Week 2 – The Emperor Jones – Eugene O’Neill (1920)
The Emperor Jones is a play that has continued to stir up controversy ever since its première
in 1920. At the time it was radical because of its staging by the Provincetown Players, and
critics have noted that this staging has obscured analysis of the text itself. The play has been
described as a racist piece of work, but in creating a black character of psychological depth,
O’Neill was writing against the prevailing trends in the nascent American theatre. In this minilecture I want to explore the play’s staging and the issue of race, but to begin with some
background as to where O’Neill derived his initial ideas for the play.
1. Sources (social, political, cultural, biographical contexts)
Example of Haiti
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O’Neill maintained that the inspiration for the play came from an encounter with a
circus performer who related to O’Neill the story of President Sam of Haiti. Sam had
taken over the presidency of Haiti in 1915, and ruled tyrannically, claiming that he
could not be killed unless it were by a silver bullet. As it turned out, Sam was
eventually hacked to death by his subjects. (See Gelb & Gelb, O’Neill, pp.438-439.)
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O’Neill said that he kept a silver coin with Sam’s image on it to remind him.
The Congo – drumming and masks
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See the accompanying Powerpoint for slides featuring the kinds of African sculpture
that O’Neill would have seen, and for an example of Picasso’s ‘primitive’ painting.
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O’Neill also read about African drumming in the Congo. He said he was intrigued by
‘how it starts at a normal pulse-beat and is slowly intensified until the heart-beat of
every one present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drum.’ (O’Neill, p.438) As I
shall explain, this idea seems to tie in with the Jungian concept of the collective
unconscious: a deep, ancestral link to the rhythms of our ancestors.
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Charles Sheeler’s book African Negro Wood Sculptures (1918), after a New York
exhibition of the same name in 1915 at the Modern Gallery, curated by the Mexican
artist Marius de Zayas. (See Powerpoint slides for examples.) This was in keeping
with the fascination amongst modernist writers and artists with what was called
‘primitivism’ – an attempt to reach back to primitive cultures in order to create a new
kind of western art form. See Picasso in particular. O’Neill, it should be remembered,
was a modernist writer (see David Krasner’s article, ‘Eugene O’Neill: American
Drama and American Modernism’, pp.6-7 of course handbook), and as such was part
of a large group of writers intent on experimentation, finding new – American – forms
and modes of expression that might reflect new ways of life – politically, socially,
sexually, philosophically.
The ‘Negro question’ and issues of race
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O’Neill claimed that in Jones he was not exploring ‘the Negro question’, as it was
known in the 1920s and 1930s, but there is no doubt that his presentation of Jones
offers a powerful critique of both imperial oppression, and the hitherto onedimensional portrayals of black characters on the American stage.
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He followed this play with All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), a play which explored
not only the consequences of a proposed marriage between a black man and a white
woman, but also the attempt by this man to elevate his social position by training to
become a lawyer (the kind of issue which directly informs the character of Beneatha
in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, who wants to become a doctor, and finds
her way barred not just by whites, but by her own family and friends). In addition, the
struggle that goes on in that play and in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, between
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asserting oneself as an American, and asserting oneself as an African American has
clear parallels in The Emperor Jones. Jones is a Pullman porter, a representative of
great American industry, before he becomes the emperor of a tribe.
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At the time of its first performance, O’Neill’s use of ‘primitive’ imagery, and the
connections made between Jones and his ancestral African past, were ideas very
much contrary to the movement in New York’s important Harlem Renaissance, where
black writers were attempting to steer perceptions well away from ideas of
‘primitiveness’, and assert themselves as Americans with strong, individual voices.
One of these, Alain Locke, edited an influential book entitled The New Negro: An
Interpretation, in which key Harlem Renaissance writers like Countee Cullen, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes appeared.
2. Influences (dramatic and theatrical contexts)

Expressionism (see below).

Travis Bogard notes the parallels with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in which the main character
flees from monstrous characters and his own mistakes, ends up collapsing in a forest
where he proclaims himself ‘Emperor of all the beasts’. (Bogard, Contour in Time,
p.137.)

August Strindberg (particularly the dream plays, which near an ‘unstageable’ point
where the characters and drama are imagined by the audience, and staging and
props should not be required).

Sigmund Freud (exploration of the unconscious mind – also a key Expressionist
acting trait). (See http://www.magma.ca/~mfonda/freud.html and
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/freud2.html.)

Carl Jung (who identifies what he calls a ‘collective unconscious’, in which
experiences which an individual has not, or cannot have had, are nonetheless part of
that individual’s consciousness because he/she is part of a group – thus Jones is part
of the black American community, and in the play we see him reliving the experiences
of a slave ship (scene 6), and a slave auction (scene 5), as well as the experiences of
being part of a sacrifical African ritual in scene 7. (For more on Jung, the collective
unconscious and archetypes, see: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/jung.html.)
3. First performances/performance history
Staging the ‘impossible’

After hearing O’Neill read the play to him and Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook
was sure that the play could only be produced by the Provincetown Players. He
claimed: ‘This marks the success of the Provincetown Players. Gene knew there was
a place where such a play would be produced. He wrote it to compel us to the
untried, to the “impossible.”’ (Quoted in O’Neill, p.441) Cook decided that the staging
had to be the most elaborate ever used by the Provincetown Players, and that a
dome must be created against which the action would be played – the first of its kind
in America, it was designed to give depth to the stage space, but cost $500, nearly all
the funds of the Players (the whole production cost $600) (See the final slide in the
Powerpoint for a photograph of the depth of field that the dome created for the play.)
Critical and box office success – and problems

The play was extremely successful, and the subscription list for tickets rose from a
couple of hundred to 1500 in a few days.
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
Critics admired it too. Alexander Woollcott, in The New York Times, called it ‘an
extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear’, and Heywood Broun in The
Tribune noted that the play was ‘so unusual in its technique that it might wait in vain
for a production anywhere except in so adventurous a playhouse as the Provincetown
Theatre.’ (Quoted in O’Neill, pp.446-447). But the success of the play and its
subsequent transfer to Broadway destroyed the Players, and left Cook angry at its
members and at O’Neill for what he saw as his ungratefuless, and anti-commercial
aspirations.
Key actors

Charles S. Gilpin, who O’Neill thought the best actor in the role, but who fell out of
favour with O’Neill as he drank to create the right emotion for the part, and took out
words in the text that he was uncomfortable with, like ‘nigger’, substituting words like
‘black baby’. Gilpin’s reluctance to adhere to the script foreshadows the difficulties
other producers have had with the play, and why it has been only rarely performed.

Paul Robeson played the role instead in London and in a revival of 1925 in New York
(and in the film version, at O’Neill’s request).

More recently, the play was staged by Thea Sharrock, with Paterson Joseph as
Jones. It began at the Gate Theatre in 2005, and was then revived at the National
Theatre in 2007. For more on this production, listen to an interview with Paterson
Joseph – the link is on the wiki page for this text (http://tinyurl.com/329ewyc).
4. Form and style
Expressionism and naturalism: characterization and monologues
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Regarded by some as the first American Expressionist play? It predates Elmer Rice’s
The Adding Machine (1923), which is seen as a key Expressionist text.
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However, it is not true to say that the whole play is Expressionist – the first scene and
most of the last scene are predominantly naturalistic.
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Expressionism, as it came to be understood within Germany = ‘the means rather
than the meaning’ (Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, p.41)
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Expressionism refocuses attention on:
o Staging and space (exaggerated in Expressionist drama)
o Time (shifts back and forth, time is malleable)
o Language (usually limited, sometimes single word speeches, sometimes
monosyllabic, elemental. Innes: Expressionist dramas are ‘deliberately
incomplete scripts’ (Avant Garde Theatre, p.42))
o Characterisation (inner states, conscious, subconscious)
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‘This expressionist simplicity is designed to reach a more basic stratum of awareness,
on which men are united by instinctive and emotional qualities shared by all.’ (Innes,
p.41) – This sounds very much like O’Neill’s use of the drum, and his attempts to stir
the audience, not just here but in his monologue play Before Breakfast (1916), in
which a wife delivers the monologue to her off stage husband, whose arm only is
seen during the course of the play as he shaves. Driven to distraction by her
incessant talking and criticism, he commits suicide – off stage. O’Neill was also
interested in seeing how close he could get to driving the audience mad, and in his
play Where the Cross is Made (1918), he tried to make his audience doubt their
sanity by having three ghosts appear on stage.)
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BUT
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o
o
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o
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O’Neill uses monologues differently to a typical Expressionist staging –
throughout, rather than to conclude the play.
His speech is designed to replicate real life speech (as in the early O’Neill
plays set at sea), not to be full of symbols and allusions.
Paul Kornfeld’s ‘Epilogue to the Actor’ (1913) suggests that the actor must
use his own experiences (and not those of others) to express the emotions of
the character, and never hide the fact that he is acting. This means
exaggerated facial expressions, large gestures…
 Contrast The Emperor Jones, which has much deeper
characterization, exploring the psychology of Brutus Jones.
 Indeed, each scene in the forest seems to explore one aspect of his
mind.
Expressionist masks were human faces, exaggerated, but O’Neill’s interest in
masks was real and he used them extensively in later plays like The Great
God Brown (1926), to try and explore the inner forces of the subconscious
which informed the conscious mind, and drove the actions of characters.
The critic Marc Robinson has observed that ‘the play’s own interior, enclosing
Brutus at his most disoriented – are triangular (a clearing in the forest),
diagonal (a path), circular (another clearing), and arched (trees reaching up
and over the stage. Their formal restraint should give pause to those
classifying the play as expressionist.’ (The American Play, 1787-2000,
pp.171-172.)
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So it is better to look at the play as a fusion of Expressionist forms and O’Neill’s own
desire for deep, psychological characterization and realistic presentation. In an
unpublished essay entitled ‘On Masks’ (probably written in the 1920s), O’Neill wrote
that ‘[a] comprehensive expression is demanded here, a chance for eloquent
presentation, a new form of drama projected from a fresh insight into the inner forces
motivating the outer actions and reactions of men and women, a new truer
characterization, in other words – a drama of souls, and the adventures of ‘free wills’
with the masks that govern him and constitute their fate.’ (Quoted in Bigsby, p.67.)
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O’Neill was not just a writer of the modern American theater, but a theorist of it as
well, but in this he was also building upon his work with the Provincetown Players and
George Cram Cook, whose aspirations towards a synthetic form of theatre, that
brought together poetry, philosophy and drama within a community of different kinds
of artists and thinkers. That aspiration and the ritualistic nature of classical Greek
theatre clearly affected O’Neill’s writing.
5. O’Neill’s influence
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O’Neill was the first major American dramatist, and his influence was felt nationally
and internationally. We will examine how that influence manifests itself in the work of
other writers: in Arthur Miller, who takes up O’Neill’s use of classical drama as
bedrock for plays like Death of a Salesman, in Lorraine Hansberry and August
Wilson, who continue to explore the struggles of African Americans against a
backdrop of racism, or Sam Shepard, who stages ritualistic moments in an otherwise
naturalistic drama; all three of these writers also try to dissect the issue of the
American family in a way that is similar to O’Neill’s attempts to do so in Long Day’s
Journey Into Night.
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To explore O’Neill further, read two of his best known plays: The Iceman Cometh
(written 1939, performed 1946), and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (written 19391941, but not performed until after O’Neill’s death in 1956 by his own request).
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6. Further reading
Christopher Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Volume
One: 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.36-119 – which is good
at explaining the influences of Freud and Jung on O’Neill
Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (London: Cape, 1962) – for background on the play and first
performances
Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.36-46 –
for details of Expressionist theatre
David Krasner, ‘Eugene O’Neill: American Drama and American Modernism’, in A Companion
to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
2007), pp.142-158
Deanna M. Toten Beard, ‘American Experimentalism, American Expressionism, and Early
O’Neill’, in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007), pp.53-68
And see the wiki for more secondary reading about the play and about O’Neill
(http://tinyurl.com/329ewyc and http://tinyurl.com/32q2t74).
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