American Theatre in the Twentieth Century

Week two

The Emperor Jonesby Eugene O’Neill (1920)

First performed November 1, 1920 by the Provincetown Players, and then on Broadway

Eugene O’Neill (on ladder), and other members of the Provincetown Players (including Cram Cook on far right), setting the stage for O’Neill’s Bound East to Cardiff (1915)

Mini-lecture – main points

1. Brief background to O’Neill

2. Sources for the play

3. Social context The ‘Negro question’ Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’

4. Cultural context African Negro Wood Sculptures (1918), primitivism Expressionism and realism: characterization and

monologues

Brief background to O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

1888: Born at Barrett House, off Broadway, New York City. Father is James O’Neill, mother Mary Ellen Quinlan.

1889-1905: At first travels with parents, then joins various boarding schools. Frequents New York City bars, brothels with brother, Jamie. Renounces religion. Reads Ibsen, Nietzsche.

1910-1911: Works on ships and lives in waterfront boarding house in New York.

1912-1913: Develops tuberculosis and stays in sanatorium to recover. Begins writing one-act plays.

1914: Enrols in playwriting workshop at Harvard under George Pierce Baker.

1916: Meets colony of artists at Provincetown. The Provincetown Players stage a number of his one-act plays, such as Bound East for Cardiff and Before Breakfast.

1920: Writes Beyond the Horizon, which is successfully staged and wins the Pulitzer Prize. Writes The Emperor Jones (staged November 1 by the Players). Emperor Jones moves to Broadway and runs for 204 performances.

1928: Writes Strange Interlude, a nine-act play, which sells over 100,000 copies by 1931.

1929: Marries third wife, Carlotta Monterey.

1936: Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.

1939: Develops ideas for The Iceman Cometh and ‘The Long Day’s Journey’ (Long Day’s Journey into Night – placed in a safe in 1945).

Starts suffering from tremor in his hands, diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease (though diagnosis changed after death). Interrupts his planned seven play cycle showing life in America from 19thC.

1953: Confined to bed in hotel suite in Boston, dies of pneumonia.

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

Sources for the play

Sources for the play

President Sam of Haiti

African drumming in the Congo Charles Sheeler, African Negro Wood Sculptures

(1918)

Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867)

Social context

The ‘Negro question’

O’Neill always denied that he was exploring the state of African-Americans within society.

The play is rarely staged because of its perceived racism, especially

in O’Neill’s use of dialect and Jones’s atavistic behaviour (atavism: the reversion to an ancestral/genetic trait).

However, note also Smithers’s dialect as a Cockney trader. Charles S. Gilpin, considered by O’Neill the best actor in the role,

clashed with O’Neill over changes in the text. O’Neill and others protest against New York Drama League’s

decision not to invite Gilpin to awards evening.

It is also worth considering the context into which The Emperor Jones appeared…

A poster for a minstrel show from the early 1900s, showing the actor before and after ‘blacking up’.

Jung and the collective unconscious

Following Freud’s notion of the unconscious, Jung developed the collective unconscious, which makes itself manifest in dreams.

The collective unconscious is a pre-experiential set of ‘mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one's own folk or in those of other races’ and which yield ‘a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind’. (Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition.)

These motifs, ideas, or images are archetypes. Jones is part of the black American experience, and when he

enters the woods he plays out certain archetypal roles, especially in scenes 5, 6 & 7.

See C.W.E. Bigsby on Jung, Freud, and The Emperor Jones: A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Volume One.

Cultural context

Example of the kind of sculpture that O’Neill would have seen in Charles Sheeler’s book African Negro Wood Sculptures (1918).

Senufo peoples, Côte d'Ivoire, 19th century, 116.8 cm (46 in.)

Example of the kind of sculpture that O’Neill would have seen in Charles Sheeler’s book African Negro Wood Sculptures (1918).

Mbole peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo, late 19th to early 20th century, 56.5 cm (22 1/4 in.)

Example of the kind of sculpture that O’Neill would have seen in Charles Sheeler’s book African Negro Wood Sculptures (1918).

Attributed to Bayansi peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 19th century, 29 cm (11 3/8 in.)

Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman / Buste de femme (1909)

See also Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and David Krasner’s article, ‘Eugene O’Neill: American Drama and American Modernism’, in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner, pp.142-158

Expressionism

‘the means rather than the meaning’• staging and space

• time

• language

• characterisation ‘[E]xpressionist simplicity is designed to reach a more

basic stratum of awareness, on which men are united by instinctive and emotional qualities shared by all.’ (Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992, p.41)

Expressionism

‘A comprehensive expression is demanded here, a chance for eloquent presentation, a new form of drama projected from a fresh insight into the inner forces motivating the outer actions and reactions of men and women, a new truer characterization, in other words – a drama of souls, and the adventures of ‘free wills’ with the masks that govern him and constitute their fate.’

(‘On Masks’, an unpublished essay, c.1920s, and quoted in Christopher Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Volume One: 1900-1940, p.67.)

Scene 7(?) of The Emperor Jones, Provincetown Playhouse, 1920 – note the way that an attempt is made to get ‘distance’ between downstage and upstage – perhaps due to the special dome that cost $500 to construct

Further reading Christopher Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-

Century American Drama, Volume One: 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.36-119 – which is good at explaining the influences of Freud and Jung on O’Neill.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (London: Cape, 1962) – for background on the play and first performances.

Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.36-46 – for details of Expressionist theatre.

Deanna M. Toten Beard, ‘American Experimentalism, American Expressionism, and Early O’Neill’, in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007), pp.53-68.

And see the wiki or your e-mail for more secondary reading.