The Wooster Group
(Wooster Group Website)
Presents

The Emperor Jones
By
Eugene O’Neill
(Eugene O’Neill Bio)

At
The Goodman Theatre In The Owen
(Goodman Website)
170 N. Dearborn Street
Chicago, Illinois 60601
312.443.3800

January 7 – January 11, 2009

Artistic Director: Robert Falls
Executive Director: Roche Schulfer

Starring:
Kate Valk, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos

Direction: Elizabeth LeCompte

Music Score: David Linton
Set: Jim Clayburgh
Assistant Director: Clay Hapaz
Production Manager: Bozkurt Karasu
Technical Director: Aron Deyo
Technical Assistant: Joby Emmons
Technical Consultants: John Collins, Gabe Maxson
Master Electrician: Rob Reese
Video Score: Christopher Kondek
Lighting: Jennifer Tipton
Sound: Geoff Abbas, Matt Schloss
Video: Andrew Schneider
Stage Manager: Teresa Hartmann
Publicity Manager: Jeffrey Fauver

Susan Weinrebe
January 7, 2009

Provocative and reality-skewing is The Wooster Group’s stock in the trade of making theater. In the hands of Elizabeth LeCompte and her band of limit testers, The Emperor Jones flips the essence of the central character and forces the audience to think about O’Neill’s tragic Brutus Jones in a way that transcends race, gender and time.

Without paring too much of O’Neill’s plot, Elizabeth LeCompte relates the saga of the former Pullman porter and murderer, Brutus Jones. He has escaped from his prison work gang and fled to a West Indian island where he has installed himself as the emperor/despot among the natives. They are on the verge of rising against him.

In the hands of The Wooster Group, this thin plot is the medium for a brilliant, haunting, and to some, enraging transposition, the likes of which O’Neill could not have dreamt. Cast as Brutus Jones, Kate Valk, a white woman, plays him in black face and speaks in broad dialect. She flashes the whites of her eyes and laughs with open-mouthed fullness that contrasts her teeth and pink lips starkly against her tarry paint. Pale, feminine hands gesture and jumble what our eyes see against the playwright’s intended character.

Race remains one of the most volatile topics that can scarcely be discussed in American society without old pain and stereotypes of our history arising. Minstrelsy, a bygone form of entertainment that used white performers in black face paint to mock African Americans for the edification of the audience, is a hot spot beyond which some people cannot step. Yet, that is precisely what LeCompte seems to ask of her audience: transcend one of the most integral identifiers of Jones, his race. And because it is The Wooster Group, gender change is added to underscore the point. No more clearly was this purposeful muddling apparent than in one scene when Valk sat in front of the other featured character, Smithers, a white man. Appearing to be Jones’ knees, the legs were disorientingly white. It was like a Topsy-Turvy doll come to life.

Further disorienting were the video monitors that played negative and reverse negative images accompanied by rhythmic thudding and loud techno sounds. Seated at the back and just below stage level, Smithers punctuated Valk’s dialog with occasional vocalizations. A periodic tapping, like Walter Winchell’s opening Morse ditting call to “Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea,” was a further disorientation of the senses.

As if this weren’t enough, the costumes looked like the exotic relatives of layered and flowing Japanese robes. At one point, hats, looking like a shogun’s ceremonial head gear, were placed on Jones and Smithers. A musical interlude between scenes had the pair doing a little number that looked as though a wedding line dance and a hula had mated.

The small stage was outlined with a metal framework that both enclosed and permitted transparency of on and off stage action. The floor of the stage, similar to O’Neill’s original direction, looked like a white square of boxing ring, though, in the rest of the Asian context, might just have well been tatami mats. A stage hand maneuvered a rolling chair, Jones’ throne, placed and removed props, joined the dance, and reminded us that we were watching a staged program.

Valk did not use a body microphone. Instead, she held the wand, sometimes the entire stand of a stage microphone, as Jones might have held a scepter. As Brutus reached the end of his domination of the natives and was hunted and haunted by his fears, the microphone dipped lower and lower, just as he, once “mighty” was fallen. Again, we were constantly reminded we were consuming theater artifice. As Valk narrated the events that brought her character to the island, he became both a figure to be pitied and despised. He, who had been oppressed in the segregation of America in the 1920’s, likewise preyed on the ignorance of the islanders from whom he exacted tribute and status.

From the perspective of 2009, there is no single way to understand this play, nor the transformation that The Wooster Group has wrought. As Jones says, “What I was den is one thing. What I is now’s another.” That’s the brilliance of the play and this particular presentation. Just as the doomed Brutus peeled down layers of his robes getting closer and closer to his skin, LeCompte’s Emperor provokes thought and discourse on ever unfolding levels.

The Goodman Theatre’s motto is: What great theater should be. That is what they have given us in this interpretation of The Emperor Jones.

Kate Valk (Brutus Jones) in The Wooster Group's production
of "The Emperor Jones" by Eugene O'Neill
Courtesy of Paula Court.

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Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos in The Wooster Group's production
of "The Emperor Jones" by Eugene O'Neil
Courtesy of Paula Court.

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For more information, contact Dr. Roberta E. Zlokower at zlokower@bestweb.net