The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill

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On the night of November 1, 1920, The Emperor Jones opened Off-Broadway for a short run at the 200-seat Provincetown Players’ Playwright’s Theatre on Macdougal Street, and it was an immediate and huge success. The first-night audience refused to leave even after repeated curtain calls, and early the next morning long lines formed at the box office. Because one had to be a “member” to see the company’s productions, the group’s subscription list doubled within days and the projected two-week run was extended.

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In part the play was a great novelty as it presented an integrated cast and a captivating black actor in the lead role, but an unusually powerful script and startling scenic effects for such a small theatre contributed greatly to the play’s success. First-line theatre critics had been busy earlier in the week at Broadway openings and didn’t see the play for three days, but when they arrived they generally concurred with the audiences.

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Plot Summary of the Play

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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.

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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 steady beat of the drum, pulsating at a little more than 72 beats a minute, the rate of the normal heart beat. However, Jones can’t find the food he so confidently hid near this spot. As he lights a match to see more clearly, the rate of the drum beat increases and “the Little Formless Fears”—hallucinations that represent Jones’s rising doubts—slide silently out of the darkness like black, shapeless grubworms “about the size of a creeping child.” When the Formless Fears laugh at Jones’s consternation, Jones notices them, pulls his pistol, and fires. In a flash, the Formless Fears are gone, and the drums begin beating more rapidly. Jones reassures himself and hurries into the dark forest.

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Scene III

It is 9:00 at night and the beams of the newly risen moon create an eerie glow on the dark forest floor as Jones enters a small triangular clearing. There, the figure of black Jeff, the man Jones killed in a crap game in the United States, seems to be mechanically throwing dice. Jones enters the clearing, his face scratched and his elegant clothes torn from forcing his way through the thick underbrush in the dark. He hears the increasingly rapid beat of the distant drums, sees Jeff, and fires another shot.

The hallucinated image of Jeff disappears with the pistol shot and Jones leaves the forest path to plunge wildly into the underbrush.

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Scene IV

It is an hour before midnight and from the forest Jones stumbles onto a wide dirt road running diagonally across the stage. His uniform is now ragged and torn, and he begins to discard parts of it to ease himself from the stifling heat. Exhausted, he throws himself down to rest but soon begins to hallucinate again. A small gang of black convicts in striped suits are working with picks and shovels. The white prison guard, armed with rifle and whip, demands that Jones join the convict group, and for a moment the nearly hypnotized Jones does. But when the hallucinated guard beats him, Jones responds by trying to hit the guard with his imaginary shovel. Realizing his hands are actually empty, Jones fires another shot from his pistol and all the imagined figures disappear. Jones plunges again into the forest, the drum beats increasing in volume and rapidity.

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Scene V

It is an hour after midnight and Jones enters a large circular clearing and sits on a dead stump. In his exhaustion and misery, Jones hallucinates again and sees the stump as an auction block from the 1850s where a crowd has gathered to watch slaves bought and sold. When Jones becomes the slave being auctioned off, he fires at the auctioneer and planter trying to buy him, once again causing the images to disappear. Again Jones plunges into the forest as the drum beats quicken and increase in volume.

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Scene VI

It is 3:00 in the morning and in a cleared space no more than five feet high under dense tree limbs Jones settles for another rest. The moonlight is shut out by the canopy and only a “vague, wan light filters through.” Jones’s silver bullet is all that remains in his gun. His clothes have all been torn away and what remains is no more than a breech cloth. Gradually, two rows of seated figures appear behind Jones in his next hallucination. The small space in the forest becomes a ship at sea and Jones a member of a slave group being carried to the new world. As this hallucination fades, the drum begins to beat even louder and quicker.

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Scene VII

It is 5:00 in the morning and at the foot of a gigantic tree near a river Jones imagines an African witch-doctor dancing and chanting before him. As the drum beat reaches a frenzied pitch, Jones is hypnotized by the Witch Doctor’s performance. He begins to sway with the shaman and joins in the chanting. At the culmination of the dance, the Witch Doctor indicates that Jones must be sacrificed to the sacred crocodile river god, but Jones rouses a final defiance and fires his remaining silver bullet into the crocodile apparition.

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Scene VIII

It is dawn and the final scene takes place in the identical spot at the foot of the forest where Jones started his journey in Scene II. Lem enters with his small band of soldiers, followed by Smithers. They examine Jones’s tracks, Smithers complaining that they have wasted their evening beating the drum and casting spells, Lem confident that they will still “kotch him.” The sound of snapping twigs in the forest alerts the soldiers and they shoot Jones, who has simply run in a circle all night. The sound of the drum abruptly ceases and Lem reveals that part of the evening’s ceremonies involved making their own silver bullets from melted coins. The soldiers show Jones’s dead body and exit, leaving Smithers to sneer at “the lot of ’em.”

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CHARACTERS

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Jeff

The black man Brutus Jones killed over a crap game in the United States before the action of the play began. Appearing in Scene III as one of Jones’s hallucinations, Jeff is brown rather than black-skinned, thin, middle-aged, and dressed in a Pullman porter’s uniform. In Jones’s hallucination, Jeff tosses the dice like a robot.

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Brutus Jones

The main character in The Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones is a tall and powerfully built American negro man of middle age. Formerly a Pullman (train) car porter in the United States, Jones comes to the West Indian island where the play takes place and becomes “emperor” after convincing the natives that he has magical powers. Before coming to the island, Jones had escaped from an American prison, where he was being confined for killing a man over a crap game. Jones exudes a strength and confidence that commands fear and respect from all around him even while he reigns quite ruthlessly as Emperor. His eyes indicate extraordinary cunning, intelligence, and a careful shrewdness.

To make himself appear regal, Jones wears a light-blue uniform decorated with brass buttons and heavy gold chevrons and braids. His pants are bright red with a light-blue stripe down the side and he wears patent leather boots with brass spurs and a holster with a long-barreled, pearl-handled revolver. In the play he speaks with a strongly marked black dialect, as in, “who dare whistle dat way in my palace?” Jones is filled with contempt for the former exploiter of the islanders, the white man, Smithers.

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Lem

A former chieftain on the island and the leader of the natives who finally rebel against Jones’s dictatorial rule. The heavy-set Lem appears on stage only in the last scene, where he is dressed in a loincloth with a revolver and cartridge belt around his waist.