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• Title: Backstory As Black Story: The Cinematic Reinvention of O'neill's the Emperor Jones (Critical Essay)
• Author : Garrett Eisler
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 91 KB

Description

While Eugene O'Neill's 1920 tragedy The Emperor Jones remains one of his most famous titles, it is rarely performed today, due largely to continuing controversy over its depiction of race. Until a much praised 2009 Irish Repertory Theatre staging the play had not appeared Off Broadway in five decades and, according to the Internet Broadway Database (www.ibdb.com), had no Broadway revival since the original star, Charles Gilpin, played a return engagement in 1927. [1] Tellingly, the most widely seen and highly regarded American production in the last generation has been the one most critical of O'Neill's characterization of his African-American hero--the avant-garde Wooster Group's revisionist take (premiered 1992 and revived many times since) in which Jones was played by a white actress in a deliberately grotesque blackface performance. [2] With live productions so infrequent, it is chiefly in the form of its 1933 film adaptation that The Emperor Jones survives, especially now that it has recently been restored by the Library of Congress and reissued on DVD in 2003. [3] But far from a photographed play, the movie Jones is in large part its own original drama, the fruit of a totally separate collaboration between director Dudley Murphy and screenwriter DuBose Heyward. Faced with the challenge of expanding O'Neill's fifty-page one-act play into a feature-length film, Murphy and Heyward went far beyond the usual "opening up" of Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations and created an original backstory of their own for the hero Brutus Jones that, while built upon elements hinted at by O'Neill, ultimately transforms his story significantly. (It also makes up more than half the film's running time.) While the character of O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" is introduced to us as a larger-than-life tyrant from the start, Murphy and Heyward's "Brutus" is a common man, faced with the temptations of everyday life. And while the 1920 play is a modernist allegorical fable, marked by primitivist Negro stereotypes, the film aims instead for a more realistic depiction of the lives of everyday African Americans, as opposed to the "ignorant bush n*****s" of the play.

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