The Emperor Jones Review: Resplendent, Racist

Would anybody even consider putting on a production of a 90-year-old play that gave an African-American lines like “Oh Lawd! Mercy! Mercy on dis po’ sinner,” and that in the stage directions described another character as an “ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type,” if the author were not a playwright almost universally viewed as one of the greatest of the twentieth century?

It is not a question I can easily answer. The ironies and paradoxes of “The Emperor Jones,” one of Eugene O’Neill’s short and early plays, are manifold — and manifest in the new production of the play by the Irish Repertory Theater. The rep’s version was such a critical and popular success in its initial seven-week run that it has been moved to the larger SoHo Playhouse, scheduled to run through January 31.

In some ways, the current production offers echoes of the play’s original reception. “The Emperor Jones” was the play that made Eugene O’Neill famous, its production at the Provincetown Playhouse at the end of 1920 such a commercial and critical success that it quickly moved to Broadway. In his review, Alexander Woollcott called it “an extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear” and said it reinforced the impression that the playwright “has no rivals among American writers for the stage.” In that same review, on the other hand, Woollcott, the esteemed New York Times theater critic, described the protagonist as “a burly darky from the States.”

At the same time, the play made a star out of the first African-American actor to play the title role, and an even bigger star out of the next one — Paul Robeson , who performed it on the London stage and then in a 1933 film adaptation. It is in the process of making a star as well out of the lead actor in the current production, John Douglas Thompson, who dominates the small stage even as fear seems to shrink him.

It is Thompson’s performance, coupled with an exquisite production, that transcends the limitations of the source material.

It would be glib and not especially clever to say that the emperor has no clothes. In any case, it is almost literally true by the end of “The Emperor Jones.”

Thompson plays Brutus Jones, a former American railroad porter who killed a friend in a card game, and then killed a prison guard in order to make his escape to an unnamed island in the West Indies populated by a people who are, let us say, not well-versed in Western culture. Jones used his wiles to become the dictator of the island and has been milking it of its riches, stowing his growing wealth in a foreign bank. All this has happened before the play begins. Now, two years into his stay, the natives are restless — ! – and planning to overthrow him. Jones, haughty with confidence, realizes it is time to give up his throne and make his way through the jungle to a corruption-enriched retirement elsewhere.

What follows is the heart of the play. Dressed at the onset in the pompous regalia of a fake royal, he is scene by scene in the darkness of the jungle stripped of his clothes as of his decorum and his ease. Jones’ journey becomes a descent into fear and panic, something close to remorse, madness — or is it magic? — and death. The ghouls he meets in his jungle nightmare are those of his own past, and those of his ancestors; there is a glimpse of the Middle Passage and of a slave auction. These are not meant to be realistic, but are rather O’Neill’s interpretation of German expressionist theater that he helped popularize, albeit briefly, in America.

What the Irish Repertory Theater’s production does (without changing or evidently omitting a word of the script) is turn his descent into something of a visually rich modern dance. This is made possible by the choreography of Barry McNabb and in particular by the splendidly varied puppets and masks of Bob Flanagan. Indeed every member of the design team deserves kudos: the lighting design by Brian Nason, costume design by Antonio Ford-Roberts, set design by Charlie Cororan, original music and sound design by Ryan Rumery and Christian Frederickson.

The incessant and increasingly loud tom-toms that O’Neill wrote into the script were meant to induce the audience into sharing some of the terror. I felt less terror, I think, than delight — delight I would have felt even if I had understood no English. Come to think of it, if I hadn’t been able to follow O’Neill’s words, I might have liked “The Emperor Jones” even better.