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Closed Theatres and Open Books: Reading and Rereading O'Neill

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.1.0064

2161-4318

Octavio Solis, Dana Schultes, Yvette Nolan, Michael Paller,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Of all the plays I could have selected for a reevaluation of Eugene O'Neill, I had to choose this one. With everything going on in the world around May 25, 2020—George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the stark social/racial inequities laid before us by COVID-19—I had to pick The Emperor Jones. Even as theatre artists are calling for deep-tissue changes in the structures around theatre-making and administration so they more accurately reflect the demographics of people of color, and as Black and Brown writers and artists like myself are clamoring for more opportunities to tell and actualize our own stories on the stage, O'Neill's curiously dark tale of a toppled tinpot despot inserts itself into the discussion.The Emperor Jones is one of those works I came to very early in my studies. Back when I was a freshman in college, all of us drama majors had to buy Masters of Modern Drama for theatre analysis class. I still have it on my shelf, this imposing tome with the frayed spine filled with forty-four of the plays that once constituted the modern Western canon. Everything from Ghosts to The Glass Menagerie to The Lower Depths, from Camus's Caligula to Awake and Sing! to At the Hawk's Well to Marty and Look Back in Anger and No Exit and, of course, two prominent works of O'Neill's. The Iceman Cometh was assigned to us, but I felt compelled to read The Emperor Jones on the side. I think I responded deeper to that play back in 1976, though I can't at the moment say why. I only remember how difficult it was to maneuver around the strange ways in which the author tried to convey both Cockney and African American dialects.But this time, I consciously chose this play because I happen to own a copy of a bound limited edition signed by O'Neill and handsomely illustrated by Alexander King. I wanted to know what it is I am in possession of and why I regard it as valuable. I thought it was an old chestnut, but clearly, it is still considered a masterpiece of great production potential. Mounted as recently as 2009 by the Irish Repertory Theatre and the Gate Theatre in London in 2005, The Emperor Jones received its most infamous staging by the Wooster Group when it was directed by Elizabeth LeCompte with Kate Valk playing Brutus Jones in blackface. That experimental production was staged frequently from 1992 all the way through 2009. The play continues to fascinate and astound viewers.When O'Neill wrote this work, he was still basking in the glory of his first Pulitzer Prize win for Beyond the Horizon in 1920. But when The Emperor Jones opened for the Provincetown Playhouse in November of that year, it caught fire immediately. Although the language of the play strives for a realism that was pretty rare for its time in the United States, the mise en scène and the structure of the story itself feels entirely Expressionistic. The unique manner in which we plunge into this haunted man's soul as he loses himself in his personal jungle is stark and rich with magical theatricality. One feels the organic life of the jungle itself breathing and moving behind Jones, stalking his every move. Although there are demons, ghosts, witch doctors, and apparitions of American slavery moving through the work, it truly feels like this play of eight tautly written scenes is actually one single running monologue performed by Jones. It's a tour de force for a powerhouse actor, like Charles S. Gilpin, who first performed the role, or Paul Robeson, who followed suit and eventually acted in the film version. Even Ossie Davis performed the role for television.The story tracks the downfall of Brutus Jones, emperor of some unnamed isle, as he makes his escape from the revolution that is taking place all around him. As the play opens to the constant drumbeat of the tom-tom, which will thread through all the scenes of the play in an aural soundtrack of doom, we see an old Black native woman sneaking through the throne room, white and palatial. She is interrupted by Smithers, a Cockney trader who wants to know what's going on. She tells him all the staff are headed to the hills and that the rebellion is coming. Smithers delights in the news as he thinks Jones is due for a comeuppance for acting so high and mighty. When the emperor makes his entrance, Smithers tells him about the rebellion of Lem and his men and suggests that he escape through the forest before he gets killed. Jones jeers at him with his pistol. “I'se got five lead bullets in dis gun good enuff fo' common bush niggers—and after dat, I got de silver bullet left to cheat ‘em out o’ gittin' me.”Given that the play was previously titled The Silver Bullet, the significance of this bullet is paramount. Over the course of each ensuing scene, Jones fires at his imagined specters until he has only the silver bullet left. This bullet is O'Neill's simple and methodical tension-builder to the climax of the play. It's kind of a rote device he employs, but there are still some surprises in store.In this first scene, the longest in the play, the exchange between Jones and Smithers goes from confrontational to almost fraternal as we see how they are both implicated in the initial colonization of this island empire. But Smithers delights in teasing and egging Jones on, like Iago manipulating Othello. He conjures up cabals with war dances and “devil spells and charms” to frighten Jones, even planting the notion that the forest itself is a force of evil, “a bleedin' queer place, that stinkin' forest, even in daylight.” Jones counters with contempt and bravado, asserting his superiority over his subjects: “Ain't a man's talkin' big what make him big—long as he makes folks believe it? Sho', I talks large when I ain't got nothin' to back it up, but I ain't talkin' wild just de same. I knows I kin fool ‘em—I knows it—and dat's backin’ enough fo' my game.”Of course, this is hubris of the most tragical kind, and this grandiose self-confidence will bring his ruin. And scene by scene, over the course of Jones's escape into the jungle, which he professes to know “high an' low like a book,” that veneer of bloated arrogance is stripped away. Smithers maliciously bids him farewell by saying, “give my regards to any ghosts yer meets up with.” Which is exactly what happens in the rest of the play.Each scene tracks Brutus Jones as he tires, grows hungry, then gets lost in the dense jungle. The first apparitions he encounters in scene 2 are “Little Formless Fears,” creatures that are “black, shapeless,” with only their “glittering little eyes” visible. They move toward him with low mocking laughter and he shoots his gun at them in terror. They are, of course, manifestations of Smithers's own bodings, insubstantial as shadows, but they are real and daunting enough to warrant a shot from Jones's gun.After this, the fears take on more specific form. In scene 3, the silent crouching figure of a man Jones had murdered for cheating at a game of craps appears. Dressed in a Pullman porter uniform, Jeff silently crouches, casting dice over and over robotically, never responding to Jones's exhortations. Perhaps Jones senses that his dead friend is casting lots for his life, and thus he dispels this ghost with another shot from his gun.Scene 4 finds Jones coming upon a group of Black convicts he knew when he was jailed. He replays the moment when the White jailer whips him and he retaliates by smashing him over the head with his shovel, killing him. Except that in this phantasmagoric scene, the shovel vanishes and the jailer lives on, glaring at him in judgment. So another pistol shot dispatches this apparition in turn.By the time Jones arrives at a clearing in scene 5, his clothes are ripped and shoes torn apart, and he's suddenly standing on an auction block in a previous century, with prosperous White “planters” and “young belles and dandies” all gathered around for their amusement. Now we are not only traveling back into Jones's personal history, but we are also descending into the maelstrom of his cultural past. Wordlessly, these White well-to-do planters feel his thighs and appraise him as the auctioneers begins to take bids for his body. Evidently, everyone eagerly raises their hands to bid on him. It is another kind of ugly death he is called to and in horror Jones cries, “I shows you I'se a free nigger, damn yo' souls!” and fires his gun at them. This act reduces him to sobs as he is cast in darkness. He flees in terror as the drumbeats close in.Every moment seems to take him back further in time, from the overcrowded steaming slave ships coursing the open seas in scene 6 to the jungles of Africa, where a witch-doctor torments him as he prepares to sacrifice him to a supernatural crocodile rising out of the water. In this seventh scene, Jones expends his final silver bullet on the charging crocodile deity and collapses to the ground in despair. He cannot even fall on his own sword, leaving only an ignominious death for his end. The final scene results in Lem and his rebel soldiers killing Brutus Jones with their own specially forged bullets, ending on a final ironic cackle from Smithers himself as he stands over the wracked body: “Where's yer 'igh an' mighty airs now, yer bloomin' majesty? (then with a grin) Silver bullets! Gawd blimey, but yer died in the 'eighth o' style, any'ow!”It's a long, torturous, and humiliating demise of a decidedly flawed ruler, but his death engenders further humiliation from the only White character in the play. I think that abasement is meant to stick in our craw.In reading this play for the second time in my life, I bring all the tools I've acquired as a playwright since my education in the mid-1970s. People change, approaches evolve, we reeducate ourselves according to the societal and artistic advances we make, the world changes; the words on the page do not. We're in an entirely new century, too. This work was written exactly 100 years ago, and therefore I struggle to keep my perspective distinct from the context of the play. I want to see the play in its proper frame as an innovative work of its time, tapping into the artistic movements that circulated around New York back then. Then there is a part of me that wishes to see it outside of time, a work of untouchable genius, constant and enduring. But I think that it is when I bring to bear my present-day biases and “triggers,” if you will, that the work begins to breathe again. It is then that the words, even as they remain unchanged, change me radically.Apparently, O'Neill was thought to be offering some sharp commentary on the US invasion of Haiti around that time (1915), but it's meaningless to us now, since we don't even register that historical event today. Moreover, that country has subsequently endured a long line of its own despots, from the brutal Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier to the beneficiaries of various coups d'état. We take Emperor Brutus Jones as his own brand of dictator on an island empire that could stand for any in the Western Hemisphere, many of which the United States has laid claim to at one time or another. In any case, the politics of that specific situation pale in comparison to the larger social treatise that O'Neill serves up in the play.It seems that Eugene O'Neill is making a point about how this country has heightened the shortcomings of Blacks in America and in so doing constricted their greatness. Jones runs through the jungle, but he can't make any headway since he is found exactly where he set out. He simply runs himself in circles. But more significantly, he runs back through time to show us the indignities of daily oppression, incarceration, and slavery that lie at the heart of his being. Taken on its own, it's a really effective expressionistic structure for demonstrating this thesis, since it allows Jones to confront these ghosts and dispatch them with his weapon, which in the end is futile against them.However, O'Neill never really gives Jones much of a fighting chance. He turns him into a modern-day Macbeth, innately arrogant, deceptive, and murderous. There is nothing honorable about this tragic hero who cares more for his patent-leather shoes than he does for his subjects, and so he seems neither tragical nor heroic in his fall. Without really wanting to, O'Neill has stacked the deck so much against his protagonist that he appears as a frightened, defensive fool, and so the message we are left with is, well, he had it coming. And even more unsettling, there's the sense that one can't entrust formidable men like Brutus Jones with real power. But I know this can't be at the root of this story.In my conversations about the play with Nataki Garrett Myers, the new artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I learned some context for the work. She told me that in his day Eugene O'Neill was a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. He hung around with a lot of the great writers and artists of the period because he related to them and their struggle. She reminded me that in the nineteenth century, the Irish, most of whom were newly arrived poor immigrants, were maligned and discriminated against in this country, and so “[O'Neill] felt closer to Black folks than he did to White folks.” He wrote six plays that prominently featured Black characters, Thirst, The Dreamy Kid, The Moon of the Caribbees, The Emperor Jones, All God's Chillun Got Wings, and The Iceman Cometh. He was genuinely concerned for the struggles of African Americans for socioeconomic parity and connected to the prejudice they faced every day. These works highlighted some of those struggles and, if nothing else, broke with harmful stereotypes and evinced the deeper humanity in characters who were Black. By creating these works, O'Neill gave many actors of color their start, including Gilpin and Robeson. And yet, Ms. Garrett Myers adds that “he was still colonizing us,” and that point bears remembering.I find it disturbing that Brutus Jones's text sometimes ventures into stilted and unnatural Stepin Fetchit language. He says lines like “Feet, do yo' duty!” I find it disturbing, not that the N-word is used frequently in the work, since it seems natural for former convict Brutus and seaman Smithers to use it, but that Gilpin sought to change its frequency in the play and almost left the show because of it. I find it disturbing not that the production was a great hit for the Provincetown Players, but that there was no place back then for African American playwrights to have their plays produced with the same critical attention. I find it disturbing that there is a stereotype of a “witch-doctor” in a late scene who conducts a ritual that bears no resemblance to anything but the most clichéd Tarzan movie tropes. And I find it disturbing that in those places where the playwright can employ his own voice, to wit, in the stage directions, he describes the rebel leader Lem thus: “Lem is a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type, dressed only in a loin cloth.”These facets get in the way of a real appreciation of The Emperor Jones, and yet they are indelible parts of it. You can't erase them. You can't undo them. And I think that's actually a really good thing. In the end O'Neill can only be as enlightened as the age he lived in, and I must give him credit for extending his reach beyond what he could truly grasp. There was no precedent play by an American dramatist that dealt as directly with the legacy of slavery and oppression. He saw that the nightmare in every Black person's eyes extended deeply into their collective DNA memory, and that White America bore the responsibility for everything that would come after. Clearly, we've come a long way, and African Americans would like nothing more than to shed the burden of that legacy. But that won't happen until we all take a nosedive into the jungles of our own messy murders and injustices.If I ponder it further, I suppose I was initially drawn to The Emperor Jones in 1976 because I was one of the few Latinos in the theatre department of my university, certainly the only one in my class. I don't recall any Black student in any of my theatre classes. This play made me feel less alone in my milieu and, by the same token, engendered the same fears. Jones's struggle to define himself within a society that marked him as an outsider and a failure was something I could, on some unconscious level, identify with. Today, reading the work with more enlightened eyes, I find the words in The Emperor Jones ever more poignant and humbling, for they still resonate with the cruel times we live in.I would love to see the Wooster Group performance of The Emperor Jones, but the DVD costs a prohibitive $350.00. I can imagine how they deconstructed O'Neill's play in order to get at deeper, more contemporary truths. But I think the play now needs to belong to an African American director or company who can layer unacknowledged new meanings onto older, staler 100-year-old ideas, even as new African American works would need to accompany it in a new edition of Masters of Modern Drama.OCTAVIO SOLIS is a playwright and author whose works have been produced in theatres across the country since 1988. His fiction and short plays have appeared in the Louisville Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arroyo Literary Review, Huizache, and Stone Gathering. His new book, Retablos, is published by City Lights Books recently won the 2019 Silver Indies Award for Book of the Year from Foreword Reviews. His new plays, Mother Road and Quixote Nuevo, premiered in 2019. A Thornton Wilder Fellow for the MacDowell Colony and a member of the Dramatists Guild, Solis has been recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.I read Long Day's Journey Into Night back in high school and have brushed through it again on occasion as a potential selection for Stage West Theatre in Fort Worth, Texas, where I serve as executive producer, but I haven't had much exposure to Eugene O'Neill's work beyond that. That hasn't been for lack of interest. We don't intentionally avoid his work, but our programming tends toward more contemporary plays. The mission of Stage West, a nonprofit, is to entertain, inspire, and challenge. We are passionate about connecting the North Texas community through great live theatre. So, why not include more classics? The answer is twofold. A lot of older plays contain problematic themes, and my own working knowledge of classic literature is limited. There are only so many hours left in the day for reading plays after factoring in the many hats required by my position, combined with my career as an Equity actress and independent director, as well as a mom. During the season selection process, I explore upwards of 100 plays each year. That exploration is often quick. The play has to catch me right away or I lose momentum with it. Often, I am led to new material through word-of-mouth recommendations from colleagues, critics, and patrons of the arts. Sadly, classics are rarely included. Those I have to find on my own, and in all honesty, it is a bit of a personal and professional embarrassment for me not to be more well read with regard to O'Neill. As a result, I was excited to receive the invitation to write a response on one of his plays. I selected “Anna Christie” and was not disappointed in the least.Spending some quality time considering the play from my perspective as a theatre-maker revealed to me its rich, timeless themes and relevance to life today: alcoholism, the parent-child relationship, social stigma of sex-workers, love. The play is dark and gritty yet filled with hope and desire. Those qualities score high marks for me. O'Neill provides a clear road map to explore those themes, but a wise director would want to be sure to keep a light touch in the staging. It could easily fall prey to melodrama, a place I avoid like the plague unless I am producing an actual melodrama. Hiring three smart actors with classical training along with a director and design team that connects well with the work would be vital, especially if the setting remains in 1910. The team must understand the multitude of details that differentiate life then from now.I enjoyed all of the characters and the general story, though Mat was a bit of a pill who deserved a punch in the guts. In fact, there are plenty of elements within the play that feel as current as anything written this year. The insane amount of alcohol, for example, would easily feel at home in any Martin McDonagh play. If I were to produce this play, I would want to fully embrace the called-for consumption of alcohol, though it would pose a decent expense since much of the drink is beer. There is no faking the sound of a beer bottle opening and the way a beer looks when poured. In my experience with other plays that called for beer on stage, nonalcoholic beer works well as a substitute and an evening's run-through could call for as much as a case! The whiskey would be easy, though: flat coke and water would suffice. An actor would be challenged to keep up with the pace set by the playwright. Furthermore, actors would need to figure out how to balance their caloric intake as all those beers add up to a lot of onstage calories when factoring in four-plus performances per week over an extended run!The play opens in Johnny the Priest's bar, where the audience is immediately introduced to some colorful characters indulging in their cups. From the opening lines, as a couple of longshoremen order a fast few shots of whiskey, the scene is set: working-class society, hard drinking, hard life. Those harbor men down a few drinks in rapid succession and then hurry back to work. Soon after, we meet Chris Christopherson and Marthy, who revel in each other's companionship while seeking their own relief and respite in the bottle. They drink to escape. They drink to celebrate. They drink to drown their sorrows. For an audience member viewing the production, it would be affecting to see these folks pound out one drink after another. Indeed, after seeing how they toss them back, it would elevate the understanding of how tanked Chris and Mat likely get at the end of act 3, when they leave Anna, fresh from exposing her darkest secrets, to go hit the bar. O'Neill sets it up well, paving the way for a director to fully lean into the moment.He also creates a fantastic character in the ever-present sea. It's the cunning siren that brings all the human characters together. Over and over again, like poetry, Chris speaks of the “ol' davil sea.” I loved the repetition. All of the characters' livelihoods, directly or indirectly, relate to the sea. It represents their lives and their losses. It lingers in many forms, such as when it presents itself as the fog from which Anna and Chris emerge, pulling Mat from nearly drowning. The image of the fog curling itself around the trio as they pull themselves from its grasp is one I would love to stage. The sea is one of the most interesting elements, providing ample opportunities for directors and sound designers to give it voice throughout with a rich soundscape during preshow, intermissions, and layered under opportune moments. In O'Neill's script, its presence is always felt, and the more that a production can embrace that element, the better! In my production I'd push it to its limits early in the rehearsal process and then simplify it to the essentials to ensure it didn't tip over into the realm of corny. Less is generally always more. My mentor, Jerry Russell, the founder of Stage West, would always tell me to “K.I.S.S.” (“Keep It Simple, Sweetie”—except he learned it a little differently). I keep that strategy alive with most things Stage West.We, the audience, should feel our heroes hypnotically at the mercy of the rhythm of the waves and the promise of escape. As a director I would explore this through conversation with the actors during rehearsals by building in sense-memory moments, especially when the characters are in conflict. That would entail layering in the idea of escape by sea or resentment of the sea into the actors' character development. A sound designer could aid this by strategically raising the volume on a sound-of-sea effect. Again, I would want to use such a tool judiciously so that it didn't lose its power. A barely there subliminal sound throughout could equal the power of a single strong and clear sound effect of waves. The latter could be a nice button at the very end of the play as the lights fade out on the scene.In “Anna Christie,” it is vital to make sure the audience becomes fully invested in the titular character's journey as well as in the beat-up yet loving relationship between father and daughter. This play has brought together numerous father-daughter acting duos. Good. That natural relationship is one that any casting director should seek out, with an eye toward actors who energize a room the moment they walk in. The audience should have no doubt that Chris loves his Anna and carries with him numerous regrets with regard to her upbringing. They should relate to his struggle to be a good dad while also realizing how much his life decisions negatively impacted Anna. The same is true for Anna as she seeks her father's acceptance and approval, all the while navigating the impacts of his choices upon her life. Theoretically, Anna would still be in Sweden, where perhaps her mother would still be alive and their family still together, had Chris not chosen the sea over his family.Everything comes back to Anna, though, and a successful production would ensure that through-line. From the loss of her mother, to being sent by her absent father to live with distant relatives who abuse and rape her, to having to support herself as a prostitute, Anna is torn apart by society for simply trying to survive. Her struggle is incredibly tragic and the resolution is a bit dated. Anna, who has suffered unbelievably at the hands of men, has to prove her mind and heart are pure for brutish Mat in order to be accepted and saved by him. I resented this plot twist and struggled with how I would make peace with it as a director or actor. As a strong, independent woman, I do not like to see a woman grovel like that. Mat requires her to atone for her “sins” but to me her only sin was survival. That is no sin in my book. I would need to find a way “in” to justify this moment as an actor and director. I would seek a way to show that she wins on her own terms, regardless of the course of the dialogue on the page. If I were playing Anna, for example, I would double down on that fire inside her and perhaps use the reality of what happened back west as a bargaining chip to ensure a secure place on the coast. Finding a way to give Mat some redeeming qualities would be helpful as well. I would advise a clever director-actor team to discover one or two well-timed, clearly focused facial expressions or gestures. Those can be worth a thousand words and can make a dated moment current and relevant. In my rehearsal room, this section of the play would be given extra-special attention.Returning to the need for Anna to find worth in Mat, it is also worth a comparison to “where we are now.” There is a ridiculous stigma and ridicule placed on any woman deemed to be “promiscuous,” and certainly toward any woman who finds herself using sex to support herself, especially when compared to how any man is judged under the same circumstances. Whether she be an exotic dancer or a call girl, she should be free to make the choices she needs to make to support herself and her family, and should be given the support of the educational and healthcare systems to do so safely. It is a bit irritating to think Ibsen penned Nora's way out of her unhappy, failed marriage—claiming her agency and independence—over forty years prior to Anna's plight. Thus, goes history: a bold step forward, followed by plenty in reverse. Still, there is heart, and in the context of 1910, it is understandable. We women had not even gained our suffrage at that point.One last element of the play intrigued me and gave me an excellent connection between 1910 and 2020. All of the characters' situations are made more complex by their immigrant status. We know, intellectually, that immigrants must work harder, starting from the bottom, to create a place of belonging in society. I appreciated spending the time with each of them and found O'Neill's written-out Swedish and Irish dialects to be a fascinating device not only for performers but also for readers! I was always aware of their status as immigrants, and that kept me connected to the characters in a rewarding way. These tiny details, paired with the elaborate character and setting descriptions, did an excellent job of bringing the entire world to life for me. Perhaps a way to reach the immigrant experience more fully would be to lightly adapt the text to allow the characters to be from Haiti or Ecuador, for example. The struggle of the Swedish immigrant today is virtually nonexistent with regard to prejudice. Introducing actors who can better represent the 2020 immigrant experience would strengthen this part of the show. Here in North Texas our community is rich with immigrant individuals whose struggles with discrimination might resonate deeply with the hardships faced in “Anna Christie.” That said, it would be important to make sure casting never felt like tokenism but instead highlighted a universality of the play.This project was a delight to work on and a welcome distraction from COVID-19 and the challenges it has brought forth for our nation and, more personally, the theatre industry. It was nice to be challenged. I look forward to reading more of the O'Neill canon, and, who knows, Stage West Theatre may be spotlighting one of them on stage in the future, and hopefully sooner rather than later.DANA SCHULTES is the executive produ