African American

Series

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Written by Eugene O'Neill

Date premiered

1 November 1920

Place premiered

Neighborhood PlayhouseNew York City, New York

Original language

English

Subject A Black porter attains power in the West Indies by exploiting the superstitions and ignorance of an island's residents.

Genre Tragedy

Setting A West Indian island not yet self-determined, but for the moment, an empire.

Poster for a 1937

Federal Theater Project

production

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Tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor.

The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the forest in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.

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In Scene (v), he finds

himself in a slave-market of

the mid-19th C.E.

As he is about to be

auctioned, he fires and the

vision disappears.

In Scene (vi), he is on a

slave-ship, working with

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In Scene (vii), he is in Congo,

where he sees a sacrificial

altar, a witch-doctor, a

crocodile-god.

He has to fire his silver bullet,

the only one remaining with him,

to kill the monstrous crocodile-

god coming towards him.

The vision disappears.

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In Scene (viii), we see the

dawn of day:oIt is the edge of the Great

Forest.

oRealistic stage-dialogue

between Lem, a tribal

chieftain and Smithers, the

cockney trader.

oJones is dead, getting killed

by a silver bullet made by his

subjects out of 'money'.

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The Emperor Jones is

the first play having a

Negro for a hero.

This shows the revival

of interest in the

primitive, consequent

upon the rise of

romanticism, both in

England and America.

It is the first play in

which a Negro actor,

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Expressionism (characterised by theatricality) as a movement started in Europe (Seymour-Smith, 559) and its most important practitioner in

drama was the Swedish playwright August Strindberg whom O'Neill acknowledged as his master in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Ed.

Bogard, Unknown O'Neill 427). It represents on the stage in a concrete manner what happens in the mind and soul of some character under the stress of external incidents

and circumstances. It is an objectification of the dark depths of the human psyche; in

order to represent this, symbols are used extensively. The Emperor Jones is one of the major American plays using this

technique.

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The Emperor Jones is mainly an

expressionistic play and the

expressionist seeks to solve the

problem by representing the soul of

man in the form of external symbols.

O’Neill uses metaphor, fable or

allegory.

He produces figures moving

obscurely on a darkened stage to

personify good or bad motives.

He gives words to unseen voices to

express the secret thoughts of a

man’s mind.

O’Neill’s link with the

expressionistic school becomes quite

clear because he has also used a

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It is carried to a height ofexcellence by O'Neill's inherited feeling for the stage, his grasp of

theatrical effect and technical mastery of pace and suspense.

The play opens with a dumb show:

"As the curtain rises, a native Negro woman sneaks in cautiously ... she

begins to glide noiselessly ... towards the doorway in the rear" .

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It explores the complexities of 'being' within the

individual soul.

It’s a record of the shedding of masks acquired by

the Negroes through their association with the Whites

and their gradual attainment of self-knowledge

through suffering.

Jones comes down through the successive levels of

the super ego, ego, and personal unconscious, and

finally goes into racial unconscious with an

evolutionary directness.

As Carpenter stresses that the psychological

theories of Carl Jung with the quasi-religious

interpretation of the psychology of the unconscious

also influenced O'Neill at this time, The Emperor

Jones is both a drama of physical primitivism and one

of the subconscious soul of man.

But the greatness of the play lies in its very lack of

explicitness and in the dramatic unity and skill of its

conception and realization.

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Exposition

The Emperor Jones is a one-act play in eight

scenes. The first and last scenes contain several

characters and employ a realistic style while the

six scenes in the middle are an expressionistic

monologue chroncling Jones's nightmarish trip

through the forest. This middle section is the

main part of the play and focuses as much on

light, sound, and setting as on Jones's spoken

words. The first and last scenes of the play, then,

serve as a framing device, first setting up and

then resolving Jones's night in the forest.

However, the first scene of the play is vastly

different not only from the middle scenes but also

from its companion, frame scene at the end of

the play. For it is in this opening scene that

O'Neill must provide all of the "exposition" for the

play.

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