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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Thin ice in the tropics

October 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

I saw three shows last weekend, one fabulous and two lousy: The Emperor Jones, Memphis, and After Miss Julie. All are reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Eugene O’Neill is the most problematic of major American playwrights, not because he wasn’t important–nobody doubts that–but because his plays, like Theodore Dreiser’s novels, are out of step with modern taste in all sorts of awkward ways. Take “The Emperor Jones,” the 1920 one-act play in which a black Pullman porter takes over an impoverished West Indies island with the help of a Cockney crook. It’s one of O’Neill’s most significant works, yet few companies dare to perform it nowadays, for the title role is written in yassuh-boss period dialect and the word “nigger” is flung around with alarming abandon. Not surprisingly, “The Emperor Jones” hasn’t been seen on Broadway since 1927, and Off-Broadway productions are scarcely less rare. In order to get away with reviving it in 1993, the avant-garde Wooster Group cast Brutus Jones as a white woman in blackface, which wowed the cognoscenti but did less well by the play. Now the Irish Repertory Theatre, an Off-Broadway troupe that never fails to deliver the goods, is putting on an uncensored production that is smart, forceful, fiercely involving and wholly successful.
Emperor-Jones-webimage.jpgCiarán O’Reilly has paid O’Neill the compliment of staging “The Emperor Jones” with unapologetic directness, presenting Jones (John Douglas Thompson) as a charismatic dictator who in a just world might well have made better use of his gifts….
I’m not so sure that O’Neill’s play still works as a poetic statement about the thin ice on which Western civilization rests, but it definitely works as a tour de force for a first-rate black actor, and Mr. Thompson is all that and then some. I first saw him on stage in Shakespeare & Company’s 2008 production of “Othello,” in which he spoke Shakespeare’s verse with bewitching elegance. In “The Emperor Jones” he shows us another kind of giant, utterly venal yet irresistibly sympathetic….
I’ve seen dumber musicals than “Memphis,” but not many and not by much. This noisy piece of claptrap, which has been rattling around the regional circuit for the past six years, turns the real-life story of Dewey Phillips, a Memphis disc jockey who fell in love with rhythm and blues in the ’50s, into a ludicrous fantasy about a white DJ named Huey (Chad Kimball) who puts a black singer named Felicia (Montego Glover) on the radio, thereby driving the local racists crazy. Big surprise: All the black characters are noble hipsters and all the white characters (except for Huey) are redneck squares….
August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” written in 1888 and last seen on Broadway for three nights in 1962, is now being performed there again–after a fashion. In “After Miss Julie,” Patrick Marber’s 1995 rewrite, Strindberg’s once-scandalous, still-disturbing play about an arrogant young countess (Sienna Miller) who sleeps with her father’s footman (Jonny Lee Miller) is transplanted from 19th-century Sweden to England in 1945. The action unfolds on the fateful night that the Brits voted Winston Churchill out of office and opted for the promise of socialism, which tells you just about everything you need to know about “After Miss Julie,” whose real subject is contemporary class warfare in England….
As for Ms. Miller, a model turned second-tier movie star, all she does is stalk around the stage striking vampy poses and looking really, really skinny….
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Read the whole thing here.
To listen to an aircheck of a 1952 broadcast by Dewey Phillips, go here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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