The Emperor Jones

Characters

Summary

The play is virtually a monologue for its leading character, Jones, in a Shakespearean range from regal power to the depths of terror and insanity, comparable to Lear or Macbeth. Scenes 2 to 7 are from the point of view of Jones, and no other character speaks. The first and last scenes are essentially a framing device with a character named Smithers, a white trader who appears to be part of illegal activities. In the first scene, Smithers is told about the rebellion by an old woman, and then has a lengthy conversation with Jones. In the last scene, Smithers converses with Lem, the leader of the rebellion. Smithers has mixed feelings about Jones, though he generally has more respect for Jones than for the rebels. During the final scene, Jones is killed by a silver bullet, which was the only way that the rebels believed Jones could be killed, and the way in which Jones planned to kill himself if he was captured.

1920 premiere

The Emperor Jones was first staged on November 1, 1920, by the Provincetown Players at the Playwright's Theater in New York City. Charles Sidney Gilpin, a respected leading man from the all-black Lafayette Players of Harlem, was the first actor to play the role of Brutus Jones on stage. They did have some conflict over Gilpin's tendency to change O'Neill's use of the word "nigger" to Negro and colored in the course of the play. This production was O'Neill's first real smash hit. The Players' small theater was too small to cope with audience demand for tickets, and the play was transferred to another theater. It ran for 204 performances and was hugely popular, and toured in the States with this cast for the next two years.

1924 revival

Although Gilpin continued to perform the role of Brutus Jones in the U.S. tour that followed the Broadway closing of the play, he eventually had a falling out with O'Neill. Gilpin wanted O'Neill to remove the word "nigger", which occurred frequently in the play, but the playwright felt its use was consistent with his dramatic intentions and the use of language was, in fact, based on a friend, an African-American tavern-keeper on the New London waterfront that was O'Neill's favorite drinking spot in his home town. When they could not come to a reconciliation, O'Neill replaced the middle-aged Gilpin with the much younger and then unknown Paul Robeson, who had only performed on the concert stage. Robeson starred in the title role in the New York revival and in the London production. He received excellent reviews and, coupled with his performance in the 1928 London production of the musical Show Boat, went on to worldwide fame as one of the great black artists of the 20th century, while Gilpin faded into obscurity.

1926 revival

The show was again revived in 1926 at the Mayfair Theatre in Manhattan, with Gilpin again starring as Jones and also directing the show. The production, which ran for 61 performances, is remembered today for the acting debut of a young Moss Hart as Smithers.

Federal Theatre Project

The Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration launched several productions of the play in cities across the United States, including a production with marionettes in Los Angeles in 1938.

Recent productions

In 1980 Richard Negri directed a production at the Royal Exchange, Manchester with Pete Postlethwaite and Albie Woodington.

The Wooster Group mounted a production of the play in 2007 for the Philadelphia LiveArts Festival, which played to sold-out audiences every night of its run. Along with its post-dramatic aesthetics, this staging was notable in that the actor playing the part of Jones, Kate Valk, was female, white, and performed in blackface — which had, ironically, been a suggestion for the original play, which O'Neill had vetoed.

In 2005 Thea Sharrock directed the play, with Paterson Joseph in the title role, for the Bush Theatre in London. The audience looked down into a sand-filled pit. The claustrophic effect was admired by Michael Billington among others. The production transferred to the enormous Olivier auditorium at The National Theatre, London in 2007.

New York's Irish Repertory Theatre staged a 2009 revival, which received overwhelmingly positive reviews. John Douglas Thompson portrayed Jones.

Film, television, opera and ballet adaptations

The play was adapted for a 1933 feature film starring Paul Robeson and directed by Dudley Murphy, an avant-garde filmmaker of O'Neill's Greenwich Village circle who pursued the reluctant playwright for a decade before getting the rights from him.

Louis Gruenberg wrote an opera based on the play, which was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1933. Baritone Lawrence Tibbett sang the title role, performing in blackface. Paul Robeson's 1936 film Song of Freedom features a scene from the opera with Robeson singing the role of Jones. This has sometimes resulted in a confusion that the 1933 film of O'Neill's play is a film of the opera.

In the UK, BBC Television produced an adaptation in 1938, starring Robert Adams, and another in 1953, starring Gordon Heath.

Several revivals were made in the 1950s when Robeson himself was blacklisted, denied his passport by the State Department and his films — including the 1933 film — recordings and performances were banned in the United States; these new productions were implicitly in defiance of the persecution and suppression of this great star by McCarthyism and the FBI from 1950 until 1958, and part of a world-wide effort of artists to lift the ban.

First, the legendary New York actor Ossie Davis starred in a television adaptation for the Kraft Television Theatre in 1955 — this at a time when black faces were rarely seen on American television sets.

In 1956 Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a ballet based on the play that was commissioned by The Empire Music Festival of New York, and danced by José Limón's company — Limon himself a revered teacher at Juilliard and breakthrough performer of color.

A live British television production by Associated Television for the first season of its Armchair Theatre series was seen on UK television on March 30, 1958. It features African-American actor Kenneth Spencer, and was directed by the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff and adapted by the American "beat" novelist Terry Southern in his first screenwriting job. Unlike other British television versions, it still exists, and has been released on DVD.

An experimental video by Christopher Kondek and Elizabeth LeCompte showcases the production of the play by the New York-based performance troupe The Wooster Group, starring Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe.