The Emperor Jones

To wind up its 1964 expanded schedule of theatrical offerings, the Boston Arts Festival has come up with as stunning and exciting a show as any to be seen in our indoor theatres all last season.

To achieve it, director Ben Shaktman and his colleagues turned to Eugene O'Neill, our greatest American dramatist, and revived his simple but powerful psychological study of a Negro's fear and fall from power, The Emperor Jones--but with a difference. The usual scenery and iterated tom-tom beatings have been replaced by a dozen ballet dancers and and extended orchestral score. The 1920 play was "experimental" to begin with, and O'Neill would certainly have approved the result of this further experimentation.

This is not the first time that the play has suggested music, for Louis Gruenberg turned it into an opera, which was the talk of the Metropolitan's 1933 season. But here the spoken text is intact. The new, moderately dissonant music comes from the pen of Dudley Moore. Al-though it is a bit obvious in spots, it serves the work handsomely. Right from the ominous opening trombones, it is clear we are in for something impressive, a far cry from the satirical score he provided for Beyond the Fringe. Woodwinds, percussion, harp, a long viola solo, harpsichord, and even wordless voices--all function with telling effect.

Performing on a bare set, the near-naked dancers themselves become the arched doorway through which the Emperor flees in panic, the stones he overturns looking for buried food, the forest trees and river he encounters during the dark night, and the visions that plague and terrorize him. Daniel Nagrin's superb choreography is enhanced by William Batchelder's expert lighting.

Being largely a monologue, the play naturally depends heavily on its Emperor, the part first made famous by Charles Gilpin and later by Paul Robeson. The work has been a rarity hereabouts. I recall seeing only Rex Ingram's performance at the Brattle Theatre shortly after the War, and Harold Scott's at Agassiz Theatre in the mid-fifties--both admirable.

As is true of many other plays in the O'Neill canon, the lines of The Emperor Jones do not always read well; but, again as elsewhere, a really fine player can make them convincing. Here, James Earl Jones is better than fine; he is nothing short of magnificent as he moves, drawing on his majestic pipe-organ of a voice and his resonant belly-laugh, from bluster and swagger through anxiety and fright to exhaustion and eclipse. (The role, by the way, bears fruitful comparison with that of Macbeth.)

Jones is one of the most intense, charismatic, volatile and galvanic actors on the stage today. He is also one of the most courageous: whether particularly trained for it or not, he is willing to risk failure and tackle anything. He's just a guy who can't say no. And that way greatness lies.

He first caught my eye in The Blacks some years ago. A couple of months back I saw him demonstrate perfection in the African play The Blood Knot, which seemed to have been written expressly for him. That was, believe it or not, his twentieth show in three years. Only last week he was playing Othello, though his training and talent do not especially lie in classical drama. And now, in his Boston debut, an O'Neill role for which he is ideally suited.

Jones, together with Sidney Poitier, Earle Hyman and Harold Scott, are the four most gifted young Negro actors today--the first two excelling in modern realism, the latter pair possessed of sterling skill in classical styles.

The current 75-minute production of the O'Neill is, in conception, a masterpiece; in execution, not far below--thanks to Jones and his collaborators seen and unseen. At the opening performance there were only a few rough edges, notably in the dancers ensemble rhythm.

Although Emperor Jones dies at the end of the work, it will be a shame if this Emperor Jones dies at the end of the week.