The Emperor Jones
This now-legendary production by New York's Wooster Group must have started with something like this question: Was Eugene O'Neill's classic play too politically incorrect, its 1920s racial politics too embarrassing, to save it from the sociological scrapheap? This show is their spectacular answer. (It's worth noting that a new production of the original play just opened at the National Theatre in London.)
The Emperor Jones.
This now-legendary production by New York's Wooster Group must have started with something like this question: Was Eugene O'Neill's classic play too politically incorrect, its 1920s racial politics too embarrassing, to save it from the sociological scrapheap? This show is their spectacular answer. (It's worth noting that a new production of the original play just opened at the National Theatre in London.)
The plot: After murdering a man, Jones escaped a chain gang to a Caribbean island where he exploits the natives and appoints himself emperor. Eventually, threatened by an uprising, he has to flee through the jungle, and his long night's journey takes him through both his personal history and his racial history, traveling back in time through a slave market and finally to Africa and to death.
Challenging notions of race and gender, Kate Valk, a white woman, plays the Emperor in blackface with wildly parodic dialect and minstrelsy. This astonishing production further subverts the intense theatricality of the original script by using TV monitors and microphones.
And if you're looking for more Wooster Group re-examinations, their Hamlet, likely to be the mother of all deconstructions, starts next month in New York; the cast includes the same amazing Kate Valk.- Toby Zinman