Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
Page 24
By then, O’Neill fully recognized that open propaganda should have no place in his work, as it counterproductively weakened a play’s message. A few years later, he told the New York Herald Tribune, “As soon as an author slips propaganda into a play every one feels it and the play becomes simply an argument”; following that, he advised Mike Gold, a sharply political writer who was looking for feedback on his play Hoboken Blues (1929), “My quarrel with propaganda in the theatre is that it’s such damned unconvincing propaganda—whereas, if you will restrain the propaganda purpose to the selection of the life to be portrayed and then let that life live itself without comment, it does your trick.”241 Mentioning the “White Marines” was even less restrained than O’Neill would later become; but if he’d said “the U.S. Marines,” the play might have been mistaken for propaganda and thus prove “damned unconvincing.”242
The Provincetown Players welcomed The Emperor Jones with near-fanatical zeal, and Jig Cook chose himself to direct it. Cook was profoundly moved by O’Neill’s script, and he seized the opportunity to breathe new life into an idea he and set designer Robert Edmond Jones had been mulling over for some time. They would construct a dome, or “cyclorama”—a Kuppelhorizont, as the Germans called it—for their stage at 133 Macdougal. It would be the first of its kind in the United States. The theater group’s executive committee balked at the scale of the dome project, however, citing a lack of funds for the estimated $500 construction cost. Hearing this, Cook began acting like “a madman,” Edna Kenton said. Each time he broached the subject, the Players said it was impossible, and he’d pick up his hat and storm out. Before long he’d return and declare, “We have to do this.” Impossible. And off he’d march on “another restless tramp.”243
Days of frustrating denials goaded Cook into designing the dome without the committee’s approval. He next bought bags of cement and other construction materials and slept on the stage at night to save money. The Players relented and emptied their bank account for the project.244 When Cook finished the installation, each of the Players signed the dome as if indelibly marking a child’s plaster cast.245 Cook’s dome allowed them to create lighting effects that gave the illusion of unbounded height and distance, thus enhancing O’Neill’s hallucinatory mise-en-scène. Once the installation was complete, Jimmy Light was awestruck by the dome’s “almost unlimited capacity for suggesting mood, even weather, by means of lighting.”246
Subsequently, Light furnished an explanatory article for Bulletin magazine at the time of The Emperor Jones’s production that remains the most vivid existing description of the dome’s design, assembly, and ultimate purpose: “The dome in the Provincetown Playhouse is made of rigid iron and concrete construction. … The constant rate of change in direction of the surface of the dome in the elliptic and circular form is what gives the sense of infinity. The light rays strike along this curve and are reflected in millions of directions. Every light ray as it strikes the small particles of sand finish casts its shadow as a complementary color. The mingling of a colored light with its complementary color shadow produces, with the constant curve of the surface, the effect of distance and makes the dome appear what it in reality is—a source of light. By varying the lights thrown into the dome one can control the effects emerging from the dome. … There is a parallel between the methods of using the dome and those of Monet in producing atmospheric effects on canvas. In one case light, and the other case color, are placed in juxtaposition as ingredients of a tone which finally arrive at the eye. This tone has the brilliancy of daylight. … When we have installed material and apparatus to take every advantage of the new construction there is absolutely no atmospheric or lighting effect that we cannot achieve.”247
For the play’s sound effects, O’Neill had happened upon an idea while reading about “religious feasts in the Congo.” Tribal members would beat a tom-tom at the normal pulse of the human heart, seventy-two to seventy-five beats per minute; the rhythm then “slowly intensified until the heartbeat of everyone present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drum.” “There was an idea and an experiment,” O’Neill mused. “How would this sort of thing work on an audience in the theater?”248 O’Neill’s stage directions specify that near the end of the first scene, the tom-tom begins at seventy-two beats per minute, then “continues at a gradually accelerating rate from [the end of scene 1] uninterruptedly to the very end of the play” (CP1, 1041). The drumbeat continues to quicken, even through intermission, as the rebels close in and Jones’s nightmares become increasingly horrific. The desired effect was that the audience members’ hearts would start beating along with the tom-tom. “Each succeeding scene left that audience more excited, more keyed up than the previous one,” actress Kyra Markham recalled of the opening. “No play is written for only one performance, but that night was colossal.”249
Provincetown Player Chuck Ellis, a white man, had been the Players’ first choice to play Jones—in blackface. Despite their prior success casting black actors for The Dreamy Kid, they didn’t yet trust that white audiences would come to see a “colored” leading man supported by a white cast. But Ida Rauh held firm. “This isn’t a burlesque,” she said, “this is a serious play.”250 They all assented, but then there was the challenge of finding a black actor who might agree to play a part written in black dialect by a white playwright using the word “nigger.” Jazz guitarist Opal Cooper’s name was floated, but he was out of town for a six-month engagement in Paris. Next, they approached a twenty-two-year-old unknown named Paul Robeson.
At the time, Robeson had only performed in one amateur production, Ridgely Torrence’s Simon the Cyerian at the Harlem YMCA (which O’Neill had reportedly attended). Though untrained as an actor, Robeson was no ordinary performer. He’d been an academic and athletic superstar at Rutgers University: the captain of the debate team; a member of the academic honors society Phi Beta Kappa before his senior year; a “three-letter man” in track, football, and basketball, and picked for the All-American football team; and his soon-legendary baritone voice made him the featured performer in the glee club.251 By the time the Players had decided to approach him for the role of Brutus Jones in the fall of 1920, Robeson was studying law at Columbia University while working off his tuition there as an assistant football coach.
Jasper Deeter, who was to play Smithers, had been tasked with recruiting Robeson for the part, and he visited the law student at his Harlem flat. “Yes, what can I do for you?” Robeson asked him at the door. “We’d like you to be in a play by Eugene O’Neill,” said Deeter. “Never heard of him.” But Robeson allowed Deeter inside to read him the script out loud. Before long, Robeson grew so infuriated according to him, that he “couldn’t breathe.” “The more he read me that terrible character,” he recalled, “the angrier I got.” A giant of a man, he could have picked Deeter up and effortlessly hurled him out his window; he said later that he nearly did.252
Deeter returned to Macdougal in one piece, but without his emperor. A future “little dictator” did show up in these first days of planning, however: the silent film impresario Charlie Chaplin, wearing a disguise and giving his name as Charles Spencer (his middle name). For reasons known only to himself, the thirty-one-year old celebrity badly wanted a part in the play. The Players happily welcomed him at first, but Hutch Hapgood warned, “Is that a good idea? Do you know what will happen if word gets around that Chaplin’s going to be in it? The theatre won’t be large enough to hold everybody who’ll want to come, and this will throw Gene’s play right out the window.”253 The point was well taken, and Chaplin was politely dismissed.
After Ellis, Cooper, and Robeson, the Players’ fourth choice for Brutus Jones was the veteran actor Charles S. Gilpin, one of the founders of the Lafayette Players, Harlem’s first stock company. No stranger to white theater, Gilpin had performed admirably the previous season in John Drinkwater’s hit play Abraham Lincoln as a Frederick Douglass–like emissary on a visit to the sixteenth president. When O’Nei
ll and Light observed Gilpin for the first time, through the box office window from the street outside the playhouse, they both uttered simultaneously, “There he is.”254
Gilpin had led a vagabond life and worked a string of low-paying jobs: barber, printer, elevator operator, janitor, minstrel show performer, boxing trainer and, like the fictional Jones, Pullman porter. Gilpin was also as burly, arrogant, and practiced at the art of survival as his fictional counterpart. “You may know this kind of person,” Robeson had fumed to Jasper Deeter that day in his apartment, “and Mr. O’Neill may know this kind of person, but I don’t.” Gilpin knew him well. “I take my characters out of the street and study them,” he told a New York Tribune reporter. “I have seen ‘The Emperor Jones.’ I have watched his braggadocio and I have seen him delirious with fear. I play him as he really is in life, with very little exaggeration.”255
When O’Neill returned to New York after several sober months of writing in Provincetown, he felt like a sailor again “making port” and summarily embarked upon an “anti-Volstead orgy” with the city’s “poison masquerading as whiskey.” Though for the most part he avoided rehearsals, when he did turn up, he was “deeply excited and gaudily indifferent all at once,” Edna Kenton recalled. He remained largely silent during the final dress rehearsal, but he did correct Gilpin on one point: “Charlie, don’t play the emperor—play the Pullman porter from 137 Street.” This was at eleven thirty at night, two days before opening night, and Gilpin turned to Cook and Light and asked for another run-through. This time, he nailed it. “That was the performance everybody saw,” Light said. “Gene had a great gift as a director. He wouldn’t say much but what he said would go right to the heart of a character. He gave an actor the key.”256
Problems arose between O’Neill and Gilpin over time, however, especially when Gilpin refused to say the word “nigger,” replacing it with euphemisms like “negro” and “colored man.” First, O’Neill threatened him with bodily harm: “If you change the lines again, I’ll beat the hell out of you!” Unfazed, Gilpin still didn’t comply. O’Neill then demanded his dismissal, but that was out of the question. Gilpin was too perfect for the role to lose over a few line changes. O’Neill also castigated the actor for relying on “cheap theatrical tricks,” but he admitted decades later that his personal response to Gilpin had little to do with his performance: “As I look back now on all my work, I can honestly say there was only one actor who carried out every notion of a character I had in mind. That actor was Charles Gilpin as the Pullman porter in The Emperor Jones.”257
“[Gilpin] is a man,” Jig Cook reflected on the actor’s success with the role, “who for years had within himself the power to mount to the top of the ladder, and there has been no ladder, none upon which circumstances permitted a man of his race to set foot.” “Eugene O’Neill made the ladder,” he said, adding that he couldn’t have done it without the Players’ philosophy of collaborative theater. Their innovations in lighting and sound, Cook said, combined with designer Cleon Throckmorton’s primordial sets, amplified Gilpin’s tour de force performance and O’Neill’s groundbreaking script: “Had O’Neill not been a member of a group which he knows to be ready to attempt the untried—ready to make any interesting new departure—he would have no incentive to write ‘The Emperor Jones.’” O’Neill concurred. Together, he remarked a month into the production, the Players had formed “a new ingenuity and creative collaboration on the part of the producer—a new system of staging of extreme simplicity and flexibility which, combined with art in lighting, [permitted] many scenes and instantaneous changes, a combination of the scope of the movies with all that is best of the spoken drama.”258
On the night of November 1, 1920, the crowded line to the box office for the premiere of The Emperor Jones stretched up the block to Washington Square. “You cannot see it unless you are a subscriber or the guest of a subscriber,” the New York Sun alerted its readers. “So subscribe now and avoid the rush. Telephone Spring 8363 and secure your reservations.” At $7.15 a subscription, the Players added a thousand members to their “sacred list” in the first week, for a total of fifteen hundred. They also expanded their performances to Sundays, though since there was a prohibition against Sunday performances in New York, admission was limited to “membership ticket only or by guest ticket purchased through a member.” The New York Sabbath Committee still contacted the police. Cook and Light, with their lawyer Harry Weinberger, battled the charge of “violating the law against Sunday theatricals” in court and won on the grounds that 133 Macdougal was a private clubhouse, not a professional theater.259
Among the throng at Macdougal Street on one of those nights was James Weldon Johnson, author of “Self-Determining Haiti,” who’d recently been elected the first black president of the NAACP. Johnson noted that The Emperor Jones wasn’t the first American play to rise above the grotesque distortions of black-faced minstrelsy, the hugely popular variety shows that caricatured “happy darkies.” Ridgely Torrence’s three one-act plays with the Coloured Players at Madison Square Garden in 1917, he said (also designed by Robert Edmond Jones), deserved that distinction. But The Emperor Jones starred a black man supported by a white cast and, Johnson observed, “No previous effort on the stage with African American actors and themes, so far as the Negro is concerned, evoked more than favorable comment.” Thanks in large part to Gilpin’s operatic interpretation of the role, he said, “another important page in the history of the Negro in the theatre was written. … By his work in The Emperor Jones Gilpin reached the highest point of achievement on the legitimate stage that had yet been attained by a Negro in America.”260
The Emperor Jones ran for an extended run of seven weeks before it moved uptown on December 27 to the Selwyn Theater. “They didn’t really understand what I was writing,” O’Neill recalled bitterly about the droves of fashionable New Yorkers in attendance. “They merely said to themselves, ‘Oh look, the ape can talk!’”261 Still, the production moved on to the Princess, the Majestic in Brooklyn, and the Shubert Brothers’ Riviera Theatre; after 490 performances around New York, it spun off on a thirty-five-week national tour.262 By 1928, even as sophisticated a theatergoer as the novelist Edith Wharton, who respected O’Neill as “our only real playwright,” quipped to a friend, with a racist reference to the trend The Emperor Jones had started, “No one knows how long a play without murderers or niggers will be able to hold the public.”263
The company understood that the tour in the South wouldn’t be without its perils. But the Players couldn’t have foreseen how hostile the pushback would be from white supremacists. After an engagement before thousands of students at the traditionally black Howard University in Washington, D.C., the play moved on to Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia (Gilpin’s hometown), where it was so well received it attracted the ire of the Ku Klux Klan. The “Ku Klux jackasses,” as O’Neill called them after hearing about the incident, sent a letter to Gilpin’s hotel warning the actor not to travel below the Mason-Dixon line. The warning was heeded, and the company redirected the tour to Ohio. They never went further south than Richmond.264
Charles S. Gilpin (right) as Brutus Jones with the African witch doctor, performed by Japanese Noh dancer Michio Itow, in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at the Provincetown Playhouse, November 1, 1920. The brilliant lighting effect is generated by George “Jig” Cook’s dome.
(PHOTO BY JESSIE TARBOX BEALS. COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
The Emperor Jones infuriated many within the African American community as well; the portrayal of Jones “does not elevate the negro,” they contended.265 And it wasn’t just O’Neill’s use of the “N-word” (though that didn’t help, nor did the minstrel-sounding dialect). Rather, it was the more odious perpetuation of the stereotype of black Americans as innately superstitious. As the white Brooklyn Daily Eagle critic ignorantly wrote of O’Neill’s antihero, “Jones is shrewd and stupid, rem
orseless and genial, far-seeing and superstitious, uniting in himself the racial qualities which make the American negro a problem and a delight.”266
By portraying blacks as susceptible to irrational fears, O’Neill was in fact walking the same perilous tightrope that Mark Twain had several decades before him. Yet both O’Neill and Twain shared the belief that Christianity was no less superstitious than any other supernatural faith. From the beginning of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Huck Finn sees little difference between his friends Tom Sawyer and the slave Jim’s rites involving dead cats and Irish potatoes and the Sunday School he’s forced to attend; in The Emperor Jones, O’Neill pits even more “primitive” superstitions against the white-sanctified superstition of Christianity. Preparing to sacrifice himself to the crocodile god, Jones cries out for mercy for “dis po’ sinner” and prays to “Lawd Jesus” to save him, contrasting the god of the enslavers with the pagan god of his African ancestry (CP1, 1058, 1059). (O’Neill had been conscious of his use of racial superstition with The Dreamy Kid, too, but had regrettably disregarded what would later be made evident in Jones: when Agnes Boulton read Dreamy’s resolution to wait by his grandmother’s deathbed in spite of the danger of the police, Boulton mistakenly assumed it was love that made him stay. “No,” O’Neill replied, then slowly read out Mammy’s threat and Dreamy’s terrified response: “‘If yo’ leave me now yo’ ain’t goin’ to get no bit of luck so long as yo’ live, I tell yo’ dat!’ … ‘Don’t yo’ hear de curse she puts on me if I does?’”)267
Back in the winter of 1915–16, O’Neill had written little of consequence and spent most of his time at the Hell Hole getting stewed with Terry Carlin; but he did manage to commit a key poem to paper, a few lines that both look forward to The Emperor Jones and tackle the apparent human need, even for atheists like himself, for superstition of any kind. This untitled work contains, like Jones, the relentless beat of a tom-tom drum, the primal rhythms of the African jungle and the Congo, the existential terror of recognizing one’s pointlessness in an indifferent universe, and then, most significantly, a futile last-minute plea to a higher power. The final stanza reads: