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"Genuine Negroes and RealBloodhounds": Cross-Dressing,

Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, andThe Emperor Jones^

AOIFE MONKS

INTRODUCTION

When Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones was first performed in 1920,it was hailed as an important landmark for the representation of race on theAmerican stage. For featuring a central hlack character and for actually cast-ing a black actor to play the role, O'Neill and his work were seen to be radi-cally progressive in an era of widespread blackface minstrel practice on thestage. O'Neill's play - which tells the story of Brutus Jones, an African Amer-ican Pullman porter who escapes from a chain gang and becomes the emperorof a Caribbean island - was hailed as a masterpiece for its expressionist inves-tigation of the complexities of race and identity. O'Neill offered his whiteaudiences a sympathetic and powerful African American protagonist, playedby a black actor at a time when the representation of blackness on the stagewas reserved for whites in blackface. O'Neill's place in the history books asan important figure in the history of African American emancipation seemed asure thing.

Over seventy years after Eugene O'Neill wrote his play, the Wooster Group,an avant-garde collective theatre company based in downtown New York, per-formed his play and simultaneously deconstructed the historical legacy of thetext.^ In the Wooster Group's 1993 production of The Emperor Jones, theblack male lead role, Brutus Jones, was played by the actress Kate Valk, inblackface, while Smithers, the white Cockney trader in the play, was played byWillem Dafoe, in a cosmetic approximation of a white Kabuki mask. Bothactors were dressed in costumes akin to Kabuki robes and performed threeKabuki style dances during the course of the production. The set was a barewhite box, and the only objects used were a television monitor placed upstage,two microphones on stands through which the actors spoke, and a large chairon wheels, which was covered with brown fake fur. Michael Feingold summedup the production as a "parade of dislocations and seeming irrelevancies[which] not only animate [...] O'Neill's play but enrich [...] it" (137).

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Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones 541

Critics received the production rapturously, favourably comparing theWooster Group's interpretation of the text with O'Neill's original play, argu-ing that "Elizabeth LeCompte's staging of The Emperor Jones is both greatand outrageous" (Feingold 137). Writing in the New York Press, JonathanKalb's reaction was typical:

[H]ere is a classic play that is virtually unperformable in 1990s America in themanner the author envisioned in I92O.[...] Unfortunately, performed today aswritten (that is with earnest and realistic emotion by a black actor), the cunning yetsuperstitious and uneducated Jones too easily comes off as a racist stereotype. (6)

And, in the New York Times, Ben Brantley suggested that

America has long passed the point where a straightforward production of TheEmperor Jones, with a black man delivering O'Neill's dialectical speeches aswritten, could be other than embarrassing. Yet the drama remains fascinating and itwould be a shame to consign it to the shelves of unplayable plays.

According to these critics, a performance of O'Neill's play at the end of thetwentieth century demanded a revisionist approach to save it from the unac-ceptably racist implications of the text. While The Emperor Jones had beenhailed as a progressive masterpiece at the beginning of the twentieth century,by the 1990s, the Wooster Group were only able to relieve the racism of theplay by using blackface in their production, a performance practice for whichthey had been roundly criticized twelve years previously, in their productionRoute i&g:^ These historical contradictions were manifold in the WoosterGroup's The Emperor Jones, and not only formed a backdrop to their produc-tion but also played a central role in the group's representation of race, gender,and the "Orient" on the stage.

The reception of the Wooster Group's production of The Emperor Jonesdemands an investigation into why it had become not only acceptable, butpreferable, to use blackface ih a contemporary production of the play and intowhy O'Neill's representation of race, which had once been seen as radicallyprogressive, was now deemed unacceptably racist."* This investigation leads tothe larger question of how black identity can be represented by white artists onthe stage and further asks whether these artists were representing blackness atall, or whether, rather, their use of racial discpurse was a means to investigatewhite identity in performance. The contrast between the celebration in 1920 ofthe "authentic" black body in O'Neill's work and the rejection of this notionof "authenticity" as a form of racism, in favour of a deeply and obviouslyinauthentic rendering of blackness through minstrelsy in the Wooster Group's1990s work, requires that careful attention be paid to the historical contexts inwhich this work took place. Furthermore, however, the question of authentic-

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ity itself requires further examination, taking into account the ongoing debateabout the right to represent the Other in performance.

The fraught arena of the representation of black identity by white artistsbrings to light the embattled position that the "authenticity" of the actor'sbody occupies in performance. While O'Neill and the Wooster Group relatedto that notion of "authenticity" in radically different ways, their opposingstrategies shared a similar admirable complexity and a problematic reduction-ism in the portrayal of black identity in performance. The tension between thereductive and productive nature of their work insists on an acknowledgementof the anxious relationship between the question of authenticity and theactor's body in perfonnance, a relationship that has deeply political conse-quences for the meanings and effects of theatrical representation. As SusanBennett argues, "As the very ground on which belief is founded, the visualityof identity is [...] all-important and the notion of authenticity produces anapparently always contested site" (175). How the body of the actor is posi-tioned and engaged in perfonnance can have radical consequences for the eth-ics and problems of racial representation. And, as I will argue in this paper,the role of racial representation on the stage has frequently had tragic imphca-tions for the construction of racial hierarchies more generally. The actor'sbody has been an important site where the struggle over authority, authorship,and authenticity in the history of racial representation has taken place.

O'Neill's struggles with the representation of blackness and the WoosterGroup's historicization and subversion of those struggles in their productionof The Emperor Jones, therefore, provide a remarkable opportunity to exam-ine the complexities of the actor's body in performance. However, actors'bodies in O'Neill's play and in the Wooster Group's production are furthercomplicated by the various forms of cross-dressing employed in both works.Cross-dressing can be immediately located in the Wooster Group's produc-tion, with Valk's gendered, raced. Orientalist, and mediated crossings onstage. Cross-dressing manifested itself in this production through a variety ofmasks: the make-up, costume, and vocal stylization, and the technologicalmasks provided by the Wooster Group's famous use of television screens andmicrophones on the stage. However, O'Neill's work also contained crossingsof.racial lines, with the doomed Jones attempting to mimic "whiteness." And,as Shannon Steen points out, the play is also more subtly encoded with meta-phorical and textual crossings in the figure of O'Neill himself, an Irish Ameri-can, who used the black body of Jones (and the black body of the actorplaying Jones) as a means to examine the liminality of his own racial position-ing in American culture (354-56). Furthermore, the figure of the actor CharlesGilpin, who first played Brutus Jones, also crossed-played, in a sense, by play-ing a black character constructed in O'Neill's "white" imagination, a characterwhose hyperbolic blackness reconfigured and constructed Gilpin's own black-ness on stage. The conflict between Gilpin and O'Neill over the ownership of


the role of Brutus Jones points to the more general tensions within the matrixof authorship and authority in performance, and the concept of "crossing" is auseful means to access the complexities of this dynamic. In the interfacebetween O'Neill's play and the Wooster Group's production, cross-dressingtakes on manifold expressions - some literary, some historical, some material,some theatrical, all located in and around that wonderfully and anxiouslycomplicated arena of the actor's body.

The concept of "crossing" is, therefore, central to this paper, allowing, as itdoes, an examination of the relationship between the actor's body and theimage that actor creates in performance, a relationship that, as I have argued,has serious implications for the construction and representation of racial hier-archies.^ While scholarship on cross-dressing has tended to focus on cross-gender casting, I want to focus instead on the intricacies of racial and cross-racial casting (although this is not to say that the question of gender is not animportant factor in the construction of racial hierarchies). The question ofcross-dressing takes on political and ethical implications when consideringthese productions, especially when Jacqueline Wood's question - in her dis-cussion of Adrienne Kennedy's work - is taken into account: "how can oneestablish out of the violence and terror of American racist performance someredemptive or at least productive figurations of black life and culture on thestage?" (7). Wood's question is a good one to pit against the work of O'Neilland the Wooster Group, and while I want to take account of the important andproductive complexity of both works, I also want to query the problematic and •reductive deployment of blackness as a metaphorical trope in the work ofwhite artists.

The various metaphorical and textual crossings of O'Neill's moment wereforegrounded by the Wooster Group's production of his text; I want to exam-ine how the question of authenticity manifested itself through cross-dressing,beginning with O'Neill's own historical context, then moving on to his play-text and the production of that text, and finally considering the operations ofcrossing in the Wooster Group's production of O'Neill's play. I want to makethe case that both artists, while problematically reducing the complexity ofblack identity in their work, did do important and productive work with whiteidentity in performance and that their racialization of whiteness offered a crit-ical response to race, even as they could both be critiqued for their treatmentof blackness. With their production of The Emperor Jones, the Wooster Groupbecame both the rewriters and the inheritors of Eugene O'Neill's primitivistlegacy.

PLAYtNG W H I T E : O'NEtLL'S THE EMPEROR JONES

O'Neill's project at the start of the century was to release the "authentic" selffrom within the stifling confines of modem life. Through the use of ritual.

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masks, sound, and lighting effects, O'Neill's dramas placed centre stage dehu-manized characters who relived their humanity through crisis and conflict.Written at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, O'Neill's work on race waspart of a larger interest in black culture in 1920s New York and can also be sit-uated in the larger western primitivist project, which functioned in the 1920sas an artistic strategy with which to criticize modernity. Artists positionedthemselves in opposition to the dominating forces of capitalism, technology,and industrialization by identifying with the non-white and the non-west.While O'Neill consciously sought to resist the imperialist and repressive atti-tudes towards blackness in his America, he, like many other primitivists,nonetheless reaffirmed many of the stereotypes of blackness by confiningblack identity to the authentic and primitive "black body," a body that wasboth radical and reductive in performance in the 1920s.

O'Neill's modernist experimentation also took place against a backdrop ofsocial Darwinism that largely informed attitudes towards race in Victorian cul-ture. The discourse of social Darwinism affirmed and naturalized already exis-tent social hierarchies but gave them a fixity through scientific claims toobjectivity and "truth." However, O'Neill's attempt to combat the fixity of the"natural" was not a reaction to scientific discourse alone. The prominence ofthe Darwinian gaze was evident also in various performance forms in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries. This could be seen in the immense popularity ofworld fairs and P.T. Bamum's American Museum, in which monkeys, apes,and occasionally humans were displayed for the erudition and amusement ofthe public. Blackface minstrel shows were packed to the rafters with workingclass spectators, drinking in the vaudeville parodies of race. The constructionof racial and class identity in nineteenth-century America was not confined toscientific discourse: through fairs, museums, zoos, and theatre, the generalpublic learned to "look" race at the occupants of the exhibitions and perfor-mances and to mediate racial identity on these terms in everyday life.

However, while these performances traded on the idea of the "fixity" ofracial bodies, the relation between performers and the image they portrayedwas a far more complex and anxious one. As Eric Lott and David Roedigerboth point out, mid-nineteenth-century minstrelsy was largely performed byimmigrant workers, who were themselves understood to be liminally white inVictorian America. Blackening their faces, donning white gloves, and whiten-ing their lips allowed these immigrant workers to subsume their ethnic differ-ences under the camouflage of blackness. The minstrel show, therefore,simultaneously produced blackness and whiteness: blackness through the gro-tesque caricatures in the images created by the minstrel stage, which subse-quently mediated how black people themselves were seen, and whitenessthrough the homogenizing effects of the burnt cork mask. Lott and Roedigereach argue that the performances also constructed and imprinted whiteness onthe immigrant, working class, male bodies of spectators of minstrelsy.


The complexity of minstrel performance is exemplified by the fact thatmany minstrel performers were Irish immigrants. In America in the mid-nine-teenth-century, the Irish were aligned with the black community and bothwere portrayed with monkey or ape-like characteristics (Curtis xiii). Irish par-ticipation in blackface performance can be seen, in part, as an anxious asser-tion and construction of whiteness, creating the paradoxical effect that, evenwhile Irish immigrants constructed degrading images of blackness on the min-strel stage, "the drunken, belligerent, and foolish Pat and Bridget were stockcharacters" in theatres nearby (Ignatiev 2). The "greenface" of stage Irishnesscompeted with the blackface of minstrelsy as two forms of racial cross-dress-ing on the American stage. Irish participation in minstrelsy, therefore, becamea way of combatting caricatures of themselves by constructing even more den-igrating images of blackness. As Noel Ignatiev points out, "In becomingWhite, [the Irish] ceased to be Green" (3).

The "production" of whiteness through minstrelsy, brought into relief bythe complex social position of Irish blackface performers, makes the case forthe fact that racial identity has been mediated and constructed, in part,through the lens of stage representation. This argument can be extended toidentity more generally, with the notion that theatre can produce idealizedand/or denigrated bodies that change how performers and spectators embodyidentity. The relationship between the actors' bodies and their roles, and theactors' bodies and the audience is clearly politicized and formative in thecase of blackface performance. The minstrel stage is a tragic example of howrepresentation can have material, as well as identificatory, effects on bodies;not only through the mediation and construction of race in performance, butalso through the lynching and race riots that frequently followed minstrelperformances. The minstrel show reconstructed the "real" of the performers'bodies and had a directly material effect on the "real" of the bodies of Afri-can Americans.

Minstrelsy was only just beginning to lose its popularity (although itremained a popular form on film and television right up until the 1970s)when O'Neill wrote his play The Emperor Jones. At a moment in historywhen the Irish American community had only tentatively become "white,"O'Neill's engagement with race in The Emperor Jones can be read throughthe legacy of the minstrel tradition that he both rejected, and - unconsciously- maintained in his play and through the lens of his own Irish American eth-nicity. Furthermore, O'Neill's modernist interest in the "authentic" or the"real" was "based on racist presumptions that utilized newly formed 'scien-tific' data in manufacturing distortions" (Krasner 19). The contradictory ele-ments of O'Neill's own ethnicity were reflected in his contradictory treatmentof black identity, which moved between a social constructionist and a deeplyprimitivist understanding of race. O'Neill, like Brutus Jones, was liminallyand precariously "coloured."

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MASKING C O L O U R : BRUTUS JONES

The Emperor Jones is a play intimately concerned with the complexities ofcolour. This can be seen in the relationship between the play's protagonist,Brutus Jones, and Smithers, the white Cockney trader. While Brutus Jones is ablack man and Smithers a white man, their relationship is an uneasy negotia-tion of power, with Jones' superior political power operating in confiict withSmithers' presumption of power through his whiteness. The complexity oftheir relationship is revealed in the liminality of their racial positioning andtheir visual encoding on stage. By placing these men in an antagonistic rela-tionship, O'Neill explores how racial relations are historically constructed andhow race is materialized through status and power.

The effects of O'Neill's historicization of race can be seen in the liminalityof Smithers' whiteness, visible in the clown-like appearance that reveals hispositioning as disempowered in relation to Jones: "The tropics have tannedhis naturally pasty face with its small, sharp features to a sickly yellow, andnative rum has painted his pointed nose to a startling red' (6). Smithers' dis-coloration reveals the complexity of his social positioning as "white" in theplay and this complexity is extended by his national and class identity. As aCockney, Smithers is ethnically distanced from the play's American audience,and so his whiteness is further complicated by his class positioning and hisnationality. Smithers' whiteness is as tainted as his outfit, "a worn riding suitof dirty white drill" (6), and O'Neill's visual treatment of the character sug-gests that race and colour are established through discourses of power anddomination rather than through stable corporeal signs.

This destabilization of colour can also be seen in the figure of Brutus Jones,an African American who mimics "whiteness." O'Neill shows this in his dif-ferentiation of Jones' appearance from that of the stereoypical Negro of con-temporary American popular culture. Jones is described in the first scene as,"a tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded negro of middle age. His features aretypically negroid, yet there is something decidedly distinctive about his face[•••]" (7)- Notably, O'Neill tetkes the homogeneity of African Americans forgranted and makes Jones' physiognomy exceptional because of his complexpositioning within the economic and political hierarchies of his West Indiesempire. The fact that Jones is cross-dressed as white is revealed initiallythrough his costume, which is a kind of parody of white clothing, a garish ver-sion of a western military outfit. This is an outfit that O'Neill describes as "notaltogether ridiculous" (8), which reveals O'Neill's view of the combinedcomedy and menace of a black man's dressing "up" in the garb of whiteness.

However, not only does Jones approximate whiteness visually, he alsodescribes how he has internalized "white" behaviour through his observationsof white people while working as porter on a Pullman carriage. As Jones tellsSmithers,


For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makesyou Emperor and puts you in de Hall O' Fame when you croaks, {reminiscently) Ifdey's one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman ca's listenin' to de white qualitytalk, it's dat same fact. And when I gits a chance to use it I winds up Emperor in twoyears. (10)

By emulating and imitating the "white quality," Jones has become as brutal acolonizer as those who once colonized him, and this is another kind of mas-querade. To act brutally and to construct an empire is to cross-dress as a whiteperson; Jones has learned to mask himself as white through the economicexploitation of others and, therefore, achieves power and domination over thenatives, whom he contemptuously describes as ignorant "bush niggers" (10).Brutus Jones, then, is a complex layering of impersonations, crossings, andmasquerades. O'Neill foregrounds the constructed nature of race and theimplication of power within the social hierarchies of colour, through the rela-tionship between Jones and Smithers. Resisting a static, or social Darwinist,perspective on race, the opening scenes of O'Neill's play offer a deconstruc-tion of the semiotics of colour in the cross-raced figure of Jones.

However, Jones' retreat from his white palace to the darkness of the forestin his escape from the mutinous natives becomes an act of unmasking, remov-ing his signs of whiteness and revealing his black body beneath the masquer-ade of civilization. Jones' journey through the forest is a journey throughhistory. He visits his personal past on a chain gang, meeting the man he mur-dered as a Pullman porter, and then moves even further back into the historyof his race, hallucinating a slave auction, a slave ship, and finally his "primor-dial" roots in Africa, with a vision of a crocodile and a masked witch doctor.Jones not only experiences these visions, he himself begins to revert to whatO'Neill considers a "primordial" state. He loses items of clothing as he goes,and his body becomes progressively more visible throughout his journey. Bythe end, "His pants have been so torn away that what is left of them is no bet-ter than a breech cloth" (34). As Jones' body is asserted, his westernizedrejection of superstition and his claims to rationality are destroyed by thevisions in the forest. Moving from the white space of civilization, to the blackspace of the forest, Jones' "white" mask is stripped away to reveal the"authentic" identity beneath: embodied, superstitious, irrational, and black.

Jones' journey from whiteness to blackness, civilization to the jungle, isalso a journey from masculinity to feminization, which can be seen in thecoyly erotic striptease he undergoes from scene to scene. While O'Neill usesthe loss of clothing to assert Jones' "authentic" body, he also establishes, forthe white audience, an erotic, specular relationship with Jones' black body;not only the body of the character, but also and more powerfully, the "authen-tic" black body of the actor playing Jones. Just as Jones' body is asserted,becoming a visual object of desire for the audience, he is also feminized, los-

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ing the stereotypical trappings of masculinity, becoming irrational, fearful,and servile. Jones' parodic whiteness also contains a parodic masculinity, andby stripping away his masquerade of colour, O'Neill reconfigures Jones' gen-dered status.

"THAT IRISHMAN, HE JUST WROTE THE PLAY"

The play's joumey into the history of Jones' race spells out a central contra-diction in O'Neill's approach to colour. Even while O'Neill deconstmctsracial hierarchies, both through the liminality of Jones and Smithers andthrough the historicization of black identity in Jones' joumey, he nonethelesssimultaneously renders race a stable, inescapable, corporeal fact. Jones' denialof his race leads to his death, and his body is asserted as the guarantor of theauthenticity of his blackness. The play both deconstmcts the static hierarchiesof race that were prevalent at the time that O'Neill wrote his play and simulta-neously reaffirms them, by showing Jones' racial cross-dressing to be unper-formative: no matter how much Jones acts like a white man, he will neverquite be a white man, and his black body is defenceless against the supersti-tion of the ignorant "bush niggers" (io).

The decision to cast a black actor as Jones in the Provincetown Playhouseproduction played a part in the play's contradictory attitude to race. The deci-sion not to cast a blackface white actor in the role was haunted by blackface.On the one hand, O'Neill made an important intervention in the racist ortho-doxy of play production in America at his time. On the other hand, the substi-tution of a black actor for a white one leaned heavily on primitivist notions ofauthenticity and "the real." Even while the casting of Gilpin, and later PaulRobeson, undermined the hegemony of whiteness in the blackface system,O'Neill's play simultaneously offered the black body as an object of desire,spectacle, and revulsion that still operated within the economy of representa-tion constmcted by white artists for white audiences. As Steen suggests,"O'Neill's play can be seen in a replacement tradition [for blackface] of blackactors performing in roles written by white authors, devised in order toexpress white anxieties" (354).

The black actors playing Jones were, therefore, also crossing or "in black-face," in playing the role. Black actors assumed a hyperbolic blackness in therole of Jones (who himself masquerades as parodically white), before reveal-ing their "authentic" black bodies on the stage. These actors were "passing" asblack in performance. By entering into a representational economy of race inwhich they had no authorial position, the actors playing Jones both imitated ablackness constructed by O'Neill and, furthermore, produced and materializedtheir own black corporeality as a sign of their authenticity as black actors, forthe edification of a white audience.

The contradictions in O'Neill's portrait of blackness can also be seen in


Charles Gilpin's remark about playing the role: "I created the role of TheEmperor. That role belongs to me. That Irishman, he just wrote the play" (qtd.in Bogard 139). This remark is telling, revealing the tensions backstage,where Gilpin accused O'Neill of being racist, refused to use the term "nigger"in the script, and began to rewrite O'Neill's words, much to the disgust of theplaywright, who threatened to beat him up. This struggle over authorship andauthenticity is extended by Gilpin's description of O'Neill as an "Irishman,"pointing to O'Neill's own liminally coloured social position.

In Gilpin's remark, we can see Eugene O'Neill as located within the legacyof Irish participation in blackface minstrelsy. He took an important step inrejecting the use of blackface in the productions of his play. Nonetheless, hisprimitivist approach to the black body still explored whiteness through themedium of blackness, and O'Neill's deployment of blackness in his play con-stituted him as a liminally white author, engaging with the anxiety of colourthrough a liminally/absolutely black figure. In this way, O'Neill himself wascross-dressing as black, through the identificatory process of writing and stagerepresentation. As Steen suggests, "[T]he black Brutus Jones is a projection ofthe white O'Neill in racial drag, a fantasy of both his own blackness and hisown whiteness" (353).

The stmggle between O'Neill and Gilpin over authorship can, therefore, beseen as a stmggle over the power to represent colour on the stage, a strugglethat Gilpin ostensibly lost.^ This clash can also be seen in the contrast betweenthe white critics' reception of the Provincetown production in 1920 and a Har-lem audience's response to a revival of the play in 1930. O.W. Firkins glow-ingly reported of Gilpin's 1920 performance that "we watched him lazily andgloatingly uncoil his sinuosities in the first scene with the stupefied recoil withwhich we might have watched the same process in the nodes of a boa constric-tor" (qtd. in Wainscott 56). Firkins' response reveals that white critics werestill putting the jungle into blackness, a response created in some ways by theplay itself. This contrasted strongly with the heckling from the African Amer-ican audience at the Harlem revival, who bade Jones "come on out o' that jun-gle - back to Harlem where you belong" (qtd. in Steen 345).

The response of the African American community to the play was complexand conflicted. On the one hand, the play was welcomed as an opportunity forAfrican American actors to take a lead role on the stage; on the other hand, theplay was suspect for "its insistence upon atavism and primitivism" (Wikander225). The problems with the "authenticity" of blackness in a play written byan Irish American, which itself idealizes the notion of the "authentic" blackbody, can be seen to be central to this debate. W.E.B. DuBois' defence ofO'Neill's play, which was printed in the Provincetown Playhouse program, isindicative of the centrality of the idea of the "real" or the "authentic" to theproblems of theatrical representations of race: "[T]he Negro today fears anyattempt of the artist to paint Negroes. He is not satisfied unless everything is

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perfect and proper and beautiful and joyful. He is afraid to be painted as he is.lest his human foibles and shortcomings be seized by his enemies for the pur-poses of the ancient and hateful propaganda" (qtd. in Wooster Group; empha-sis added).

The Wooster Group printed DuBois' defence of CNeill's use of blackactors in their 1998 program for their production of The Emperor Jones. How-ever, there were no black actors in their production. Instead, Kate Valk woreblackface to play Jones and mimicked the vocal and physical conventions ofblackface minstrelsy in her performance. DuBois' defence of the representa-tion of "the Negro as he is" in O'Neill's work acted as a frame for the WoosterGroup's performance, in which a white woman played a btack character, writ-ten by an Irish American, in blackface.

HISTORICIZING O ' N E I L L

The use of DuBois to frame their program was indicative of a larger historicalproject within the Wooster Group's production of The Emperor Jones. AsRoger Bechtel notes, this was the first play text that the Wooster Group pro-duced under its original title - they would also produce O'Neill's The HairyApe in 1995 under the original title (Bechtel 2). Unlike their previous produc-tions, which had combined up to eight different texts,'' The Emperor Jonesmarked a departure in the company's work by being a "straight" performanceof the play (straight for the Wooster Group, at least).

The historicizing effects of the program were reflected by the strategies ofthe production itself, and the use of blackface in Valk's performance was notonly a performance of the role of Jones but also a commentary on the histori-cal legacies of the play. The cultural iconicity of the play, which came fromthe casting of a black actor - Charles Gilpin - in the lead role, together withthe fact that the role was played by the famous African American actor PaulRobeson in the 1933 film, acted as a secondary source text for the WoosterGroup's performance, informing the construction of racial and gendered iden-tity on the stage and relying on the intertextual knowledge of the audience andthe iconicity of the text itself for the interpretation of the theatrical strategiesat work in the production. While the Wooster Group performed O'Neill's text,they also performed the history of that text and produced historicized andmediated bodies in performance, bodies that challenged a notion of the fixityof race, bodies that implicated theatre practice itself in the construction ofhierarchies of race and power.

As I described above, when the Wooster Group production of The EmperorJones opened to critics in 1998, the reception was rapturous. In marked con-trast to the critics' response to the company's use of blackface in their earlierwork, Kate Valk's Jones was seen as a virtuoso and intelligent performancethat underscored the historicity of the role, with one critic even arguing that


"that is fundamentally what O'Neill intended" (Kalb 6). Kalb's response wasnot unusual: critics saw the company's combination of cross-gender, cross-race, and cross-Oriental casting as loyal to the spirit of O'Neill's play, "restor-ing theatrical life to what was occluded by antiquated style and language"(Kalb 6). Despite the obvious irony of seeing Valk's blackface performance asloyal to O'Neill's revolutionary casting of Gilpin, the critics subtly authorizedthe Group's formal experimentation with O'Neill's intentions.

This reception, while praising the production, also elided many of thepotentially controversial elements of the performance. The reception wasalmost like a restaging of the conflict between O'Neill and Gilpin in 1920. Inreviews, the role of the Wooster Group as the authors of the meaning of theirperformance was subsumed within the figure of O'Neill, whose language andstyle may have become obsolescent but whose core intentions overwhelmedthe autonomous authorship of the company. The blackface of Valk appearedto be acceptable to critics only under the rubric of authorial "consent." Thecritics' focus, then, was on how the Group's formal innovations could bestserve the staging of the text and the renewal of the play for contemporaryaudiences. The potentially racist implications of Valk's performance wereignored, as was the problematically Orientalist use of Japanese costumes anddance styles. This response contrasted markedly with the furore over theGroup's use of blackface in 1981 and the critics' glowing response toO'Neill's "authentic" racial casting in 1920. This may have been partly due tochanges in the social and theatrical contexts between 1920 and 1981. While Iwill examine the production itself for its use of blackface in performance, anexamination of the changes in the social and theatrical contexts in which theGroup worked in the early 1990s can also help illuminate the current accept-ability of the Wooster Group's appropriative bodies in performance.

THE SENSATION OF SOMETHING NEW

Unlike O'Neill's unconsciously appropriative primitivism, the WoosterGroup's work at the end of the century is characterized by their perfor-mance of consciously appropriated bodies, bodies which are knowingly fic-tional and mediated representations of races and cultures outside of themake-up of the Wooster Group's company and audience profile. WhilePatrice Pavis condemns appropriation for "reduc[ing] everything to the per-spective of the target culture, which is in the dominant position and tums thealien culture to its own ends" (qtd. in Bennett 202), the Wooster Groupappropriate bodies while acknowledging and problematizing that act ofappropriation in their performances, foregrounding the inauthenticity of thebodies on their stage. As a result, the Wooster Group produces subversiveand interrogative forms of identity in performance which challenge the nor-mative approach to gender, race, and an imagined Orient. However, the ethi-

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cal problems of appropriation still remain, and I will investigate this tensionin their work further below.

The development of the Wooster Group's consciously appropriative aes-thetic strategies emerged from their origins within the New York avant-gardetheatre community of the 1960s and 1970s, whose performances worked insimilar ways to O'Neill's modernism. These artists positioned themselves ascounter-cultural and worked to critique and rebel against mainstream culturefrom the margins of society (frequently, by identifying themselves with non-white and non-western identities). However, the Wooster Group positionedthemselves differently in relation to the political interventions of their work.By the 1980s, the avant-garde's marginality and "outside" status had becomecommodified as the next altemative movement in consumerist culture's end-less search for novelty. As Bruce King suggests, "[T]he avant garde hasbecome popular, more an up-to-date fashion in taste, like this year's hemlineand colours, than a radical rejection of bourgeois culture" (8). As a result, thepolitics of avant-garde practice necessarily changed, and some would arguethe concept of the avant-garde became impossible (see Burger).

Rather than critiquing mainstream culture from the margins and creatingpolemical theatre designed to intervene in the mainstream, fringe artists beganto acknowledge that an "outside" perspective was impossible and began towork, instead, to deconstruct the politics of contemporary culture from within,using irony and subversion instead of outright rebellion and employing thetools of commodity culture (such as technology and popular film and televi-sion, etc.) in order to dismantle that culture from within. This strategy, ofcourse, always runs the risk of becoming complicit with that which it attemptsto subvert, and contemporary avant-garde theatre practice is often criticizedfor its endorsement of mainstream culture, its seeming apolitical stance, andits disengagement from social issues.

The Wooster Group's performances have exemplified this trend. Their pol-itics have not been overt or oppositional but have vvorked from within thetexts and performance styles of mainstream culture and the theatrical canon.Their work has frequently been seen by their critics as an endorsement ofmainstream ideology - as in the case of the Wooster Group's use of blackface,which could be read either as a deconstruction of race or as an affirmation ofracism - but advocates of the Group's work claim they have operated "decon-structively, resistantly, from within" (Auslander 51). As Phillip Auslanderneatly puts it, the Wooster Group is "a 'theatre with a politic' rather than a'political theatre'" (104).

Alongside the changes to the politics of avant-garde practice, the field ofracial representation in American theatre practice since O'Neill has also beenradically altered by the greater prominence of African American artists in thecreation of theatre performances. African American playwrights, actors, anddirectors wrested the representation of blackness from the hands of white art-


ists and challenged the right of white artists to speak on behalf of the blackcommunity, particularly after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Towardsthe end of the 1990s and throughout the 2000s, African American playwrightsbegan to employ radically deconstmctive techniques in their treatment of race,notably in the work of female writers such as Suzan-Lori Parks. These artistsbegan to question the stability of the categories of race and gender, and theirwriting deconstmcted and historicized fixed categories of race.^ The use ofblackface in African American writing and performance^ has reconfigured itsuse and perception in contemporary American theatre practice - or, at least, incontemporary New York theatre practice; as Wood argues, "[B]lack appropri-ations of early performances of whites in blackface have inevitably compli-cated the politics of blackface on the stage and have provided models for morerecent black dramatists' parodic inversions of minstrel figures" (5). The repo-sitioning of blackface within African American performance may have donesome work towards making the Wooster Group's own use of blackface moreacceptable to critics and spectators, simply through ensuring a greater famil-iarity with the form.

Furthermore, a wave of academic scholarship investigated the complexitiesof blackface performance during the 1990s, opening up a debate on themedium. Lott's seminal Love and Theft (1993) was typical of this trend, andhis investigations of blackface minstrelsy argued for complex investigation(rather than straight-out condemnation) of the operations of blackface, inorder not to condone its images but to fully understand them, in order to fullyunderstand their effects. As Lott argued,

[S]o officially repugnant now are the attitudes responsible for blackface joking thatthe tendency has been simply to condemn the attitudes themselves - a suspiciouslyrespectable move, and an easy one at that - rather than to investigate the ways inwhich racist entertainment was once fun, and still is to much of the Caucasiafipopulation of the United States. (141)

Lott and others effected a deconstruction of white identity, as well asexploring the tragic effects of blackface on black identity;'" the WoosterGroup's use of blackface also took place against a backdrop of controversyover the representations of race by white actors. In 1993, the white actor TedDanson was widely criticized for making a speech at the Friars Club whilewearing blackface. The effect of this was complicated further by the fact thathe was accompanied by Whoopi Goldberg, an African American actress, whowas his partner at the time. Similarly, the white English actor Jonathan Prycewas at the centre of a scandal around representations of Asian identity whenhe wore prosthetic eye pieces to simulate an "Asian" look in his performancein Miss Saigon which toured to Broadway in New York in 1991. Asian actorsin the American actors' unions protested at the implications of Pryce's Orien-

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talism for the employment of Asians on the American stage. Pryce's perfor-mance raised the question voiced by Susan Bennett: "Should an audience see- and therefore believe (in the name of artistic freedom) - that Jonathan Pryceis, or even appears as, an Asian man?" (175).

While these debates over authenticity and the actor's body had by no meanslost their force at the time that the Wooster Group performed their EmperorJones, the company's own positioning as a world-renowned theatre companymay also have influenced the reception of their use of blackface. The reputa-tion of the Wooster Group/or their use of blackface and controversy and theirincreasingly powerful position in the arts world in New York have given thema kind of exemption from the scandal that other companies might cause byusing blackface. As Roger Beehtel argues, "The Wooster Group as authorfunctions differently now than it did in the early '80s - its name serves as akind of totem which affords it special privileges" (11)." All of these social,historical, and theatrical factors may have been the reason why the critics didnot denounce the representation of race in the Wooster Group's performanceas they had done in 1981. However, I want to argue that their use of blackfaceis worthy of analysis due to the sheer complexity of its use on stage, offeringon the stage a concept of the body and of racial identity radically differentfrom that of O'Neill. In contrast to O'Neill, who revealed the authentic blackbody hidden by the layers of theatrical "deception," the Wooster Group's pro-duction revealed that masks constitute racial and gendered identity, that thereis no identity beneath the mask. However, like O'Neill's, the WoosterGroup's engagement with race was simultaneously radically subversive andproblematically reductive.

PLAYING W H I T E : THE WOOSTER GROUP'S THE EMPEROR JONES

The use of blackface and whiteface in the Wooster Group's production of TheEmperor Jones can be read at first glance as a straightforward critique ofO'Neill's construction of colour in the play. With Valk's performance regis-tering as an "obscene cartoon" (Brantley) and Dafoe's Smithers a stylized andfeminized ghostly figure, the production's hyperbolic use of colour fore-grounded the artificiality of O'Neill's use of the "authentic" black body on thestage. Furthermore, the use of blackface implicated O'Neill's constructions ofrace within the traditions of blackface minstrelsy, showing his vision of black-ness - despite his rejection of minstrelsy - to have been formed via the black-face mask, exposing how O'Neill's vision of race was mediated through thegrotesque stereotypes of the blackface stage. Theatrical performance itselfwas, therefore, implicated in how audiences see and understand race in theWooster Group's production, showing minstrelsy to have been formative inthe construction of race in American society, leaving an imprint on the bodiesof black people themselves.


However, while the use of blackface in Valk's performance can be readstraightforwardly as an indictment of O'Neill's construction of race, in fact,the use of blackface in the production was far more complicated. As RogerBeehtel points out, the use of colour on Valk's body subverted the possibilityof a straightforward blackface reading: "Valk may be in blackface, but herneck is shaded red, her hands remain white, and she is wearing pre-modemJapanese clothes" (4). While Valk's blackface was destabilized by the variouscolours included in her make-up, it was also reconfigured by its contrast withthe whiteface of Dafoe. While both Dafoe and Valk wore mask-like make-upin the production, the rest of their bodies were left unpainted apart fromValk's red neck and Dafoe's feet, which were also painted red. While Valk'sblackface first appeared to be a representation of the vision of blackness in theplay, next to Dafoe's whiteface it also became a theatrical referent, calling tomind the masks of various theatre traditions: blackface and the white masks ofJapanese drama, which theatricalized the construction of race in the produc-tion. Even while Valk's blackface recalled the original social conditions ofThe Emperor Jones, evoking the racism of the minstrel stage, Dafoe's Japa-nese whiteness undermined the sociological implications of the blackface, bypositioning whiteness as a theatrical device. Because Dafoe's white Japanesemask evoked not a racial whiteness but a theatrical one, blackface alsobecame a theatrical mask, positioning minstrelsy as a theatre form equivalentto Japanese Kabuki. The fact that the performers' bodies were left unpaintedmaintained this effect by constantly reminding the audience that the actors'coloured faces were a theatrical rather than a biological construct.

This use of colour would appear to be a formalist convention, removingblackface from its political context and denying its racist implications. How-ever, by dislocating colour from race, showing it to be constructed from aseries of gestural and vocal signs rather than innate to the coloured body, theWooster Group foregrounded the performative nature of theatrical representa-tion. Theatre itself is implicated in the construction of racial identity, movingthe debate about O'Neill's play's racial "accuracy" or authenticity to the morecomplex question of the ways in which theatre can materialize bodily identi-ties for performers and audience alike.

O'Neill's Brutus Jones was shown to be a purely theatrical construction, aconstruction mediated through minstrelsy, with material effects on the waythat audiences and performers could understand race after the performanceended. The use of the analogous but asymmetrical theatrical masks of min-strelsy and Japanese theatre in The Emperor Jones, showed how theatre itselfcan operate as a disciplinary mechanism in culture, producing bodies throughits theatrical masks and contributing to the way that people can see and liverace. Unlike the politics of Eugene O'Neill's piece, where the masking of theself as a colour other than its "true" colour is punished by history and thecolour of the body is the guarantor of the "authentic" self, the Wooster Group

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showed that the body is produced through masks. Like the notion of bodiesbeing materialized through the repetitive performance of gender norms thatJudith Butler explores in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, the WoosterGroup's treatment of race-as-mask, revealed that theatre itself can function toconstruct and impose norms through the use of masks, which have a disciphn-ary and materializing effect on raced bodies. This vision of identity echoesLott's observation of the formative effects of blackface minstrelsy: "It washard to see the real thing without being reminded, even unfavourably of thecopy, the 'cover version' that effectively did its work of cultural coverage.Nor, just as surely, could the copy be seen without reminding one of the realthing" (115). The theatrical blackface and whiteface of the Wooster Group'sproduction unearth the ways in which O'Neill's text - and potentially theirown performance work - can operate to materialize race for the spectator.

While the Group's use of make-up constructed a blackface/whitefacebinary which implicated theatre in the materialization of race, their use ofvideo technology re-negotiated this duality even further. Representing thecharacter of the old black woman at the beginning of the play, an image of aghastly white face with black lips is shown on the television screen. Thisimage was Valk's blacked-up face made white through negative imaging onthe screen. As Roger Beehtel points out, this image had a deconstructive effecton the black/white binary on stage, fragmenting the stability of that duality byadding a further technological mask to Valk's face. As Beehtel argues, Valk'sface does not simply appear as white, minus the black make-up, but insteadwas imprinted with an added layer of colour, through the negative imaging onthe screen: "the negative image does not serve simply to erase the black make-up on Valk's face, but instead creates a hybrid that neither melds the two racesnor privileges one over the other" (4). Here, the use of technology de-stabi-lized the operation of the "real" in performance, calling into question the"original" colour of Valk's skin. Unlike the blackface minstrel performers,who took care to reveal their white skin under their black make-up to assurethe audience of the stability of their whiteness, the use of technological mask-ing in the Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones called into question the stabil-ity of racial origins, infinitely layering Valk with racial masks. In this way,race became a mask without an origin, materializing the actor's body throughthe mask rather assuming a stable authentic body beneath the mask. Thiseffect was further achieved with Dafoe's image at the end of the performance.In the last scene, in which Smithers speaks with Lem the native chief, Dafoeplayed both parts on the television screen, using a negative image for Lem(black with a white mouth) and a positive image for Smithers (white facedwith a black mouth). Here, the technological masking worked to break downthe opposition set up in the play between the black Lem and white Smithers bycontaining both figures in the body of Dafoe. Furthermore, as with the medi-ated image of Valk, the use of the television screens foregrounded the ways in

Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, atid The Emperor Jones 557

which theatre and television can be implicated within the creation of racialidentity. The interplay among mediated images undermined the stability ofracial binaries, while at the same time showing those binaries to be the prod-uct of technological and theatrical mediation in the first place. Representationitself was shown to be at the origin of race in the Wooster Group's TheEmperor Jones.

Furthermore, as Valk performed Jones' joumey through the forest, shebecame progressively more feminine, again conforming to the trajectory ofthe playtext. For an audience familiar with the play, her joumey created theanticipation of Jones' exotic striptease. However, rather than reveahng the"authentic" African body through her loss of clothing, as in O'Neill's version,Valk revealed more and more of her whiteness. As her arms and legs were notblacked up, she progressively undermined the stability of her blackface. Fur-thermore, as the costume begins to unravel, it also loses its Japanese qualitiesand revealed an American-style plaid shirt and an African print skirt under-neath the Kabuki style robes. The bulkiness of the costume began to disappearand, by comparison with her earlier statuesque presence on stage, her mascu-line powerful stance in the first scene, Valk became a diminutive feminizedbody.

In O'Neill's play, the peeling away of the layers of Jones' clothing acts asa means for O'Neill to reveal the authenticity of the black body beneath theclothes. In the Wooster Group's staging of this striptease, the layers of cloth-ing were themselves significant of different kinds of bodies, racial, cultural,gendered, and historical. From Japanese to (literally) African/Americanclothing, from blackened features to white arms and feet (a whiteness whichcould not be fully trusted due to the destabilizing effects of the video imag-ing), from bulky masculinity to a smaller, feminized figure, Valk's Jones didnot unearth an authentic body beneath the costume but revealed yet anotherset of representations beneath the layers of aristocratic. Orientalist, black-face masculinity. Unlike Jones' body in the text, Valk's body was neverfully revealed on the stage. Instead of revealing a "real" body in contrast to afalsely "masked" body, as O'Neill did, the Wooster Group suggested that the"real" body was a construction through its masking, that in fact, the maskconstituted the real. The Wooster Group's use of costume, make-up, technol-ogy and performance styles revealed that the doer is in fact constituted bythe deed, that the body is formed through its costuming, and that the racial-ized body is invariably mediated and materialized through and by the repre-sentation of race.

The Wooster Group's presentation of the racial and gendered body as aproduct of mediation worked in useful counterpoint to the complex primitiv-ism of O'Neill's text. Their production of The Emperor Jones was not ariposte to O'Neill's "racism" but rather worked within the legacies of his for-malism, placing his historicization of race within the play into the context of

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his own theatrical moment.'^ In their production, the Group teased out thecontradictions and tensions in O'Neill's text, while paying homage to his ownpolitical and aesthetic innovations.

ABSENT BODIES

However, while the Group renegotiated the power dynamics of authorship,the absence of black actors in their production - while providing an ironicalcontrast to the "authentic" black actors in O'Neill's performances - did pre-serve the status quo of a racial representation similar to that of O'Neill's orig-inal production. The Wooster Group deconstructed and performed colour withwhite performers for a white audience. They imported and reconstructed theformal qualities of two expressions of colour, blackface and whiteface, inorder to play with the concept of race for their white audience, just as O'Neillused the blackness of his lead actors as a means for him to present his visionof race for his white audience. In the Wooster Group's production of TheEmperor Jones, with two white actors presenting race on stage, the control ofracial representation still remained in the hands of white artists.

The context in which the Wooster Group worked, therefore, problematizedtheir engagement with race. The presence of black performers or audiencemembers might have troubled the equilibrium of the Wooster Group's explo-ration of race. The absence of black performers and, by and large, black audi-ence members, problematized the context in which the Wooster Group didthat exploration. The Wooster Group used blackness as a theatrical trope, inthe absence of black performers and (by and large) in the absence of blackspectators for their production. While race was destabilized in their produc-tion, this destabilization took place in a white context, and the focus of theproduction was, therefore, concerned with the identity of whiteness ratherthan of blackness. The audience was constituted as problematically white bythe Wooster Group's production, and the question of blackness became a met-aphorical trope rather than a material concern of the production. While theWooster Group challenged an essentialized vision of race, they did so in aprivileged, racially homogenous environment. And, as Shannon Steen argues,"[T]he freedom to take on the expressive, plaintive quality of the dispossessedand to drop it at will [is] surely a privilege of the self-possessed, white, andwealthy" (355).

Furthermore, even while the notion of racial and gendered identity as theproduct of mediation and representation is a useful and provocative one, thisshould not rule out the materiality of race within its social context. By makingblack and white faces interchangeable in The Emperor Jones, the companyattempted to subvert and challenge the distinct categories of race and gender.However blackness and whiteness are not symmetrical racial categories, justas blackface minstrelsy and Kabuki drama are not symmetrical theatrical


forms. Unlike O'Neill, who had to contest his representation of race withGilpin, who renegotiated the racial meanings of the play by refusing to saysome of the lines, the Wooster Group did not have black performers or artistsinvolved in the process of making the art,.nor did they have a Harlem audi-ence that might have contested the racial images on stage.

While the work of the Wooster Group certainly destabilized any notion of astable or "real" racialized body on stage, a tension still existed between themetaphorical and material conditions of blackness and whiteness in theirwork. There was a clash between the destabilized racial bodies of the Group'stheatre performances and the material and economic conditions of race. Whilethe Group experimented formally with the destabilization of bodily identities,they still did so in the white, 61ite environment of avant-garde theatre. Themediated qualities of the bodies they produced on the stage were problema-tized by the appropriated qualities of those same bodies, and this tensionproved an embattled context for the Wooster Group's work. Furthermore,while the company's use of blackface was carefully foregrounded as an "arti-ficial" rendering of race, nonetheless, the use of the medium always runs therisk of reaffirming racist categories, even when used subversively in perfor-mance. As Jacqueline Wood argues of African American usages of the form,"[A]ny attempt to reproduce blackface, no matter how radicalized, includes acertain recognition of a form that it, through its characteristics, wont to under-mine in some ways any challenge of it" (8). While the use of the minstrel formdid some powerful and important work in the Wooster Group's investigationof race in O'Neill's play, the minstrel tradition remained problematic in per-formance and was doubly problematic in the hands of a white theatre com-pany.

However, while the construction of blackness in the Group's work neededto be problematized, the destabilization of whiteness that the Group performedthrough the white mask of Dafoe and the technological masks on the videoscreens did the invaluable work of making whiteness, as well as blackness,strange on stage. Unsettling the stability of whiteness, a racial positioning fre-quently elided as race, did important work in the context of the Group's per-formers and audiences, deconstructing the essentialized whiteness thatnineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy partially produced. The WoosterGroup deconstructed white identity for their white audience, this time throughthe consciously inauthentic and destabilized bodies of their blackfaced andwhitefaced performers.

Furthermore, the production's implication of theatre practice itself in theconstruction of identity undermined the positioning of the spectators watchingthe production. The fact that theatre itself was shown to have a hand in thematerialization of identity meant that the Wooster Group's production alsopresented its own images of race and gender as inevitably complicit with theconstruction of unequal hierarchies of identity. The production refused to

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allow the spectator to take a high moral ground in watching the show andshowed that not only performance but the act of watching a performancecould materialize racial bodily identity and hierarchies of race for the per-former and spectator alike. The Wooster Group's production demanded thatthe spectator politicize the act of being a spectator and acknowledged the for-mative effects of the images created on their stage.

The act of crossing and impersonation were, therefore, shown to be centralto the formation of identity in the Wooster Group's production. Bodies ontheir stage were destabilized, mediated, and produced through representation.The destabilization of bodies applied not only to the performers but also to thespectators, who were required to politicize their presence as audience mem-bers at the production. The idea of the "authentic" or "stable" body was shownto be a product of performance itself, and the act of being a spectator becamecomplicit with the absence, presence, and materialization of race in theWooster Group's work.

THEATRICAL BODIES

A comparison of O'Neill's and the Wooster Group's work leads us to RustomBharucha's question: "what are the altemative modalities of representing theOther with responsibility and engagement?" (2). These artists showed that the-atre itself is an important and problematic medium within the construction ofracial hierarchies. These artists created bodies on their stage that had radicalimplications for how identity could be understood and perceived. The dis-course of "authenticity," in both instances, was shown to be a deeply fraughtarena, in which the actor's body became a locus for the struggle over the defi-nitions and ownership of both black and white identity. Cross-dressing tookon deeply political implications in both works. While Eugene O'Neill rejectedcross-dressing as a viable mode of identity, the Wooster Group showed cross-ing and theatricality to be an inescapable tragedy. While Eugene O'Neill pos-ited the act of crossing as a form of deception that ultimately leads to death,the Wooster Group framed crossing as an inevitable mode of materializingidentity. Theatricality was shown by the Wooster Group to be central to theformation of racial and gendered bodies. And O'Neill's early work was shownby the Wooster Group to be worthy of revision and restaging in the latter yearsof the twentieth century.

NOTES

1 I take my title from an advertisement for the 1852 production of Uncle Tom'sCabin (qtd. in Smith 40). The play was produced by the Provincetown Players inGreenwich Village in New York in 1920.

2 The Wooster Group emerged from the Performance Group, which was led by Rich-


ard Schechner, in 1967. The Performance Group was joined by the actors SpaldingGray, Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, and Peyton Smith. ElizabethLeCompte joined Schechner as an assistant director in 1975 and also developed herown work with Gray, Vawter, Dafoe, Valk, and Smith through a series of perfor-mance pieces called The Rhode Island Trilogy. In 1968, the Performance Grouppurchased a disused garage in Soho in downtown New York and renamed it thePerforming Garage, which later became the home of the Wooster Group. In 1980,after a break with Schechner and the Performance Group, LeCompte, Valk, Vawterand all named themselves the Wooster Group and have developed work which'"speaks to an age' where we can talk on the phone, look out the window, watchTV and be typing a letter at the same time" (Dafoe; qtd. in "The Wooster Group'sRoute"). Famed for their use of new media on stage (such as microphones, televi-sion monitors, and live camera footage), and their radical fragmentation of canoni-cal texts, the Wooster Group have established an intemational reputation for theirdeconstnictive approach to theatrical performance (see Auslander; Savran; Ker-shaw).

3 Route i&g (The Last Act) was a radical revisioning of Thornton Wilder's OurTown and was a mish-mash of popular and past performance styles, includingblackface minstrelsy and pornography, the combining of which caused contro-versy, protest, and the rescinding of forty per cent of the Group's funding from theNew York State Council on the Arts (see Savran).

4 Roger Bechtel outlines the historical contradictions and relations betweenCNeill's moment and the Wooster Group, citing the fact that O'Neill's play AllGod's Chillun Got Wings had been censored by the mayor of New York for usingblack actors, while the Wooster Group had lost funding for their use of blackface inRoute I&g. Similarly, recent critics have condemned CNeill's play for being rac-ist, while the Wooster Group's use of blackface in their work is now greeted raptur-ously by critics as a deconstruction of racism. The historical contradictions andrelations between the Wooster Group's work and O'Neill's played a central rolewithin the production, as Bechtel explains in his essay (Bechtel 2).

5 I will use the term "cross-dressing" or "crossing" throughout this paper to describethe process of playing an Other on the stage. I see "crossing" as the moment inwhich there is a power shift between performer and character and there is a powerplay in operation on the stage. I employ the term "crossing" while acknowledgingthe problematic nature of the term's connoting the fixity and stability of the pointsfrom which to cross and want to acknowledge that the levels of fixity and stabilityin cross-dressing vary widely in different historical, cultural, economic, and aes-thetic contexts.

6 From the fact that CNeill's text became canonized and the "meaning" and wordsof the play are attributed to O'Neill, Gilpin appears to have lost this battle. Further-more, Gilpin sank into poverty and alcoholism after playing Jones and was nothired again as an actor. He died in poverty and anonymity, a fate that a similarlysuccessful white actor might not have suffered. Nonetheless, the current condem-

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nation of O'Neill's play for its racism and the resurgence of interest in Gilpin andRobeson's roles in the production of the play would seem to vindicate Gilpin's"contestation of CNeill's authorial right to represent blackness on the stage.

7 Their 1987 production, Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Antony, combinedeight different source texts, including Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Antony, Ing-mar Bergman's film The Magicians, the works of an Irish spiritualist, and thereconstruction of a late-night television nude chat show.

8 However, despite the presence of writers such as Parks, social and representationalparity has not been achieved by African American theatre artists. For example, inthe 1991-92 American theatre season, only five per cent of plays produced in theUnited States were written or directed by African Americans (Mahone xvi-xvii).The fact that African Americans continue to be under-represented in theatre mak-ing presents a further challenge to the Wooster Group's use of blackface in theirperformances.

9 Ntozake Shange's play Spell #7 employed blackface minstrelsy (see Cronacher)and the recent Classical Theatre of Harlem's production of The Blacks, a ClownShow, in New York in 2003, employed blackface and whiteface in a performanceof Genet's play.

10 See Roediger, Ignatiev, Dyer.11 This is a citation from an advanced copy of Bechtel's text that has just been pub-

lished in The Wooster Group and Its Traditions (Peter Lang, 2004). Citations are tothat edition.

12 This is a strategy that the company also used in their production of The Hairy Ape,focusing particularly on the relationship between gendered identity and the specu-lar authority of the viewer. In both productions, there was a sense that the companywas placing O'Neill's work within its theatrical context and deconstructing hisvision of identity through the theatrical strategies he used (and rejected) in his ownwork.

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Bechtel, Roger. "Brutus Jones 'n' the Hood: The Wooster Group, the ProvincetownPlayers, and the Emperor Jones." The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. Dramatur-gies. Ed. Johan Callens. Texts, Cultures and Performances 13. Brussels/Bem: PeterLang, 2004.

Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London:Routledge, 1997.

Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in anAge of Globalisation. London: Athlone, 2000.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Oxford

UP, 1972.


Brantley, Ben. "Putting the Downtown Element Back into O'Neill." New York Times13 Mar. 1998: Ei.

Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." London: Rout-

ledge, 1993.. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Rout-

ledge, 1990.Cronacher, Karen. "Unmasking the Minstrel Mask's Black Magic in Ntozake Shange's

Spell #7." Theatre Journal 44.2 (1992): 177-95.Curtis, L.P. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington, DC:

Smithsonian, 1997.Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.Feingold, Michael. "Rites and Wrongs." Village Voice 24 Mar. 1998: 137.Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.Kalb, Jonathan. "Theater: The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill." New York Press

25-31 Mar. 1998: 6.Kershaw, Baz. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard.

London: Routledge, 1999.King, Bruce, ed. Contemporary American Theatre. Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1991.Krasner, David. Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness in African American

Theatre, i8g5-igio. New York: St. Martin's, 1997Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

New York: Oxford UP, 1993.Mahone, Sydne, ed. "Introduction." Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by

African-American Women. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994.xiii-xxxiii.

O'Neill, Eugene.T/ie Emperor Jones. The Emperor Jones, "Anna Christie," The HairyApe. New York: Vintage, 1995. 1-41.

Roediger, David R. The Wages ofWhiteness: Race and the Making of the AmericanWorking Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Savran, David. The Wooster Group, ig75-1985: Breaking the Rules. Ann Arbor, MI:UMI Research, 1986.

Smith, Edward G. "Black Theatre." Ethnic Theatre in the United States. Ed. Maxine

Schwartz Seller. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1983. 37-67.Steen, Shannon. "Melancholy Bodies: Racial Subjectivity and Whiteness in O'Neill's

The Emperor Jones." Theatre Journal 52.3 (2000): 339-59.Wainscott, Ronald H. Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1934. New

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