Emperors and Empresses
By Jonathan Kalb
Emperor Jones
By Eugene O'Neill
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
(closed)
Happy Days
By Samuel Beckett
Mabou Mines
P.S. 122
(closed)
Among the more amusing paradoxes of the 20th-century
theater is classical avant-gardism--productions such as Max Reinhardt's
Turandot (1911), Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1970), and Peter Stein's Peer Gynt (1971) that acquired instant
canonical stature despite their boldly insolent dismissals of long cherished
theatrical traditions. Some would argue that their quick embrace proves
that the directors weren't truly avant-garde. But even those rebels
for whom marginalism is compulsory generally agree that these directors
were extraordinarily perceptive, not only about the power of their innovations
but also about how history and tradition had blocked access to what
was once dangerous and fervid in the plays. The productions actually
changed public perceptions about the classic works and the range of
expression available to the theater.
The Wooster Group, one of America's premiere
avant-garde theaters, has long been led by a director (Elizabeth LeCompte)
so ambivalent toward advertizing and promotion that she has sometimes
seemed to hew to a principle of marginalism, even as several members
(Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter) pursued sparkling careers
outside the ensemble. The Group's productions change significantly after
opening to the public, and they often play in New York (typically to
full houses of loyalists) without opening to critics. Recently, however,
The Wooster Group transferred its production of O'Neill's The Hairy
Ape to a commercial run at the Selwyn Theater on 42nd St., and
The Emperor Jones (originally from 1993, last seen here in
1995) has now been opened to review. Perhaps LeCompte has come round
to the mortal hope that some of her work will be recognized as classic.
In any case, The Emperor Jones deserves it.
Here is a classic play that is virtually unperformable
in 1990s America in the manner the author envisioned in 1920. An expressionistic
station-drama with realistic first and last scenes, it depicts the quasi-mythical
final night of Brutus Jones, a black Pullman porter who establishes
himself as an exploitative emperor on a West Indian island after committing
several murders in the United States and escaping from a chain gang.
The Emperor Jones is famous for providing the first serious
and substantial role for an African American and for overcoming international
skepticism about the literary merit of American drama.
Unfortunately, performed today as written (that
is, with earnest and realistic emotion by a black actor), the cunning
yet superstitious and uneducated Jones too easily comes off as a racist
stereotype ("I ain't 'lowin' nary body to touch dis baby. She's my rabbit's
foot"). Moreover, the hallucinatory journey he takes through "the Great
Forest"--after the natives wise up to his stealing, he flees and gradually
reverts to a primitive state before dying--also too easily reads as
racist because it depends on dated and trite symbols of Jones's fear,
guilt, and ethnic past (drums, an alligator, and a witch doctor, for
instance).
LeCompte's solution was to pare the action down
to its powerful core--Jones's inner journey of self-destructive self-
discovery--and then reconstruct its outer trappings using theatrical
means that haven't grown stale yet. Hence, Jones is now played by a
white woman in blackface (Kate Valk). Smithers, the Cockney trader who
half admires, half despises Jones, is played by a white man whose face
is famously menacing (Willem Dafoe). And both are dressed in soiled
Kabuki robes and move with oriental formality. These are the only actors,
apart from a stagehand in street clothes (Dave Shelley) who dashes about
and occasionally joins the classical Japanese-style dancing. LeCompte
has transformed O'Neill's multi-character, panoramic epic into a two-character
chamber work, with the effect of streamlining its difficult questions
of race and identity.
Anyone who has ever wondered what Brecht meant
by "alienation" ought to see this production, with its cross-gender
casting, blackface, interculturalism, and physical movement all working
to encourage clear thought by making familiar questions seem unfamiliar,
imposing carefully chosen sources of strangeness on the dialogue and
action. During the first scene, for instance, Valk sits downstage in
a fur-lined roll-stool on the plain white central platform, speaking
into a mic attached to a rod she wields like a scepter, the unblemished
powder-black surface of her face becoming a pictorial reference
to regality that is belied by her crude and cynical speech. Meanwhile,
Dafoe sits upstage of the platform, half out of sight, looking fixedly
off to one side and never at Valk while "conversing" with her in mocking
Cockney tones and sometimes riding herd over her lines.
The point is: all easy antinomies of blackness
and whiteness, majesty and tawdriness, boldness and servility, insider
and outsider, are placed in figural quotation marks on this stage. And
that is fundamentally what O'Neill intended, I think, in setting up
an uncultivated black as an emperor and a disenfranchised white as his
aggressive yet servile foil. LeCompte has merely found means to let
us see this for ourselves again, restoring theatrical life to what was
occluded by antiquated style and language.
Smithers's and Jones's differences are obvious,
but LeCompte saw that their profound affinities were the key to the
play's contemporaneity. Both have platforms from which to express arrogance
(political position and skin color), and both are determined to press
their non-advantages. Condescension and insincerity therefore amount
to sources of comaraderie between them--a sort of mutual backhanded
acknowledgement of the void beneath the social "face." This Smithers
and Jones are never really separated during the latter's forest journey.
As she prepares to leave, they join together in a precise parallel dance
(an Americanized blend of Kyogen, Noh and Kabuki performed to a rock
beat), after which Smithers affectionately smacks her with a fly swatter.
The only material hints of forest in this setting
(designed by Jim Clayburgh) are a few bent wires resembling vines tied
to a pole and several leafy plants to the rear of the platform. Wide
banks of fluorescent lights, electronic equipment with operators in
full view, and three video monitors constantly playing upstage help
generate the reluctantly technocentric atmosphere that has long made
The Wooster Group past master at conveying themes of loneliness. Here,
the monitor images are especially crucial because they resolve the problem
of O'Neill's pathos, which is cloying when played as part of the live
action. Grainy location shots show Jones's visions (speeding trains,
a prisoner's striped pants), but more often Jones's and Smithers's faces,
live and recorded, are shown in various states of distortion (unfocus,
split-screen, reverse contrast, color fading to black and white). For
one thing, these images are beautiful in themselves, and for another
(since TV has become the Great Validator), they drive home the ephemerality
of Jones's celebrity and the tenuous hold both characters always had
on enfranchisement.
Not one moment of this production strikes me
as gratuitous or unduly extravagant. Recognizing the triteness of the
steadily increasing drumbeat in the original script, for instance, LeCompte
wisely inserted silences and unpredictable rhythms. Understanding that
the play was built around the melodramatic suspense of a countdown of
bullets, she undermined that effect, upstaging the gunshots with wound-like
pulsations on the monitors and having Valk cross nonchalantly to display
her death wound, then walk off. Valk and Dafoe's sharply contrasting
voices and demeanors were also blended with musical care and precision,
with the humor of the thug-like Dafoe presented as a nimble oriental
adding pivotal lightness to the heavy, brooding action. Avant- gardism
aside, this is simply the shrewdest and most powerful production of
The Emperor Jones that any of us is likely to see.
Would that the venerable Mabou Mines had done
as well with Happy Days, Samuel Beckett's 1961 classic about
a woman buried in a mound up to her waist during one act, then up to
her neck in the next. Beckett has been the impetus for some of Mabou
Mines's proudest work over the years, and it's hardly surprising that
the group's grand dame, Ruth Maleczech, would want to attempt Winnie.
The role isn't really right for her, though, and this production (directed
by Robert Woodruff) also features a stunning set that isn't really right
for the play.
As if reacting against the elegant Winnies of
the past (Madeleine Renaud, Billie Whitelaw), and the respectably ordinary
Winnies as well (Ruth White, Irene Worth), Maleczech plays the part
as a sloppy, old, fat actress (or whore) who wears too much makeup and
a ridiculously slinky bustier. All the famous lines she half-remembers
seem to come from bad plays she either acted in or wishes she had, and
her utter lack of refinement makes it unthinkable that she ever read
what Winnie is really quoting (which includes Milton, Shakespeare, Browning
and The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam).
Worse, rather than the mound of scorched earth
Beckett specified, set designer Douglas Stein has constructed a spectacular
pile of shattered car windshields, marvelous to behold but deeply disappointing
to contemplate. Its implication is that the problem in the play is a
matter of human agency-- technology and the throw-away society--rather
than an inborn burden to do with the naked fact of earthly existence.
Let's chaulk this one up to West Coast glitz (La Jolla Playhouse co-
produced) and hope that next time everyone involved will, as Beckett
once wrote, "fail again, fail better."