• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.117-132
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• 2007

Playwright Eugene O'Neill's expressionistic text-based approach to The Emperor Jones, with an emphasis on fixity, was at odds with African American actor Charles Gilpin's improvisational performance technique, stressing rupture, spontaneity, and discontinuity. The contemporary avant-garde performance troupe The Wooster Group likewise produces subversive and interrogative forms of identity in performing the play, which challenge the normative approach to gender, race, and an imagined orientation. The historical foundation of subversion and destabilization laid by O'Neill and Gilpin were manifold in the Wooster Group's production of The Emperor Jones, and not only formed a backdrop to it but also played a central role in the group's representation of race and even gender on the stage. In this essay, I use O'Neill's play, The Emperor Jones, a crucial example of racialized fantasies of identification, to explore how the modernist stage through the performances of Gilpin and The Wooster Group constructed racialized subjects of both its performers and audiences. Gilpin and the Wooster Group's strategies each shared a similar complexity in the portrayal of black identity in performance. Offering an examination of how ideologies of race and gender overlap in The Emperor Jones, I hope to show how each performance signifies a range of subversions and differences simultaneously and sometimes oppositionally that needs to be explored both holistically and in detail to offer a fuller picture of these remarkable attempts. Through this approach, I examine Gilpin's creative adaptations of O'Neill's text and illuminate how it is that the Wooster Group's appropriative use of blackface in their performance has come to gain critical acceptance.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.79-96
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• 2005

Eugene O'Neill portrays Puritan values of the Mannon family inherited from their family past. Since Puritan values of the Mannons suppress the normal way of life and love, they retain only rigidity, without the charity which is the core element of the teaching of Christianity. With Puritan repression and its dissociation from the vital spring of life, the Puritan Mannons live in a world drained of life and in a world of hypocrisy between outer beauty and inner ugliness. Ironically, they think more of death itself, neglecting to feel the vitality of life. Working as a fate, Puritan values of the Mannon as 'Force Behind' in O'Neill's own term are the cause of suffering and destruction of the Mannons throughout the whole play. The mask-like house and faces are effectively used as a dramatic technique to express the distorted Puritan values.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.109-134
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• 2019

This essay examines the significance of Yank's struggle to belong in Eugene O'Neill's play, The Hairy Ape in light of Nietzsche's definition of man as "a rope tied between beast and overman." Contending that Yank's death in the gorilla's cage signifies both a defeat and his only chance of success, the essay investigates how his "tink[ing]" leads him to question his former understanding of what it means to belong. Knowing his struggle to belong is bound to fail, Yank uncompromisingly seeks to fit into the point of completely isolating himself from all other species in the gorilla's cage. Consequently, he becomes "the Hairy Ape" and opens up the possibility of belonging by creating and becoming the species of one to which he alone belongs. Echoing Nietzsche's vision of greatness in man, Yank's endeavor proves that what is noble "in man is that he is a bridge" rather than "a goal."

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.249-277
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• 2012

Eugene O'Neill's one-act play Before Breakfast (1916) depicts a morning scene of a married couple who live in a slovenly flat at Greenwich Village. There is no apparent dramatic action occurring in the play. Instead, the play is full of Mrs. Rowland's incessant complaints about her husband Alfred's loafing around bars with artists friends, neglecting his role as breadwinner. An irony is that every morning she prepares breakfast for the good-for-nothing husband even in the moment of complaining. It is worth noting that Alfred is an 'unseen character' who is never directly observed by the audience but is only described by her wife. Deprived of all chances to speak and present himself on stage, he is kept in the room throughout the play. In contrast, Mrs. Rowland dominates the stage, monopolizing language and action. The audience has to listen to her, judge from her statements, and take her one-sided complaints. The accused husband, with zero chance of showing up and defending himself, has no choice but to be the sinner as the wife intends. Another irony is that the audience's feeling about the situation is quite different from what is expected. The wife's complaints are regarded to be unfair and groundless in the reason that the situation is monopolized by her. In case of the husband, in contrast, the loss of voice and presence stresses the injustice of his dead-lock situation. In other words, the 'absent' quality of Alfred works to evoke the audience's sympathy for himself and subsequently makes his presence recognized, not visually but emotionally, by the audience throughout the play. Discovered in this paradoxical moment where the spectators understand or 'see' the status of the unseen and the devoiced message is successfully conveyed to the listeners, is the theatricality of absence. Adding to the function as theatrical device, the 'unseen character' Alfred works as a device of self-reflection to mirror the author's own life. Alfred, the alter-ego of O'Neill, effectively exorcises the author's life-long feeling of guilty as the unfaithful husband and father in the unhappy first marriage, successfully evoking the audience's sympathy for himself.