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.
