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The Black Emperor of Broadway

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.2.0226

2161-4318

Shane Breaux,

Black actor Charles S. Gilpin, white playwright Eugene O'Neill, and the Provincetown Players made US theater history when they first staged The Emperor Jones in 1920. The attention that production generated was due partially to the play's situatedness in an emergent tradition of serious American drama and partially to the assignment of the title role to Gilpin, rather than, more conventionally, to a white actor in dark makeup. The first run at the Playwrights' Theatre, and the play's subsequent move to Broadway and a national tour, is now considered a turning point in American drama not only for solidifying O'Neill's burgeoning success but also for enabling Gilpin's groundbreaking performance. It also informs the story told in The Black Emperor of Broadway, directed by Arthur Egeli with a screenplay by Ian Bowater, adapted from Adrienne Earle Pender's stage play N (2015).While Gilpin was not the first African American actor to star on Broadway, as the film's Facebook page erroneously claims, he was the first to star in a noncomedic role in a straight play. (Black performers such as George Walker, Bert Williams, and Aida Overton Walker had already starred in musical comedies nearly two decades prior to The Emperor Jones's transfer to Broadway.) Nonetheless, Gilpin's performance marked both a significant shift in conventions of casting and a dilatory recognition that Black performers could be major box-office draws without singing and dancing in blackface. This production paved the way for future Black actors to take on serious leading roles. Yet Gilpin is largely unknown today, partially eclipsed by Paul Robeson, who took over the role of Brutus Jones in revivals of the play and in the 1933 film adaptation. This important history requires nuanced storytelling that bears its responsibility without flinching at the realities of institutionalized American racism.Pender's N fits that bill. It is an intimate play for three actors playing O'Neill, Gilpin, and Gilpin's wife, Florence. Pender creates a moving portrait of the Gilpins' marriage as they do their best to thrive despite life in the United States. Charles's need for the job and his reluctance to agree to all of the requests or demands of his employer, particularly that he tolerate (and speak) the “N” word on stage, are mirrored in Florence's experience as a maid. The couple's reckoning with wide-reaching racism and their participation in its perpetuation are among the play's and film's strengths. Shaun Parkes as Charles and Nija Okoro as Florence give their most earnest performances in the safe and private space of their home. Okoro, in particular, makes the most of Florence's attempts to balance her frustration with Charles for even considering changing the playwright's word choice with her own experiences at work, where she often had to say “yes, ma'am” when she meant “no.”However, it is the relationship between the playwright and actor, O'Neill and Gilpin, that provides the centerpiece of both play and film. The tenuous friendship and fractious collaboration of these artists came to a head when they quarreled over issues of racial representation and questions concerning who can or should tell stories about African Americans and who truly creates theater and attracts audiences: the playwright or the actor. While N is without a doubt Charles Gilpin's play, Pender's coalescing of the stories of all three characters and the original production of The Emperor Jones exposes larger issues of race, class, and the American theater evident in our own cultural moment's concerns about authenticity, cultural appropriation, and racist legacies in reality and in the arts.The play's depiction of the fight between playwright and actor is most effective when Pender uses their debates about theater to ignite and underscore their disagreements about race, for in the American theater the two are inseparable. For example, when trying to exert authority over his actor, O'Neill argues that he knows Brutus Jones better than anyone because he created him through text, but Gilpin disagrees, claiming that he created the role through embodiment. Gilpin argues that, as the actor who lived in the character's skin throughout the process (and who, he points out, actually is African American), he has insights into the character that the playwright had not considered. Gilpin's rationale for not saying the “N” word includes both his personal understanding of the word's psychic, physical, and social violence as well as Jones's Black character who, Gilpin says, would not use the word because it is “a word white people call us.”Trying to have the last word, Gilpin would substitute “Colored” or “Negro” for the epithet in performance, which riled the young playwright who adamantly opposed any changes to his script. At the same time, Gilpin understood his need to establish himself as a serious Black actor in order to evoke necessary changes in casting and representational practices—and, of course, to survive. Even more distressing to Gilpin was his awareness that in order to earn that reputation, he would have to agree to whatever those in power required of him, paradoxically meaning he would have to participate in what he considered racist behavior in order to upend it. Pender's interplay of racial conflict between a Black artist who would die in obscurity and a mostly well-intentioned white artist who would be considered the father of American drama provides a rich and convincing exploration of a little-known moment in American theater history.These historical events, and Pender's complex approach to them, deserve wider attention, and Egeli and Bowater's film should be celebrated for attempting to do so. Unfortunately, their adaptation actually diminishes the complexity and lyricism of Pender's play by playing fast and loose with history, thereby shutting down a nuanced discussion of race and creating a sentimentalized melodrama that is more James O'Neill than Eugene. The problems become clearest when the film is compared to the play. This might be explained by the shift in medium: a quiet three-hander is more welcome on stage than on the screen. In some ways, the expanded scope of the film is successful, particularly when it fleshes out African American responses to racism, including new scenes where Gilpin meets leading Black intellectuals and artists of the period (Anita Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes) and talks about the politics and responsibilities of artistic creation and representation from African American perspectives.But most other adjustments Egeli and Bowater make to open the play up to the larger scope of film seriously undermine Pender's complex representation of racism as well as Gilpin's agency, specifically his own attempts to work against racism. For instance, the film's O'Neill (John Carter Hensley) is portrayed as a cartoonish racist villain without analogue in Pender's play. During Gilpin's first rehearsal, the actor changes the script's “N” word to “Colored,” and O'Neill objects. Pender's O'Neill firmly orders Gilpin to speak the words as written but accompanied by a condescending “PLEASE.” In the same moment in the film, O'Neill threatens Gilpin that if he ever changes any words again, “I will jump up on this stage, and I will beat you up in front of the entire company.” While O'Neill's physical threat has been documented, it is not in Pender's play, and including it in the film undermines her implicit critique that even “woke” (to use the contemporary vernacular) and well-intentioned white people behave in racist ways because it is so entrenched in society.Bowater's other changes skew the play's focus on Gilpin by adding scenes from O'Neill's domestic life. When O'Neill is not seen brooding over his typewriter or pensively walking along the beach at sunset like a Romantic hero, he is at home with his wife, Agnes (Boulton), who belittles him and his potential for theatrical success. In addition, Bowater reduces Gilpin's place in his own story by assigning words that Gilpin speaks in the play to various white characters. This is especially troubling with respect to the moments in which Gilpin and O'Neill argue about racial representation and about their shared frustrations with reconciling their art and their need for material gain and personal recognition. In Pender's play these two giant artists and egos clash about race, to be sure, but also about life, art, and social responsibility. This is not so in the film: when Bowater transfers Gilpin's dialogue to O'Neill's white compatriots, he denies the complexity of Gilpin's reaction to his powerful white employer. In the film Gilpin doesn't speak truth to power as he does in the play and as he did in reality, making him seem to be more like the “yes man” he so desperately tried to escape in his life.One of the most extreme (and questionable) changes made to the play is in a pivotal moment near the end when Gilpin and O'Neill meet again after their bitter falling-out over O'Neill's decision to replace Gilpin with Robeson. Both artists need another commercial hit, and Gilpin, yearning to continue the groundbreaking work he began in the first run of The Emperor Jones, begs O'Neill to hire him for a planned revival of it. Not to be fooled again, O'Neill agrees but only if Gilpin promises to say all the words as written. In the play, however, O'Neill forces Gilpin to say the “N” word as proof of his conciliation—and to humiliate the actor. Gilpin refuses, collapses to the stage, and apologizes, but O'Neill does not hear him: he has already exited, and Gilpin is left alone. Even on paper, the moment is unsettling. However, in the film, the same scene features a teary-eyed O'Neill so desperate for another success that he agrees to hire Gilpin and to remove “that word” from the play. This troubling invention of the movie's well-intentioned white filmmakers implies a false resolution regarding racism in the United States and its theater; this rings hollow today, as it would have in the 1920s. Everyone involved—O'Neill, Gilpin, the Provincetown Players, Black artists of the 1920s—deserves more than what this film provides. Pender's N is a great start, but there is much more to be done.