play Bach and generalize?”
Surely, Valk’s intimate, even passionate connection to the character and the play’s language had much to do with her tour-de-force performance and the show’s critical acclaim. At the same time, however, the various production elements—such as Valk’s blackface (along with her white, unpainted hands), her non-Western Kabuki costume and Kabuki-like dances, the microphone through which she continually spoke, and the play’s overall mise-en-scène influenced by Kabuki and Noh theater, as well as her gender and race—distanced and undermined realistic conventions of representation by displaying the tensions between Valk and her character, performance and the written script. Additionally, the play’s distancing elements allowed the spectator to partake, like Valk herself, in the pleasure of O’Neill’s text, which would surely be more painful than pleasurable should it be performed today without distancing devices that help the spectator to appreciate the writing, and even blackface performance, as artistic constructions rather than merely as (problematic) attempts at “authentic” representation.
One could also view the Wooster Group’s complex blackface aesthetic, which the company has utilized for other productions, too, most notably Routes 1 & 9, as a way of foregrounding the unpresentable, a perspective that would align the company’s production of The Emperor Jones with a concept of postmodernism developed by Jean-François Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that the postmodern
puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.29
While the playing of Brutus Jones in blackface could be read as a “bad form” in “bad taste,” the sordid history often associated with blackface minstrelsy could short-circuit, in the audience, potential collective feelings of nostalgia for the past. Ironically, however, Valk’s brand of blackface performance—played with impressive artistry by a woman in a strange-looking robe, speaking into a microphone on a stand—helps to distance and thus make palatable, and even enjoyable, O’Neill’s seemingly unpresentable dialogue. Moreover, the virtuoso, Obie Award-winning actor Valk—who understands O’Neill’s writing sensuously, as an artist who performs it night after night in front of an audience—strongly believes that the dialogue possesses powerful aesthetic value. And her assertion seems to be supported by the numerous laudatory reviews of both the show and her remarkable performance.
Additionally, the foregrounding of the unpresentable, combined with Valk’s/Jones’ complicated theatrical presence (a white women in blackface and Kabuki attire playing a black man written by a white dramatist), makes it difficult, if not impossible, to judge the play in conventional ways. According to Lyotard, such resistance to judgment is common within the work of the postmodern artist:
the text he [or she] writes, the work he [or she] produces [or performs] are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work.30
The antithesis of dramatic realism and its apparently stable, ideologically secure referents, postmodern performance resists simple categorization.
A primary means of destabilizing categories, which brings us back to Brecht, is the use of quotation that interrupts and short-circuits conventional, taken-for-granted processes of signification. As Walter Benjamin observes in “What Is Epic Theater?”: “interruption…is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context.”31 Through Valk’s highly stylized, blackface-Kabuki presentation that undermines the play’s normally stable referents, her performance acts as a continual quotation device which interrupts the conventional context(s) of O’Neill’s play, including its presumed claims to “authenticity,” as well as other conventional/constructed contexts, such as gender, race, and even blackface minstrelsy itself.
Thus, unlike the written script of O’Neill’s drama, or even a new-yet-conventional production of The Emperor Jones, the Wooster Group’s performative deployment of quotation is able to set aside, in a way (within quotation marks, but without erasing), the play’s and the production’s more negative aspects while enabling spectators to appreciate other elements of the work, including, especially, Valk’s performance. At the same time, the production’s numerous ironies and its undercutting of empathy strongly encourage the spectator to think, actively, although perhaps in less directed ways than Brecht’s epic theater, in order to find meaning within a performance whose carnivalesque excess upends and complicates so many familiar rules and categories. In fact, “those rules and categories are what the work of art itself [and thus the audience] is looking for.”32
Characters Adrift: Drama of the Inarticulate
While the expressionistic bookends of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape remain the best known of O’Neill’s early experimental plays, his dramatic innovations that will forever alter American drama begin with his earlier, one-act “sea plays” of the nineteen-tens, often referred to as the S.S. Glencairn Plays (and presented by the Wooster Group/New York City Players as Early Plays). Eschewing the prevalent exclamatory language of the stage of the period, O’Neill achieves a breakthrough for American drama—which had long been considered derivative of European drama and decidedly second-rate—by creating characters whose language is, unlike his own, “low colloquial.” Up until that time, low “vernacular language [on the stage] was used entirely for comic purposes.”33 But with Bound East for Cardiff (written 1914; produced 1916)—the piece which first excited the Provincetown Players about working with the then-unknown dramatist—O’Neill begins to utilize low-colloquial language in ways that will reinvigorate American playwriting. As Jean Chothia observes,
O’Neill finds in the speech of the uneducated man a model through which he can show unaccommodated man locked in to himself but unsure, because of the limitations of the communicative faculty, of what the self is… He uses an individual’s inarticulacy to explore the wider inarticulacies of the human condition.34
O’Neill’s motley, international crew of sailors forever adrift at sea, as well as his searching protagonists of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, embody, through their fragmented, slang-filled language, inarticulate ways of being, as well as the difficulty of making sense of an increasingly complex, modern world. Thanks, in large part, to his early plays populated by stammering, inarticulate, lumpen-proletarian anti-heroes, O’Neill is largely responsible for creating, by the mid-ninteen-twenties, an American stage that is “changed beyond recognition.”35
Although O’Neill’s dramatic dialogue would utilize more standard forms of American English after The Hairy Ape, the playwright remained aware that he could never quite master such language, in spite of his efforts. In a frequently cited passage, Edmund, young O’Neill’s stand-in in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, laments to his father in the drawing room of their New London, Connnecticut home that he lacks facility with poetic language:
The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do.36
Unsurprisingly, and in spite of the dramatic power of O’Neill’s more inarticulate characters, critics often view this passage as a confession by the playwright which, in turn, supports their assertions that O’Neill can’t write effective dialogue. Yet the playwright, unlike Edmond, believed that a writer’s limitations with language were more related to the historical moment than to personal shortcomings. O’Neill wrote in a letter to Arthur Hobson Quinn, for example, that his play Mourning Becomes Electra would have been stronger if he had been able to provide it with “a great language.” Such language eluded him, he informed Quinn ten years after The Hairy Ape, because
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