Andy Murray and Obi Abili in "The Emperor Jones," which is showing at the Irish Rep through May 21.
PHOTO: CAROL ROSEGG
By Orla O’Sullivan
“The Emperor Jones” is unlike anything I have ever seen at the Irish Rep Theatre. It’s as much a dance performance as a play and features deft choreography, elaborate puppets, and a cast that is all black, bar one.
This Eugene O’Neill play offers little character interaction. It’s mostly one man on stage, on a journey to the heart of himself, a heart of darkness. This after he loses his iron grip on a Caribbean island, where he, an African-American, rose to power by generating a personal mythology.
O’Neill’s 1920 work was read as an oblique criticism of the U.S.’s 1915 invasion of Haiti.
This production was inspired by “the current political and social climate,” the Rep said. How it compares to the Rep’s 2009 staging, I can’t say, but it makes a dramatic, if unexpected impression.
A director’s note from Ciarán O’Reilly provides a quote said to represent, “the foundation of the Emperor Jones’ rise to power,” adding, “The media in 2017 might describe his dogma as ‘fake news.’”
`The quote in question from Brutus Jones, AKA The Emperor, runs: “Sure I talks large when I ain’t got nothing to back it up… I knows I can fool ‘em.. and that’s backin’ enough for my game.”
As the play opens, the Emperor senses the game is up. Like any good political operator, he (Obi Abili) smells change in the air—albeit not quite as well his white sidekick Henry Smithers (Andy Murray). “I’ve got six months before they get sick of my game,” the Emperor opines—before Smithers, the quintessential survivor, asks where are all the natives gone, adding, “wanna check for your horse? They steals the horses first.”
The ominous mood has been set, and, for the rest of the play, the heat is turned up as the distant sound of tom-toms draws closer.
The Emperor immediately decides to run, but downplays his sense of foreboding, above all to himself. His power-inflated ego reframes his U-turn. “Was I saying I’d six months? Well, I changes my mind,” he tells Smithers, before setting off across the jungle to catch, he says, the Martinique morning boat that will deliver him to his foreign bank account.
The play is very symbolic from that point on. The Emperor begins his disorienting journey by walking on a rotating circular section of the stage. Landmarks are gone; the tree-people block him and have strange, animalistic protuberances. Even the moon can’t be trusted. He encounters—or imagines?—ghosts, past victims and mini-puppets of himself.
The Emperor has been both puppeteer and puppet or master/slave. With which should he identify? In running from his people is he running from himself?
O’Neill’s play was written half a century before the derogatory slang term “Oreo” was coined for a black person affecting whiteness at the expense of his own heritage, yet it speaks to the condition.
The play presents both an unflinching look at race and a critique of the brutality of the powerful and how they justify it. The n-word abounds. The Emperor disdains the natives as “bush n*****s” and, at one point, invoking his Baptist-Church God (naturally superior to the natives’ gods) he admonishes himself with a rhetorical question: “Is you civilized or is you like those ignorant, black n******s?”
When the play opened in Greenwich Village in 1920 it was such a hit that it quickly had to relocate to a bigger venue.
It marked a radical departure in American theater with its bold elevation of a black protagonist. It’s also said to have opened Americans’ eyes to European expressionist theater, with its grotesque exaggerations and characters’ inner conflicts expressed through scenery. (Think of Munch’s painting “The Scream.”)
At the Rep, writhing creatures, like the surprisingly eerie, enormous poodle-crocodile hybrid, are among those that spring from the fertile imagination of puppeteer Bob Flanagan (formerly of “Saturday Night Live”). With great dancing by the cast, excellent direction and choreography plus a powerful performance by Abili, “The Emperor” makes for a disconcerting, lavish spectacle. You might call it a long night’s journey into day.
“The Emperor Jones” by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly and choreographed by Barry McNabb, with puppets and masks by Bob Flanagan, runs through April 23 at the Irish Rep Theatre, 132 West 22nd St., Manhattan. Tickets from irishrep.org or 212-727-2737.
