Why now? That must have been The Wooster Group’s first reaction to the controversy that erupted over its recent production of The Emperor Jones in Chicago. Eugene O’Neill’s early play has been contentious before. In 1920 it introduced American audiences to what was then an unusual spectacle: a black actor in a leading role. This time, though, the uproar is for precisely the opposite reason. This time, there is no black actor.
Jones, a murderous railway porter who flees the US to set himself up as a brutish dictator in the West Indies, is here played by Kate Valk, a white actress who performs the role in blackface.
Chicago publisher Third World Press has called for the play to be boycotted: “Merely days away from the inauguration of America’s first black president, the world of theatre has taken us back almost 17 decades,” it fumes.
That, roughly, takes us to the root of the problem: the birth of the minstrel show, where white stage actors (mainly of Irish or Jewish descent) blacked up for the amusement of white audiences, smearing their faces with burnt cork, circling their mouths in red carmine, and mixing music routines with racist gags about inept, lazy but essentially happy slaves.
Blackface might be a curious anachronism if it hadn’t persisted so long. Minstrel houses dominated Broadway for nearly half a century, and blackface made cinematic history when Al Jolson starred in the first talkie, and it continued until as recently as 1978, when the BBC’s Black and White Minstrel Show finally stopped broadcasting.
Even now, when almost anything can be excused in the name of irony, blackface sets your teeth on edge. Slipping into somebody else’s skin is a no-go area. It isn’t just politically incorrect. The betrayal still feels too recent, and the lazy stereotypes have stripped it of comic potential (is Robert Downey Jnr’s ironic blackface in Tropic Thunder really a world away from Spike Milligan’s earnest “Indian” in Curry Chips?). True, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles and Anthony Hopkins all blacked up to play Othello (Hopkins as recently as the 1980s), but today the idea is toe-curling at best, deeply offensive at worst.
So why is The Wooster Group’s Emperor Jones different? For a start, ’Neill hardly offers the most authentic depiction of an African American to begin with. Sample dialogue: “I’ll git de hide frayled off some o’ you niggers sho’!” And Valk, clearly playing against gender and race, performs the part with such ferocious parody that it underlines what a febrile and unreal creation Jones really is.
But I understand the protesters’ anxiety, particularly when blackface has been dragged into the mainstream. Rory Bremner, bidding adieu to George Bush, reflected on Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech as “one small step for man, one more hour in makeup.” If he can carry off that ethnic feint without a flicker of controversy, we’ll know we’ve entered a new era.
The method may be Max Factor, not burnt cork, satirical, not racist, but blackface has never been change we can believe in.
