Performance Review

Ah, Wilderness!

The Emperor Jones

Figures

The Emperor Jones. By Eugene O'Neill. The Wooster Group. The Performing Garage, New York City. 22 March 1998.

Eugene O'Neill attempted throughout his career to reveal identity below the surface of appearances. In his Memoranda on Masks (1932), the playwright asks, "For what, at bottom, is the new psychological insight into human cause and effect but a study in masks, an exercise in unmasking?" (The Unknown O'Neill, ed. Travis Bogard [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 406). Despite handsome mounting and accomplished acting in two very different venues, an uptown commercial revival of Ah, Wilderness! and a downtown experimental production of The Emperor Jones, both efforts adhere to a performance style that appeals to the senses but does not embrace the soul. Pursuit of the easy laugh or technical dazzle prevents either production from peeling off enough polished veneer to reveal a heartfelt human--or theatrical--experience.

Lincoln Center Theater's production of Ah, Wilderness! boldly emphasizes O'Neill's slang to evoke turn-of-the-century America. Language, not often considered O'Neill's strong suit, achieves a richly pleasant musicality under the direction of Daniel Sullivan. A player piano in the bar scene and later a sentimental rendition of "Dearie," popular at the time, highlight the fun. Scene designer Tom Lynch further accentuates the human figure by stripping away the walls of the Miller home and placing a rectangular platform upon the thrust stage. Matching wicker furniture in the first act and stuffed chairs in act 2 provide a sense of order and harmony. The small size of the platform offsets the sterility of the furnishings by forcing intimacy among family members. Characters enter and literally disappear behind black curtains spanning the width of the immense stage. Dunya Ramicova's light and breezy costumes document the period and Peter Kaczorowki's lighting makes the actors pop out against the dark background. A green and cloudy sky, a discordant intrusion into an otherwise tranquil picture, hangs above the blacks upstage. Three power lines swag across the sky and connect to a sometimes flickering electric lamp standing upstage of the family platform, a reminder of the nascent power and technology that will blossom in coming years.

The strength of the production lies in the fine acting of the entire ensemble. As the sympathetic father Nat Miller, Craig T. Nelson is all patience and restraint. His ability to hold a line and stare down a moment adds to the leisurely pace that a [End Page 382] holiday atmosphere requires. The most surprising performance, however, belongs to Debra Monk in the role of the mother. Initially, she seems rather cold and a somewhat stereotypical and disposable character. But as the action unfolds, Monk fashions a contradictory character who is intelligent, loving, manipulative, yet innocent. She is capable of pulling off the bluefish prank against her husband and laughing at her own joke, but she rushes to his defense when she senses his hurt feelings. She expresses concern that her son is having an affair with Hedda Gabler in one scene, but in the next [End Page 383] scene she teases her husband about not being very bright. The audience delights in her full-bodied representation.

Unfortunately, the production as a whole flattens human experience into sitcom dimensions. In the climactic scene in act 4, the production goes all out to create a romantic landscape, complete with a big full moon hanging over a lighthouse lit horizon. A washed-out relic of a rowboat puts the finishing touches on the beach scene in which young Richard Miller first brings on the night with Juliet-like pleading. All this prologue leads to a most chaste kiss that seems to satisfy the longings of both lovers. However, an earlier parallel scene matches Richard with a prostitute named Belle. Her worldliness and womanliness frightens him away in the bar scene. If Richard recoils from the sexuality of the earlier scene, he needs to have a different response in the climactic scene, in order for the play as rite of passage to make sense. O'Neill's comedy works on the basis of Richard not being the "melancholy Dane" whom his father teases him of being. The perceived gap between Richard's true self and the identity that he tries to fashion out of books creates the comedy. Sam Trammell as Richard embodies awkward youth in search of a role model: Omar Khayyám, Eilert Lovborg, Hamlet, Swinburne. His spasmodic outbursts, passionate declarations, and hysterical gestures reveal an intelligence in search of a proper form. Surely Richard must reconcile the two aspects of himself that appear so foreign and comic, yet the production fails to do so satisfactorily.

Director Sullivan takes great care to develop the pathologically doomed romance between alcoholic Sid and Nat's spinster sister Lily in order to present different kinds and stages of love. In one gorgeous scene transition, the two young lovers, Richard and Muriel, exit downstage, Sid and Lily counter upstage, and the family platform floats in from the wings and revolves to show Nat and Essie getting ready for bed. The decision to stage the final scene in a private bedroom rather than in the sitting room as the stage directions dictate does not go far enough. By sexualizing the parental relationship, the final scene underscores an absence of sexuality between the young lovers. It creates an oddly Freudian moment when Nat, lying in bed, spies his son coming home and invites him into his bedroom for a chat. His reluctant lecture about girls who do and girls who don't fails to create tension in the scene because Richard shows no signs of developing sexual or conflicted feelings as he listens. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! quickly after a dream as a kind of wish fulfillment for the family and boyhood that he never had. Honestly depicting a son's awakening sexuality would not compromise such an idyllic family life. Indeed, when Nat metes out the stern punishment that his son must go to Yale and graduate, he completes the classical comic expectation of reconciliation and integration by making a rite of passage much smoother than an audience knows it to be.

The program of The Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones reprints W. E. B. DuBois's "The Negro and Our Stage," taken from a leaflet first issued during the 1923-24 Provincetown Playhouse season. DuBois suggests in his essay that a series of concentric shells surrounds the identity of African Americans, hindering sincere and artistic representation. This problem inspires The Wooster Group's current presentation, a companion piece to The Hairy Ape and a continuation of this avant-garde group's exploration of mask in American theatrical iconography.

The eponymous character, as in The Hairy Ape, is played entirely in blackface. After playing Yank in the earlier production, Willem Dafoe here plays the supporting role of Smithers and Kate Valk appears as Brutus Jones. Mask is both symbol and substance in this performance as a series of masking devices brings identity issues to the foreground. Race and gender are seen as roles. Acting style becomes another mask. Valk draws upon the tradition of minstrelsy and Kabuki as she struts around the bare stage wielding a microphone as though it were at once both scepter and cane. She entertains the audience with a vocal cadence that imitates stereotypical "black" speech even as she indicates that she is doing an imitation. She strikes commanding poses and demands to be watched at all times, often rolling her eyes to set the whites against black, a gesture that recalls pictures of Olivier's performance as Othello.

In a bare bones production, designer Jim Clayburgh presents a metallic, cold world set upon a white paneled floor. Jones's throne is nothing more than a covered chair built upon large casters that allow it to ride around the stage. A couple of small potted trees indicate the tropical locale. Valk and Dafoe energetically perform the entire one-hour play by themselves, aided by a couple of stage assistants dressed in black. Costumes of the two principals are layered to evoke an eastern style.

Technology itself functions as a kind of mask. Technicians sit in front of their electronic equipment in plain view of the audience on one side of the stage. Microphones and three video monitors, including a large monitor in the center, are spaced evenly across an upstage plane. Microphones [End Page 384] mediate all of the spoken text accompanied by a very effective original and percussive score by David Linton. The combination of sound, video, and live performance characteristic of The Wooster Group produces several exceptional theatrical images. A recurring sound of a whip, made quite distinct from the physical response to the lash by Valk lying downstage, proves anguishing. The image of Dafoe as a slave trader in a live video peeking over a childlike drawing of a slave ship is at once humorous and chilling. Dafoe's frenetic dance as a crocodile apparition, backed by equally violent music, is an intelligent solution to one of O'Neill's more difficult stage directions.

The best moment of the production comes in the very first scene in which Smithers stands alongside Jones and they perform a rhythmic, synchronized dance together. The precision of the movement and the grace of the moment is a joy to watch. Meaning remains unclear and this interlude does not advance any narrative, as though the performance itself were a kind of mask asking the audience to admire the polished surface of appearances. Unfortunately, the production never cracks the shell of O'Neill's text to engage its contents. O'Neill's play is a journey in which Jones, initially clad in a splendid uniform, sheds his clothes to reveal his nakedness as a person. Outside changes are manifested psychically as well. Jones's hallucinations in the dark jungle take him back in time to tap his collective unconscious, not just of his black race, but of humanity. In this production, the physical treatment of the play undergoes a transformation, but the obligation to explore what might be under the mask remains the same. An emphasis upon physical performance comes at the expense of narrative comprehension. The production does not build to a conclusion because, as the layers of identity are stripped away, there is no display of emotional vulnerability on the part of Jones. The mask never drops and we never see the human soul underneath. The end comes instead as an anticlimax, which detracts from the tragic irony of the last lines of the play, Smithers's reference to the native inhabitants of the island as "Blarsted niggers." That ugly epitaph repetitively haunts the entire text. Spoken by an all-white cast to an overwhelmingly white audience, the word resonates but ultimately fails to connect.

Zander Brietzke
New York City

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