13936: Dailey: Emperor Jones and Christophe

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Dailey <phdailey@msn.com>

Emperor Jones is a play, and is very loosely based on Christophe. It is
about a
convict who escapes from a Georgia chain gang and makes his way to a
Caribbean
island where he makes climbs to the top by playing on the superstition and
credulity of the "natives." Although O'Neill was part of the relatively
small
group of people who spoke out against the American Occupation and signed
petitions, etc. Emperor Jones is full of grotesque racial stereotypes, and
is
written in dialect- "Negro" dialect-  which can make performances painful
to
sit through. (The best I ever saw was by the Wooster Group in New York
several
years ago and was highly stylized, borrowing elements from Japanese Noh
etc.
The characters were all in black face. The Emperor Jones played by a
woman,
more or less as a malevolent rag doll. Willem Dafoe played the cynical
Englishman.)
A while back I tried to find out what O'Neill knew about Haiti when he
wrote it
and the answer was very little. He had been struck by an account of the
death
of Vilbrun Sam, one that conflated the recent happening with the "silver
bullet" story.

According to a friend of mine who knew C.L.R. James, the genesis of Black
Jacobins was a Toussaint play that James said he wrote for Paul Robeson in
London in the late 'thirties. I think Robeson may have backed out.

Best,
Peter