1057-9). Here O’Neill gives free rein to his strong interest in masks as scenographic and psychological means of expression. Within the play’s development the scene represents the final “station” of the emperor’s morality-like regress into some animalistic state, the dissolution of his individuality and his arbitrary election as a victim “to allay the fierceness of some implacable deity demanding sacrifice” (1058). In fact, the “primitive” ritual of atonement from Scene 7 again implies the regression from the symbolically equivalent Christian confession of Scene 5, in which Jones invokes the power of the Baptist church.

Baptism eliminated the Christian sacrament of penance, so that Jones is counting on his creed’s revivalist doctrine to get another chance—hence the witchdoctor’s ritual taking place near the (baptismal) river. O’Neill’s childhood Catholicism, however, still allowed for confession, which in its Jansenist version, the variety he was imbibed with from ages 7 to 12 while at Mount St. Vincent Academy boarding school (Porter ms; Gelb 64-74), was particularly cruel. In the latter half of the seventeenth century penance even required self-flagellation and donning the sackcloth. That cruelty again meshes the allegedly more “civilized” confession to the more “primitive” rituals of atonement, besides stepping up the parallels between Jones’s plight and that of African-Americans (or recalling the 1950’s witchhunt by Joseph McCarthy, whom the Wooster Group castigated by way of Miller’s Crucible in L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...). The Jansenist concept of original sin or the axiomatic presumption of a “black” soul—guilty of desire (primarily sexual, in Jones’s case lust for power and lucre—symbolized by the silver bullets)— provides an autobiographical, religious motivation why Brutus’s failure has been preordained. From the Jansenist perspective Jones’s corruption of the Caribbean island simultaneously ruined his chances at recovering the prelapsarian “Blessed Isle,” which Ernest Jones associated with the myth of Ireland and the mother archetype.

What remains of the witchdoctor ritual in the Wooster Group production is some manipulated video imagery, in which Jones’s delirious mind might indeed recognize a crocodile’s eyes and nostrils, seen from the front, alternated with a dancing Dafoe, whose arm postures may or may not involve reverential poses, though these hardly constitute O’Neill’s “narrative in pantomime” (1058). By trimming or de-emphasizing the ritual LeCompte distanced herself from its folkloric aspect as well as countered the traditional enough reduction of the African-American to a scapegoat, a “skandalon,” stumbling block or offense, to be eliminated (like Gilpin from the New York Drama League festivities or Robeson from the film establishment). Minstrelsy and lynchings were two major tools of African-American suppression, with their diametrically opposed stereotypes of the black clown (the “happy blackie”) and the black rapist. To Faulkner, who modelled Joe Christmas from Light in August (1933) partly after Brutus Jones, the dramatic character’s fate certainly resembled that of Southern lynchings (Duclos 8­13). That fate also recalls the much criticized conclusion (Celia Coplestone’s sacrifice) of T. S. Eliot’s cathartic Cocktail Party, which formed the basis of the Wooster Group’s Nayatt School (1978).

Actually Micheaux already took the lead when emending his (double) dramatic source (Nan Bagby Stephens and O’Neill). In Body and Soul, Isabelle, for one, at first seems sacrificed, since she dies after confessing the rape, which proves the extreme consequence of the female congregation’s idolizing of their minister (Bowser and Spence 196-7). Unaided by Isabelle’s ghost (a melodramatic convention found in Stephens’s and O’Neill’s play) Martha Jane then denounces Jenkins in front of the congregation, which chases him from the church. In Stephens’s play, the mob subsequently exacts justice southern-style (Cicero Brown is shot offstage after Roseanne briefly hid him). In Micheaux’s movie Jenkins is last seen hitting a boy pursuing him. The open end of the inset dream circumvents the parallel with the white lynchings of blacks. It also leaves Jenkins’s true nature undecided (since the return to the frame restores Isabelle unscathed so she can marry Sylvester with Martha Jane’s blessing). The happy ending of Body and Soul, however, is only apparent, being set off by the unmelodramatic implication that evil cannot be so easily exposed and expelled from the community, to the extent that it is never radically Other, as is conveyed by Robeson’s doubling. After all, Sylvester, the con man’s brother and alter-ego (also played by Robeson) is a member in good-standing of the community, which abetted the fake minister’s abuse of power. Similarly, in O’Neill’s play Jones is fighting himself as much as his pursuers, past and present. In fact, the two possess homologous positions, like black and white, male and female, or colonizer and exploited, as the Wooster Group production through Kate Valk’s cross-gender, blackface performance made abundantly clear.

Homology

By now it has been sufficiently established how Jones learned his crooked trading from white trash like Smithers, a Cockney (1034), and from “de white quality” overheard when he was a Pullman porter in the US (1035).²¹ The same applies to his discriminatory ways with the West Indian natives. Suffering from racism at home and abroad, Jones has fallen victim to what Erving Goffman (106-7) has called the “self-betraying stratification” typical of the stigmatized trying to pass as “normal,” by establishing his superiority over the local blacks and taking up the discriminating attitude of the whites. Put differently, he has internalized the racial ideology, using it to his own advantage for better or worse.²² Jones’s quintessential Anglo-Saxon last name, compounding the morality-like effect (much like Yank’s “Smith” in The Hairy Ape), leaves no doubt about his white behaviour. With a few penstrokes O’Neill exposes the colonial mechanism pur sang: extortion and levying of exorbitant taxes (1035), under the guise of self-created laws and missionary work (1042) (a cover picked up by Micheaux and Murphy) and making good use of superstition to stifle revolutions and pass as saviour (1035).²³ Development of the local population, like teaching it English or reinvesting the proceeds, is superfluous, unless it guarantees a larger profit (1036). More often the money is deposited in foreign banks (1035) and spent abroad (1037). Jones presents it all like one big game of poker, “Yankee bluff” (1036), a “circus show” (1035) put on for everybody’s benefit (if not self-acknowledged minstrelsy), until he overplays his hand (1039) and, serving poetic justice, gets killed with silver bullets made from money. But this is not just Lem’s astute doing to defeat the charm protecting the exploiter. Plotwise it is already made clear that Lem and Smithers persecute Jones, each for his own reasons. In the final scene the sneering white trader indeed appears at the side of the tribal chief, eager to witness the downfall of his envied “associate.”

In performance the functional identity of Smithers and Lem in their opposition to Jones was brought home through the onstage video images, the blocking, and textual intervention. Towards the end of the production the onstage monitor indeed rendered the chief’s face in a negative black and white image yet with a coloured mouth, and the trader’s face in colour with a black and white (almost vampiric) mouth. Within the traditional, minstrelsy perspective, the enhanced mouth serves the widespread preoccupation with oral and genital amusement, “whether painted red or left a sharp, unpainted circle of white around the lips” (Lott 145). In the present context the “red” mouth represents the fear of the primitive, “bloodthirsty” Other, an accusation the Wooster Group’s inverted mirror images make reciprocal, as one that Smithers may direct at Lem or Lem at Smithers. Jones and Smithers’s outward antagonism appeared from the start of the show during Valk and Dafoe’s simultaneous, quarrelsome opening exchange, as if both were eager to get the upperhand. Even if the rest of their dialogue was delivered sequentially, Dafoe gradually relinquished his sidelong look and upstage marginal position. The more Jones lost his self-confidence and superiority, the more brazen Dafoe became, suddenly confronting his antagonist and moving center stage, then downstage, after Jones had willed him what was left in the palace. Ultimately, Dafoe assumed vigorous fighting poses with a Samurai sword (possibly Kabuki’s “Tobi roppo” going by Scott 304, 307) as if he had joined Lem’s heathen religious ceremony or war dance before the hunt. When in the second scene Jones is beset by the mocking Little Formless Fears, Dafoe’s smirking face quite appropriately appeared as a negative image on the monitor (as it does when he doubles in the part of the subsequent hallucinations). Further to increase the impression that Jones is persecuted by Smithers, Dafoe also marked the time at the beginning of Scenes 3, 4, and 5.

In between O’Neill’s scenes the Wooster Group indeed returned to the palace, where Smithers had gone on a drunken binge while looking for valuables. These structural transitions stressed the characters’ structural relationship and added suspense, like the cross-cutting between parallel actions in film, which reconnect at the end, as they do in The Emperor Jones. From this perspective the slammed doors heard in between the scenes are those Smithers encounters while prowling through the palace. The textual basis for these transitions must have been provided by the lines ending Scenes 1 and 8, supplemented by those which O’Neill cut in the 1924 Collected Works version which provided the text for subsequent editions.²⁴

From Jones and Smithers’s interdependence, business rivalry, and professional envy, it is but a small step to their functional identity as representatives of colonial capitalism, conveyed once again by the blocking and stage business. In the words of one critic: “the polarity of black versus white becomes the process of black-and-white” so as to demonstrate how “the demonizing of the Other in race relations is born of self-alienation” (Favorini 106). O’Neill’s text prescribes that Jones progressively remove his clothes—signs of Western civilization—until he is wearing just a breech cloth for the scene imaging the ancient vessel’s hold on the Middle Passage (1055). As mentioned, Valk only took off her boots and the top of her Oriental outfit, beneath which she was wearing a working man’s checkered, flannel shirt. Dafoe equally removed the top of his costume and later appeared as the slave driver in loincloth. He explicitly doubled as his poor charges when he threw himself “full length, face downward on the ground,” like Jones is said to do (1055), thereby once again substantiating the inversion at work throughout the production, if also Hegel’s master/slave or Lordship/bondage dialectic, according to which the master’s dependence on the slave as instrument turns the latter into the personality norm (Stepelevich 15).

Much the same principle was at work in the opening scene, when Dafoe and Valk performed what Shewey has identified as two Polynesian dances.²⁵ These took place after Jones told us how he got away from the US (1038) and hoped to flee the West Indian island (1040). Quite significantly, he presents his actual escape as a story and his imaginary one as real. From the individualistic, psychological and dramaturgical perspectives Jones is already hallucinating. From the collective anthropological one he is reverting to magical thinking (for Lévi-Strauss the beginning of the mythical or symbolic elaborations typical of the “savage mind”). By reducing reality to fiction (out of a protective measure against Smithers) Jones actually hopes to increase the likelihood that his fictive escape will materialize into reality. Consequently the stage dances following both narrations vented his naively triumphalist mood, whether in the manner of the “kuse-mai” or story dance of the Noh­tradition (Scott 51; Hori 143-148), or that of American vaudeville and musical. LeCompte’s rejection of racial essentializing, then, does not prevent her from possibly relying on psychological affects to structure the mise-en-scène and invite interpretation—despite ample disclaimers in interviews that the Wooster Group’s acting is neither textually nor psychologically based, but rooted in physical actions (Auslander 94-98; Allen 153-157).

For all that, she systematically refuses to uphold misguided ideas about an immutable, contained identity (whether racialized or gendered) as buttressed by western dramaturgical models. During the second dance, her two performers wore similar hats, Dafoe a white one, Valk a black one. When the dance was over, they both moved downstage for their next exchange, Dafoe meanwhile sliding from behind and underneath Valk. The blocking once more brought out and graphically developed the point of the blackface and transvestism. Behind and beneath the black mask of the protagonist lies a white mentality, and not just that of a white man, but that of a fearful woman, going by Jones’s sexist conviction that the belief in magic, haunts, and ghosts is typically feminine (1042). Hence Valk opened the stage version of The Emperor Jones on video, from the margin, her face a negative image and her soft-spoken, high-pitched voice channeling that of the old servant fleeing the palace, the one Smithers called a “black cow” (1033). “Woman,” John Lennon sang, “is the nigger of the world.” Jung considered her man’s shadow, Freud the dark continent. As recreated by the Wooster Group, then, Jones was no longer a tragically flawed and racially doomed individual who “lost himself” but an ideological and theatrical palimpsest, revealing beneath the blackface, the exploitative white colonialist, the fearful old woman, and the energetic actress, whose earlier blackface parts include Willie and Tituba.

Conclusion

In retrospect the Wooster Group’s production of The Emperor Jones thoroughly substantiated an insight to be gleaned from good old-fashioned structuralist thinking that black and white, male and female, master and slave are homologous positions within an ideological representational system. Lévi­Strauss believed our brains, and the cultures generated by them, construed identities as (op)positional, i.e. depending on their homologous (op)position within a larger structure, like the distinctive features in minimal phonemic units, which structuralist linguists isolated, following principles established by De Saussure and Jakobson. Phenomenological reality, however, often is a continuum, a matter of at times hardly perceptible cross-overs, into whose awareness the Wooster Group’s masquerades and inversions shock us, thus demonstrating the homology of the structuralist (op)positions. Musser (97) as well as Bowser and Spence (199, 201) rely on Peter Brooks’s definition of melodrama as a polarizing mode of excess, the one to interpret Isabelle’s initial muteness, the others to account for the outspoken, “overdrawn” signifiers (the storm accompanying Jenkins’s rape, Isabelle’s white dress). The Wooster Group is of course more interested in the problematizing of values addressed by the melodramatic genre, than in its desperate disentanglement of good and evil and individual reassertion of them as polar opposites, though Bowser and Spence admit that Micheaux undermines the genre’s conventional resolution.

Furthermore, the structures of the brain may be far from the elementary diagrams provided by Lévi-Strauss. In fact, the chiastic or symmetrical inversion exemplified in the video images of Lem and Smithers is typical not just of mythical thinking (seeing structures as relational differences) but of Lévi-Strauss’s own abstract and ahistorical thinking in formal figures, whether rhetorical or musical (Sperber 22, 26). Hence Derrida called Lévi-Strauss’s critical discourse “mythomorphic,” having “the form of that of which it speaks” (286). Which goes to show that the “mythical” thinking of “advanced” societies is hardly any different from that of so-called “primitive” societies, even the ideologies constructing the differences partaking of that mythical thinking. Hence, if Lévi-Strauss’s abstract thinking is captured by the Wooster Group’s production of The Emperor Jones, so is that of LeCompte, who vaunts she can formalize any concrete reality (Savran 51). And if LeCompte historicizes her show by recycling the indigenous American performance tradition history, together with the production and reception histories of The Emperor Jones (by way of Micheaux and Murphy), her reliance on the dynamics of memory and autobiography in her life-long work-in-progress counters the falsely authoritative causality and chronology of traditional history, which Lévi-Strauss’s abstractions very much reacted against. In that respect, the systematicity of Jones’s regression and O’Neill’s perfect alignment of his character’s personal and collective memory was at odds with much current modernist thought. Even if Lévi-Strauss’s assumption of universally valid unconscious structures (whether linguistic, ethnographic or social) easily complements Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, we had to wait for Strange Interlude (1927) and its experiments with the stream of consciousness for O’Neill’s drama more fully to catch up with modernism.

NOTES

¹ For reviews of the 1992 Wooster Group production, running under the title Fish Story Part I at the Performing Garage, see Gary Vena, Michael C. O’Neill and Marvin Carlson.

² See Gauss and Olsson for two opera versions with music by resp. Louis Gruenberg (book by Kathleen de Jaffa, premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, 1933) and Sven-David Sandström (choreography by Stanislaw Brosowski, book by Lars G. Thelestam, premiere at the Royal Opera, Stockholm, 1984). For a comment on the 1928 and 1933 puppet versions of The Emperor Jones by resp. Ralph Chessè and Jerome Magon, see Swortzell 1987, and for a more general assessment, Swortzell 1992.

³ In a post-production talk during the April-May 1996 run of The Emperor Jones at the Kaaitheater, Brussels, the Wooster Group has acknowledged drawing inspiration from Micheaux. While Christopher Kondek and Elizabeth LeCompte in 1999 based a video creation on the stage production, the present analysis builds on the stage version.

⁴ Eric Lott (140) has also established the link between the early minstrel show and what Tom Gunning has called the cinema of attraction.

⁵ The Library of America “Chronology” (1068-9) somewhat speciously omits O’Neill’s blackface performance in Thirst.

⁶ See Mantan’s racial caricature in Spike Lee’s satirical movie, Bamboozled (2000). The movie’s website at <www.bamboozledmovie.com> contains essays on the history of blackface, minstrels and African-Americans on TV, including some clips. One of the sketches features a porter cap, showing that Jones’s part is a stock character in the minstrel tradition.

⁷ See Poole and Musser 304N34 for the linking of Jones to Garvey and the latter’s condemnation of O’Neill’s play and Robeson’s performance in the October 1935 and June 1939 issues of the British monthly, Black Man.

⁸ As Bowser and Spence reveal, one should, however, distinguish between the doom of adverse criticism (178) and that of racial apology or middle-class contentment (181).

⁹ Ben-Zvi includes a discussion of another, equally realistic script adaptation of The Emperor Jones, credited to Murphy rather than to Heyward. While it is undated, its brevity, lack of detail and limited divergence from the original may indicate it preceded Heyward’s script.

¹⁰ The 1919 Provincetown Players’ production of O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid was among the first to have an all-black cast. On Gilpin see Wilson 392-5 and Krasner.

¹¹ See the reproductions in Stewart (ed.) 80, 97. Another one by Steichen of Robeson as the semi-nude boxer (based on heavyweight champion Jack Johnson) in Jim Tulley and Frank Dazey’s play, Black Boy (1926), fits the tradition of male athletes’ popular representations, as well as feeds on the stereotype of the threatening black rapist (see the reproduction on 141 glossed by Stewart 137, 140).

¹² The double-edged strategy of Negro Spiritual, simultaneously to display and contain the body through its spiritualization and formalization failed once Salemmé had painted the statue black and was refused to exhibit it as such by the Philadelphia Art Alliance lest it disturb race relations (Stewart 153-4).

¹³ Dudley Murphy visually insisted on Jones’s costume changes (Pullman porter, business tuxedo, Napoleonic) to symbolize his wordly rise (Orlandello 57-8).

¹⁴ Bowser and Spence 192, 255n41 (spelled “Stephens”); Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen xxvi (spelled “Stevens”). The black-cast revival of Roseanne in the Shubert­Riviera on upper Broadway degenerated into pure entertainment because of the many encores of negro spirituals taken (Bowser and Spence 205).

¹⁵ As a result of the adverse criticism, Micheaux’s movie did poorly at the box­office, radically curtailing Robeson’s contractually determined 3% of the gross income above $40,000. Taken together, the personal and financial slights, Musser claims, made the movie anathema to Robeson and the reason why Dudley Murphy’s 1933 film adaptation of The Emperor Jones has long been considered Robeson’s cinematic debut. This myth, still prolonged by Orlandello and also ignoring Kenneth Macpherson’s Borderline (1930), required that the Micheaux connection be downplayed in favour of the one with O’Neill, regardless of the controversy that, too, involved with All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

¹⁶ In combination with the comically transformed lamp stands (recycled in later productions), the ivy equally demystified the dark forest’s metaphorical suggestions of an evil racial subconscious.

¹⁷ Through Valk’s expert manipulation the microphone shaft/rod became an all­purpose prop—staff, walking stick, rifle, or telescope—forcing her down on her knees, when Jones realizes how low he has sunk (1052). During the auction scene Valk is seen peering through the upright stand and turned-down extension rod, like a ferocious beast snarling through the bars of its cage. The removal of the microphone from its stand/rod and its subsequent disappearance conveyed Jones’s loss of power, his diminishment from public to private person and, finally, to racial icon.

¹⁸ While “melting” does not figure among Lévi-Strauss’s principal modes of cooking (roasting, boiling and smoking), it comes closest to “boiling,” for requiring a receptacle (or cultural object) to mediate its exposure to the agent of conversion (the fire) (Leach 27-8).

¹⁹ Technically speaking, the adjectival plural bonnes ought to be translated as “good” in the adverbial sense. Sperber 33 paraphrases this as “food for thought” instead of plain food.

²⁰ The music was by David Linton, the sound editor was Dan Dobson, the sound recordists James “J. J.” Johnson and John Collins.

²¹ The adoption of white colonialist attitudes by black rulers also applies to Henri Christophe or Haiti’s President Sam, who apparently served as models for Brutus Jones (Hornby 14; Shaughnessy 151). While commentators seem to agree on Haiti standing model for O’Neill’s West Indian island setting, the self-contradictory specification that it is “as yet not self-determined by the White Marines” (1030; my emphasis) equally recalls the US liberation of Cuba from the Spaniards in 1898 and the founding of the republic in 1902, provided its constitution include the Platt-Amendment, giving the US the right to military bases on Cuban territory and military interventions, so as to guarantee political and economic stability.

²² Pfister 136 believes that O’Neill’s insight into the internalization of racism stands in contradiction to his psychological determinism. This may be true, but whether this internalization makes it easier for Jones to escape its detrimental effects remains moot.

²³ Jones’s hubristic claims to superhuman status, beyond the confines of human morality and its work ethos, parallel those of Jenkins in Body and Soul (Bowser and Spence 194).

24 The Emperor Jones first appeared in Theatre Arts Magazine of January 1921. In April of that year Boni & Liveright published the play, in a slightly revised form, together with Diff’rent and The Straw. Still in the same year Stewart Kidd Company, Cincinnati, released another edition, which O’Neill did not supervise. The Library of America edition quotes the omitted lines in the notes (1103-4). The first passage runs: “(Then putting business before the pleasure of his thought, looking around him with cupidity.) A bloke ought to find a ‘ole lot in this palace that’d go for a bit of cash. Let’s take a look, ‘Arry, me lad; (He starts for the doorway on right as . . .” The second reads: “LEM makes a motion to the soldiers to carry the body out left. SMITHERS speaks to him sneeringly.) SMITHERS—And I s’pose you think it’s yer bleedin’ charms and yer silly beatin’ the drum that made ‘im run in a circle when ‘e’d lost ‘imself, don’t yer? (But LEM makes no reply, does not seem to hear the question, walks out left after his men. SMITHERS looks after him with contemptuous scorn.) Stupid as ‘ogs, the lot of ‘em! Blarsted niggers!”

²⁵ Other examples of the inversion principle at work in the Wooster Group’s production of The Emperor Jones included the L-shaped black ramp lining the white stage floor on two sides (even if recycled from Brace Up! and FinISHed Story); the substitution of blinding floodlights for the more common blackouts at the end of Scene 1 (reminiscent of Foreman’s aggressive theater of disequilibrium); the shifting diamond patterns on the stage monitor; and the switching, from the crap shooting scene onwards, of the colours in the diaphragm pulsating to the sound of Jones’s gunshots, with the crimson fringe growing ever intenser, the black core ever darker. True, the video images and floorboards also substantiated a geometric fragmentation, similar to Lévi-Strauss’s “reticulation”—the armature or matrix of transformational groups he sought to establish. Along more traditional lines, the cross-pattern, as in the auctioneer’s video image, expressionistically (or cubistically) conveyed Jones’s subjective perspective of the caged slave or the disintegration (“unraveling”) of Jones’s mind. After all, the play traces the shattering of the barriers between his conscious and unconscious self, accompanied at one point in the show by the sound of breaking glass.

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_____. La pensèe sauvage. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1962a.

_____. Le totèmisme aujourd'hui. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1962b.

_____. Anthropologie Structurale. 1958. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1974.

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_____."Memoranda on Masks" (1932). Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990. Ed. George W Brandt. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998. 153-155.

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Porter, Thomas. "Jansenism and the `Black Soul' of Eugene O'Neill." Paper read at the Fifth International Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Society, 5-9 June 2003, Tours, France. [See Porter’s revised essay of his paper in this issue.]