No Emperors

Yesterday there were "No Kings" protests throughout the United States, and at the Joyce Theater in New York City the anti-monarchal ballet The Emperor Jones by the Limón Dance Company.

I went due to the connection of the dance piece with its source material, the play The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. The play, with its extensive stage directions and overwhelming focus on a central character whose internal fears are made manifest around him, seemed already halfway to being ballet when José Limón first adapted it to dance in 1956.

O'Neill wrote the play in 1920, and the Provincetown Players premiered it at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, starring Charles Sidney Gilpin. The show was a hit and had to be moved to a larger theatre to accommodate the large crowds who wanted to see it. It then toured the United States, providing many people in the U.S. with their first contact with Expressionism on stage.

When the play was revived on Broadway in 1925, it starred the previously unknown actor Paul Robeson, who went on to star in it in London and then on film in the 1933 movie version. The piece was thus already famous when Limón turned it into a showpiece for his own virtuosic dancing, taking on the role of Brutus Jones, who after rising to become emperor over a Caribbean island, disintegrates psychologically and is ultimately killed by a silver billet.

O'Neill's stage directions indicate that "Little Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest." The Little Formless Fears danced excellently in this production, though the forest was transformed into an urban jungle of skyscrapers. The company's revival kept Limón's original choreography, but adapted the costumes and sets to turn it into a parable about capitalism. They also allowed women to dance some of the roles, though Limón originally envisioned an all-male cast.

The piece was suitably creepy, though, which set the mood for the show I saw in the evening, Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, which he performed at Poe Cottage in the Bronx. Seeing Smith perform virtually every word of "The Black Cat" and "The Raven" in the house where Poe once lived was a real treat.

If you missed him, don't worry! He plans to be back with more Poe stories next October!

Where the Cross is Made

Whaling voyages can make certain men a little obsessed. That's what we learn in Moby-Dick, anyway, a novel I myself have adapted for the stage.

The obsessions of whaling captains also show up in the early plays of Eugene O'Neill. For instance, in O'Neill's play Ile (a New England Yankee pronunciation of "oil") a captain becomes so preoccupied with going after more whale oil that he drives his wife mad.

However, Captain Isaiah Bartlett in O'Neill's Where the Cross is Made has a different obsession. He was on a whaling voyage when he was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean. There, he and a handful of survivors found a treasure, buried it, and created a map marking the location with a cross.

Bartlett not only obsesses over the treasure, but after the other survivors are killed trying to get it, he passes his obsession on to his son Nat, though his daughter Sue is immune to the madness. O'Neill implies that the treasure exists, but is fake. A bracelet Bartlett returned with turns out to be made of brass with paste jewels rather than real ones. The play makes Bartlett's dream of fortune manifest onstage, though, by having actors playing the drowned crew members cross the stage like ghosts.

Where the Cross is Made premiered in 1918 by the Provincetown Players. Ida Rauh, who directed the production as well as playing Sue, apparently had difficulty staging the ghostly effect that really makes the play stand out as something special. "You'll have to do something about the ghosts, Gene," she reportedly said. "The boys never can look like ghosts, you know it. The audience will simply laugh at them." O'Neill stuck to his vision, and the ghosts stayed.

O'Neill later turned the one-act play into a full-length work called Gold. It opened on Broadway in 1921, but closed after only 13 performances.

Provincetown Players

I was supposed to see Jeffery Kennedy speak on the Provincetown Players earlier this week, but circumstances intervened, and I missed his talk.

Fortunately, Kennedy's talk is now available on YouTube. He spoke about material in his new book, Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players.

On the cover of the book is a recently rediscovered painting by Charles Ellis showing  a number of the original players, including Christine Ell, George Cram Cook, James Light, Eugene O'Neill, and O'Neill's childhood friend, Hutchinson Collins.

It was Cook who founded the Provincetown Players and led a group of people that included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bryant, John Reed, Djuna Barnes, and others. He had been at a theatre in Chicago in 1913 that performed The Playboy of the Western World, barely escaping a riot due to the piece's controversial subject matter. He immediately knew he wanted to create an American theatre that had the same energy as that exciting performance.

After marrying the writer Susan Glaspell, Cook put his ambitions into action, starting the Players in 1915. The first plays they produced were Neith Boyce's Constancy and Suppressed Desire by Glaspell and Cook, both presented at a vacation house in Provincetown, Massachusetts with sets designed by Robert Edmond Jones.

The performance was so popular, that the plays were staged again at a wharf, and two more plays were done that summer. Over the following year, the participants drummed up interest in Greenwich Village where they lived. The next year, a whole slew of artists vacationed in Provincetown, including O'Neill. At the wharf that summer, O'Neill's play The Moon of the Caribbees was performed for the first time. Other plays by O'Neill followed, including Bound East for Cardiff and Thirst.

In 1916, the group decided to produce a season in New York City as well. They converted the first floor of a brownstone into a very small theatre with extremely uncomfortable benches for seating. The stage was only 10 feet by 14 feet, but it played host to some of the great plays of the early American theatre.

The Provincetown Players' first full-length play was Cook's The Athenian Women, inspired by Aristophanes' old comedy Lysistrata. The play premiered on March 1, 1918, with a full 33 people packed onto the tiny stage in Greenwich Village. Eventually, the company moved into a larger space, an old stable that had recently been used for bottling wine.

On November 22nd, 1918, the new theatre opened, only days after the Armistice that ended World War I. It was here that the company premiered such break-through plays as Millay's Aria da Capo and O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

By 1922, the company had premiered nearly a hundred new American plays and opened new opportunities for African Americans on stage. While short lived, it had a permanent impact on the American stage. 

e.e. cummings, playwright

Edward Estlin Cummings, who famously signed his poetry e.e. cummings, did indeed write plays, and while I'm not a big fan of his poetry, I have to say, his plays aren't half bad.

In 1927, Cummings published his three-act play Him, which prefigured the coming of Absurdism (particularly Ionesco) decades later. The Provincetown Players premiered it the following year in New York, though few critics seemed to understand the piece.

The play opens with the Three Fates having a hilariously ridiculous conversation. ("Your husband is a vegetarian?" "On the contrary, my husband is a burglar.") In the second scene, we meet the title character, Him, who appears to be a stand-in for the playwright. Him speaks with a woman named Me. And who is she? The audience? The playwright's true self? Someone else entirely? Cummings is never entirely clear.

Throughout its three acts, Him alternates between potential scenes which the author, Him, is trying to write, and scenes between Me and Him discussing those scenes. The next-to-last-scene involves a side-show barker trying to draw in an audience. A woman in white appears, who is then revealed to be Me, mixing together the two worlds of the play. The three Weird Sisters explain the break from the play's established rules, claiming, "It's all done with mirrors."

Such humor also pervades Cummings' one-act play Anthropos, or the Future of Art. A group of cavemen in the play seem to discover evolution while another man paints a picture of a mammoth on the wall. At the end, the painter tries to go outside to take another look at the mammoth. Instead of finding a furry beast, he sees that the mammoth has been transformed into a steam shovel.

Though Anthropos seems almost impossible to stage, Cummings' later one-act play, Santa Claus, has been produced a number of times since he wrote it in the 1940s. Described by Cummings as "A Morality," the play pairs Santa Claus, a figure who supposedly does not exist, with Death, a figure who eggs him on to the impossible. Under Death's tutelage, Santa Claus stops trying to give things away and begins selling shares in a wheel mine.

The fact that wheel mines don't exist does not stop the mine from collapsing and killing workers. A mob is then out for Santa's blood. Naturally, he is only saved by the faith of a child. While I've never particularly liked Cummings' poems, I have to say, his plays can be quite witty, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.