The Emperor Jones and Purification

The final fall production of the Theater Workshop is a most impressive event. Both of the intense plays are given masterful productions, maintaining the imagination of experimental theater without sacrificing admirably high standards. The quality is, although the Workshop hates the word, usually professional. Indeed the only real complaint one can make about the Workshop's productions is that they conspicuously employ as stars and director several students already well established in the HDC, thus assuring polish but slightly displacing the idea of the Workshop designed to find and train new faces. But minor complaints cannot obscure the distinction of the Workshop's Emperor Jones and The Purification.

The Emperor Jones is familiar enough to the audience so that the present abridged version conveys nearly all of O'Neill's original. Instead of first seeing Jones as the corrupt misruler of a jungle island we first meet him as he is fleeing from the wrath of his subjects, plunging into the jungle. The emperor bursts on stage, confident and arrogant, but already tired of running. The fear and disintegration seen in Jones on his frantic flight is echoed remorselessly by the ceaseless native drums, coming louder and closer and faster until, finally, Jones is shot. At this ponit, it might have been stronger and better balanced for O'Neill's abridger to end his play, but he leaves the original ending--light enters the stage, civilization is introduced in the form of a skeptical white trader.

The brilliant terror of O'Neill's atmosphere is brought out with exceptional insight and power by Hal Scott's portrayal of Jones. From a mildly tired fugitive in the first scene, he becomes an exhausted, desperate, crushed man; Jones' fear and collapse is most striking in Scott's blazing eyes, but his flashing teeth, his increasingly exhausted movements, his moans, and his nearly childish desperate voice are all highly effective.

To support Scott, Director Glenn Goldburg has used stage effects and the few minor characters with imaginative skill. Rachel Durand and Liz Keene, as Little Formless Fears, are visually intriguing; Fred Mueller's Withch Doctor is properly awesome. The half dozen shots fired in the play are startling in their loudness, but very effective, and the lighting, displaying Jones but leaving the jungle nearly black, achieves a difficult effect with skill. Lastly, the off-stage tom-tom pounder, Jack Hyman, should be congratulated for his faithful creation of the most memorable effect in the play.

The Purification, a too-little-known work by Tennessee Williams, is a tragic, poetic play that contains an over-powering weight of emotion, language, and idea. The drama takes place in the Old Southwest--an informal trial is set up to bring truth to light in what turns out to be a sensitive, almost unearthly love of brother for sister. Their rapturous relationship was doomed; the sister has been killed by the cruder man whom she married but to whom she had never given herself. At the trial of truth, the boy, his Conquistador parents, and the husband declare themselves before a quiet, frozen chorus of townspeople, baring themselves in extraordinary speeches that are nearly soliloquies.

Hal Scott again stars; as the beautiful incestuous brother he is a magic boy. His voice is silvery. His face is as striking as his all white costume. As the girl's husband, struggling to find meaning or justice in a frustrating world, David Lange is rather eloquent. David Cupp's rigid expressions are just right for the Spanish nobleman father, and Phyllis Ferguson, as the mother, conveys sorrow and resentment in a visually excellent manner. Lee Jeffries, as a witch-like partial leader of the chorus and voice of conscience, grinds out her evil incantations with great effect, even if she at first juggles a few too many accents on her tongue. Louise Bell, as the vision of the dead sister, is properly lovely, graceful, and ethereal.

As a whole, the Workshop's highly interesting experiment in intense theater is an important success. It was a stimulating pleasure to be in the audience.