A ghost in the expressionist jungle of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Carme Manuel

O'Neill's biographers have traced the origin of The Emperor Jones to different sources. Arthur and Barbara Gelb write that the idea of the play came from the playwright's memory of several stories told to him by different black and white acquaintances as well as from his experience while prospecting for gold in Honduras. (11) From here he wrote home letters complaining about "fleas that infest the native huts and eat you alive at night" and "an acute bilious attack caused by the rotten food" (Sheaffer 152). The play was immersed in controversy from its opening day. When The Emperor Jones was first produced, no black person had ever played a major role in the American theater in a non-musical production. The Provincetown Players decided that only a black man should play the role of Brutus Jones. They chose Charles Gilpin, who like the title character had once been a Pullman porter and who was one of the most superb actors at the time, arguably the black community's very best actor. The play was such an instantaneous success that it was moved from the Players' theater in the Village to Broadway, "where on December 27, 1920, for the first time in American history, a serious play by a serious playwright about a 'human' Negro, intelligent, and resolute, was played by a Negro before a white audience on Broadway" (Raleigh 108).

As the run of The Emperor Jones continued through 1921, Gilpin and O'Neill began to have serious problems. The friction emanated from Gilpin's increasing qualms about the racist content of the play: it led him "to show himself less and less willing to 'play the game' " (Gelb 238). White literary critics have traditionally emphasized one aspect of Gilpin's behavior--the fact that the strain to fight back racial prejudice led him to drink heavily and manipulate the text of the play. Specifically, as Arthur and Barbara Gelb represent the quarrel:

   O'Neill complained that Gilpin, who
   had grown suddenly finicky about
   using the word "nigger" (called for by
   the script), was rewriting the role.
   Aware that Gilpin was substituting
   "black baby" and other terms he considered
   more genteel, O'Neill was also
   annoyed by the fact that Gilpin was
   doing too much drinking to give an
   effective performance. He went backstage
   one night and warned his star:
   "If I ever catch you rewriting my lines
   again, you black bastard, I'm going to
   beat you up." (238)

As a result of his quarrel with O'Neill, Gilpin was not asked to play the role character in the English production, or to appear in the New York revival in 1925. (12) Drama historian David Krasner reconstructs the theatrical career of Charles Gilpin to suggest the black actor's attitude towards O'Neill's play. Krasner unearths John H. Raleigh's 1965 assessment of Gilpin as resentful of "the play's atavism whereby the terrors of the jungle night reduce the proud Jones to a cringing, crawling African savage, just before his end" (qtd. in Krasner 109). Krasner also highlights Caswell Crews's The Negro World speculation on May 17, 1921, "that if Mr. Gilpin is an intelligent and loyal Negro his heart must ache and rebel within him as he is forced to belie his race" (qtd. in Krasner 486). Moreover, these feelings attributed to Gilpin might well have been feelings shared among African American intellectuals, who were generally disapproving of The Emperor Jones. Numerous black publications rejected it, and several Harlem ones condemned it. Krasner reveals Gilpin's anxious attempt to defend the play and the lead role: