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The Emperor Jones | Introduction

The Emperor Jones was part of an amazing first year for O’Neill as a Broadway playwright. His very first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon, had appeared in February of 1920 and eventually won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama, but The Emperor Jones was so successful in its Off-Broadway production in November that it moved to Broadway by the end of the same year and became another highprofile success for the newly acclaimed playwright. By 1930, at the end of an astoundingly productive first decade, O’Neill was widely recognized as America’s greatest dramatist.

The Emperor Jones was also the first of several experiments with Expressionism for O’Neill. O’Neill found inspiration for Expressionism in the work of Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912), whose A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907) explored and represented on stage complex states of mind, eschewing realistic style and imitating instead the fluid associative structure of human consciousness. After The Emperor Jones, O’Neill used expressionistic techniques most fully in The Hairy Ape (1922) and to some extent in Strange Interlude (1928), where his five-hour play focused on the interior monologue of its main character, Nina Leeds.

The Emperor Jones was also the first American play to offer an racially integrated cast to a Broadway audience and feature a black actor in its leading role. Prior to O’Neill’s ground breaking drama, black roles in integrated productions were played by Caucasians in black-face makeup. But O’Neill insisted that black actor Charles Gilpin play Brutus Jones in the Provincetown Playhouse premiere of The Emperor Jones, and a precedent was set that would eventually lead to this country’s present level of racial equality in the arts.

The Emperor Jones Summary

Scene I
The Emperor Jones takes place on an island in the West Indies and opens in the elegant throne room of the island’s ruler or ‘‘emperor,’’ Brutus Jones. It is late afternoon and no one is present except for an old black peasant woman sneaking through the palace. A white trader named Smithers enters and interrogates the woman, asking her why the palace is deserted. Smithers learns that the natives of the island, led by a former native chief named Lem, have stolen all the horses and have headed to the nearby hills to plan a revolt against their oppressive emperor.

When the Emperor, Brutus Jones, enters, Smithers gradually reveals this news, but Jones remains calm. He arrived on the island two years earlier from the United States, where he had worked as a porter on a fancy Pullman train before going to prison for killing a man named Jeff over a craps game. Escaping prison, Jones had come to the island and found Smithers cheating the black natives with his trade goods. After briefly joining Smithers as an associate, Jones eclipsed Smithers and named himself Emperor. Convincing the natives that he had magical powers and could only be killed by a silver bullet, Jones felt secure. He continues to feel secure in the face of this native revolt because he has carefully planned a response to it. He has money stashed in a foreign bank account, an escape route through the woods mapped out in his mind, and food buried at the edge of the forest. Jones has even made for himself a good luck charm out of what he thinks is the only silver bullet on the island.

But as Jones outlines his escape plan to Smithers, a drum begins to beat in the distant hills, and Jones is initially startled by it. Smithers informs Jones that the natives have begun a war dance to work up their courage for killing their ‘‘emperor.’’ Smithers tells Jones that the natives will send ghosts after him into the dark forest, but Jones asserts that he’s not afraid of ghosts and that by nightfall he will have gotten such a head start on Lem’s troops that they will never catch up to him. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Jones casually sets off on foot for his getaway through the dense forest.

Scene II
Night has fallen sometime after 6:30 pm, and Jones has reached the edge of the dense forest. Fatigued from his afternoon hike in the hot sun, Jones rests, listening to the... » Complete The Emperor Jones Summary