Those who haven’t read Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones will leave the Irish Repertory’s new production occupied with a single question:  is this a bad play, or is it just a contrived staging? They’ll be nearly mystified at their dulled senses and likely disappointed that the spectacle hasn’t inspired less ireful considerations. (Those who’ve read the play probably stayed home in the first place). It isn’t long before the question is resolved:  both writing and staging are complicit in this dead theater.

This answer comes quickly because the line of questioning soon leads back to the source, and no progeny, as the play tries to remind us, can outrun its provenance. Here is the story:  Brutus Jones, a black American who years ago escaped from a U.S. prison and became the tyrant ruler of a Caribbean island, learns that his slaves have fled to the hills and are preparing to revolt. Over the course of eight scenes he attempts to abscond from the island with his fortune. Eventually physical weariness and guilt over his past overwhelm him. The haughty man becomes suppliant; his garishly regal clothing is reduced to slave tatters; he abjectly prays to his “Lawd.” Sound interesting? The premise, merely by virtue of what details a casual listener may imagine, is poetically more fecund than the actual play, which is the epitome of literary façade-a work whose laborious signifying conveys only its intent.

No matter how “avant garde” it might have seemed to put a black protagonist (whose initial foil is a submissive white overseer) on stage in 1920, its power would have been purely in shock, for today the effect is nondescript-without the shock, we have only uninspired symbols. The destruction of Brutus the Western Black, Brutus the Ostensibly Emancipated Black, and Brutus the Christian American Black, who in his struggle for self-determination subjugates the island’s tribal blacks, is the play’s extended metaphor for man as prisoner of Fate. It isn’t really about race or Western Civilization’s sins of avarice-the ultimate ambition is to bring the Greeks into the 20th Century, and this is attempted by a convoluted conduit:  the primitives represent Nature; Brutus, in his depravity, weakness, and hypocrisy, stands both for the frailty of civilization and for the vanity of individual man’s striving. His skin color and struggle against its history, portrayed under the sound of steady, approaching tribal drums and culminating in his losing both his mind and way in a dark forest, represent the shackle of inevitability that binds all men. Even its most interesting idea – that man cannot be other than who he is by birth, that the will to power or new identity is impossible and ultimately one is cut down by and returned to his origins – which is meant to be signified by the death of Brutus at the hands of the racial kinsmen he scorned and exploited, is impotent. The Emperor Jones pursues it exiguously; Absalom, Absalom establishes it as a law of the universe.

And yet the writing suffers a greater flaw than narrative vacuity – it’s innately alien to the theater. It seems that O’Neill never understood why the medium attracted him more than others. Reading his plays, with their verbose, florid and inane stage directions, one doesn’t get the sense that he conceived for performance, but that he simply wished to tell stories. He was an impostor, a closet novelist manqué who expended more energy and imagination on pages of superfluous description than anything else in the scripts. What good does a scene note such as this do in a play:  “It is late afternoon but the sunlight still blazes yellowly beyond the portico and there is an oppressive burden of exhausting heat in the air.” Yes, that heat can be readily produced in a theater, and with even less difficulty, be given a distinctly “exhausting” quality. Or this:  “His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam’s apple, looks like an egg. The tropics have tanned his naturally pasty face with its small, sharp features to a sickly yellow, and native rum has painted his pointed nose to a startling red.” Only if you forget that the theater is something actual, not abstract, could you believe stage makeup is capable of communicating something so particular as the precise physical history of a character’s face.

Though the heavier guilt falls on O’Neill, it’s not all his – this review is of a performance. It should be said that a theater company’s endeavoring to insufflate dead horses is a significant indication of its faculties of discernment and, by relation, artistic intelligence. To return to our original theme of inevitability, the most heroic and ingenious of productions cannot save a bad play from itself. But this was neither a heroic nor an ingenious production, and its attempts to give the play the theatricality it lacks felt perfunctory and amateurish and ultimately accentuated this lack. This was especially disappointing because there were a few instances near the beginning when it succeeded in cultivating genuine theatrical suspense. A good example was when Brutus experienced his first spectral vision in the forest. Unidentifiable creatures O’Neill called “The Little Formless Fears” appeared upstage in hooded costumes and remained in shadow, wordless, insentient, and hovering mysteriously near Brutus. They were as portentous as they were meant to be. Yet as the play moved toward the denouement, there were fewer and fewer successes until all were forgotten in theatrical drivel.

This drivel was the production’s many devices, which included marionettes, masks worn by apparitions, extended dance sequences performed by trees and a witch doctor, and a self-consciously utilitarian employment of props. The problems were more in trite execution than in conceptualization, except for the dancing, whose choreography was also regrettable. The trees doing most of it were “played” by people in leafy, faceless costumes. In and of itself, this idea was clever because most of the action takes place in a forest, and for a moment or two, it even seemed possible that they might have made Brutus’s apostrophes a little compelling in spite of the risible words. This didn’t happen. In interludes between scenes, they swarmed around him, “obstructing” his way, attempting to signify the passage of time and to anthropomorphize Nature as an oppressor. Their hamhanded movements created an unintended dissonance-the Rep was not working in the Brechtian vein of alienation; they were trying to transport the audience. We, however, remained firmly within ourselves and were acutely aware of watching an imitation that didn’t produce what Aristotle called the universal “pleasure felt in things imitated.”

The Emperor Jones is at the Irish Repertory Theatre until November 29th.

Early twentieth century Irish theater has a hard time in America today. The accents, which are integral to the cadences of the old peasant idiom, are frequently a problem for our actors, who not only struggle to produce plausible tones but often deliver limply the words of the theater’s great writers, W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge. Compounding this is a common failure of the theatrical imagination. All the things the theater uniquely gives us – gestures, lighting, non-verbal sound – and which should be symbiotic with the words, are often given short shrift. The problem with these productions is complacency:  they are too comfortable with the reputation of the work or the author or both, and the actors perform as if the audience’s familiarity has freed them from much of their labor.

And yet the failures don’t seem to matter. We go to performances of these ill-served works happy to repress apprehensions of inadequacy, drawn by the desire to see something we love as it was meant to be – not in a book, but on the stage. Recently, I went with such credulity to a preview of The Pearl Theatre Company‘s new production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, which opened on October 11th and will run until November 22nd at New York City Center Stage II. As with last spring’s festival of Yeats plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre, this show was harmless, “fun,” and stillborn.

In the play, a young man who believes he has killed his father appears in a rural public house and, inadvertently delighting the locals in telling of his violent act, becomes an object of romance and reverence. Over the course of the next 24 hours, he – Christy Mahon – who until he proclaimed himself a patricide, we find out, didn’t have much of a reputation, strives to maintain and aggrandize his new status through various trials, including the eventual appearance of his not-dead-but-wounded father. This might sound to some like a gentle parlor comedy, a lá George Bernard Shaw, but it is far from any such thing. When it debuted in 1907, amid growing Irish nationalism, it was received as a vituperative attack on the character of the country’s peasantry and met with boos and riots. Yet this anecdote, like the synopsis, also fails the play, for it is far more nuanced than a bifurcated categorization of satire and sympathy allows.  

The principal flaw of this production is that they have confused folk subjects with a folksy narrative. Synge’s irony and macabre humor have been bowdlerized and replaced with an almost vaudevillian quaintness – the characters’ sprightly lack of self-awareness is indistinguishable from the presentation. The laughs feel closer to “the false joy of the musical comedy” that Synge condemned than to the “rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality,” which he believed should be the heart of the theater.

It also suffers from the theatrical complacency mentioned earlier. The development of man and society over the last hundred years has done little to make the play antique, and at this show, I was mostly struck by missed opportunities. It was as if beneath every innocuous utterance the muted wit could be heard begging to be in keener hands. The peasants’ sordid fascination with Christy’s murder and their eagerness to mythologize his person has much in common with our mass culture’s worship of celebrity and obsession with the grotesque. Today’s public figures – politicians, actors, musicians – live by myth-making, which is a constant and precarious effort. In favorable times, they embellish; in unfavorable ones, when the whims of the collective have turned against them, they fight to save face. In the vicissitudes of Christy’s interactions with the locals, we behold a microcosmic prophecy of the crude and desperate struggles that are inescapable in our society.

It’s not a light thought that the work of Synge and his peers may have had its moment and is now, as are the people who were its subjects, irretrievable – something we may never see or hear. But until a modern company makes these old plays stand up, they will remain, deficiently, as relics.

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim is a major event in New York. Six levels of the museum have been devoted to the painter’s canvasses – nearly 100 of them – in a retrospective that ranges from 1902-1942 and draws mostly from the three largest public holdings of his work:  the Guggenheim Foundation, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. As the artist died in 1944, this is likely the most comprehensive gathering we’ll see for some time. His work was last given such attention in the United States in the 1980s, when the Guggenheim presented three surveys.

The show is organized chronologically, and this is a felicitous decision. It’s hard to think of another artist whose development appears so neatly linear – each period seems the logical successor to its antecedent. As spectators walk up the museum’s winding rotunda, they follow the evolution of an aesthetic from its beginnings in darkly-colored folk scenes (1902-07), through an intermediary period of bright amorphous landscapes (1908-12), to its maturity in abstraction, of which there are a few phases (1912-21; 1922-33; 1933-44). There is such concordance between the artist’s genius and the presentation’s utility that one could think that no human labor went into forging his monumental vision.

This is not to say all the paintings are masterly. In fact, that the early work wouldn’t be of great interest without the later work is precisely what makes the exhibit’s breadth so impressive. Colorful Life (Motley Life) (1907) is a village tableau whose salient compositional units, waterfront perspective, and violence commend it as a mock-idyll response to Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It’s certainly vibrant, but unremarkable among the canon.

The next period, during which Kandinsky lived near the German Alps, begins around 1908 and is known for landscapes that defy traditional principles of representation. Heavy with mass, these scenes contain large blotchy shapes of sky, shrubs, clouds, and chimneys that converge on one another. Vigorous brush strokes fill every form with motion. Increasingly, the “subjects” – often people and their horses – recede into the totality of the pictures, as in Improvisation 3 (1911). Some of these paintings just feel crude. Others, such as Improvisation 7 (Storm) (1910), are quite compelling:  they seem the primitives of his abstract masterpieces.

When the spectator gets to those masterpieces, which for most will have been the original attraction, it’s a feeling of consummation. Around 1912, heavy strokes are replaced with subtle harmonies of color and lineation that generate a much more powerful energy – motion is no longer contained within shapes; entire paintings become motion (the Edwin R. Campbell Panels from 1914 are superlative examples). After 1922, geometric figures become predominant. These works, though varied, are generally sparer. In Several Circles (1926) and Movement I (1935), bright forms are suspended across black planes, conjuring infinite space.

The mature work stands on a deep faith in the inherent spiritual values of colors and shapes, telling us that, all along, the arrangement of these simple elements – not subjects – has produced the “vibration in the soul” that is the great initial achievement of art. It is the artist’s task, Kandinsky believed, to “set art free,” and the ultimate task the collective formation of a “spiritual pyramid” that would “some day reach to heaven.” Roll your eyes as you will at reaching heaven, the feeling of standing before these paintings is ineffable.