A Través el espejo. "The Emperor Jones", de The Wooster Group (1993; 2006; 2009): representación y transgresión

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS. THE WOOSTER GROUP’S THE EMPEROR JONES (1993; 2006; 2009): REPRESENTATION AND TRANSGRESSION EMELINE JOUVE Toulouse II University; Champollion University. [email protected] Received April 26th, 2013 Accepted July 18th , 2013 KEYWORDS The Wooster Group; theatrical and social representation; boundaries of illusions; race and gender crossing; spectatorial empowerment. PALABRAS CLAVE The Wooster Group; representación teatral y social; fronteras de las ilusiones; cruzamiento racial y genérico; empoderamiento del espectador ABSTRACT In 1993, the iconoclastic American troupe, The Wooster Group, set out to explore the social issues inherent in O’Neill’s work and to shed light on their mechanisms by employing varying metatheatrical strategies. Starring Kate Valk as a blackfaced Brutus, The Wooster Group’s production transgresses all traditional artistic and social norms—including those of race and gender—in order to heighten the audience’s awareness of the artificiality both of the esthetic experience and of the actual social conventions it mimics. Transgression is closely linked to the notion of emancipation in The Wooster Group’s work. By crossing the boundaries of theatrical illusion, they display their eagerness to take over the playwright’s work in order to make it their own. This process of interpretative emancipation on the part of the troupe appears in its turn to be a source of empowerment for the members of the audience, who, because the distancing effects break the theatrical illusion, are invited to adopt an active writerly part in the creative process and thus to take on the responsibility of interpreting the work for themselves. 62 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 RESUMEN En 1993, la iconoclasta compañía estadounidense The Wooster Group, se propuso explorar las cuestiones sociales inherentes a la obra de O'Neill y arrojar luz sobre sus mecanismos mediante el uso de diferentes estrategias metateatrales. Protagonizada por Kate Valk que, pintada de negro, tiene el papel de Brutus, la producción del Grupo Wooster transgrede todas las normas tradicionales del arte y de la sociedad - incluso las que atañen a las cuestiones de raza y de género - con el fin de realzar la conciencia del público respecto a la artificialidad tanto de la experiencia estética como de las convenciones sociales actuales que imita. La transgresión está estrechamente ligada a la noción de emancipación en el trabajo de The Wooster Group. Cruzando las fronteras de la ilusión teatral, muestran su afán de apoderarse de la obra del dramaturgo con el fin de hacerla suya. Este proceso de emancipación de interpretación por parte de la compañía parece ser a su vez una fuente de empoderamiento para el público, a quien, gracias a los efectos de distanciamiento que rompen la ilusión teatral, invita a adoptar un papel de escritor activo en el proceso creativo y así a asumir la responsabilidad de interpretar el trabajo por sí mismo. Of all Eugene O’Neill’s plays, The Emperor Jones is one of the most controversial. This play in eight scenes, first produced at the Provincetown Players’ Playwrights’ Theatre, New York City, in 1920, tells the story of African-American Brutus Jones, who, having escaped from prison, establishes himself as emperor over the Black residents of an island in the West Indies. In an attempt to escape his former subjects who are now rebelling against him, Jones makes his way through the forest, a spatial journey which leads him to recall scenes from his earlier life. In 1993, the iconoclastic American troupe, The Wooster Group, set out to explore the social issues inherent in O’Neill’s work and to shed light on their mechanisms. Starring OBIE-winning white actress Kate Valk as a black-faced Brutus, The Wooster Group’s production transgressed all traditional artistic and social norms in order to heighten the audience’s awareness both of the artificiality of the esthetic experience and of the actual social conventions it mimicked. By crossing the boundaries of theatrical illusion, The Wooster Group displayed their eagerness to take over the playwright’s work and to stage their own interpretation of O’Neill’s representation of Brutus’s fate. With its staging of The Emperor Jones, The Wooster embarked the spectators on a journey through the looking glass, beyond both theatrical and traditional social representations of reality. Like the Provincetown Players, as we will first see, The Wooster Group played with theatrical traditions and broke the boundaries of illusion to unveil the fabric of representation. By doing so, the troupe explicitly staged representation as both the theatrical rendering of an object or a subject through artifice but also as the social image of that same object or subject as it is perceived or constructed by an author and, more widely, by a culture. By focusing, in the second part of this study, on race and gender crossing, this paper shows that social Through the Looking-Glass… 63 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 representations were exposed as misrepresentations upon which, as is finally demonstrated, the spectators were invited to reflect. By involving the audience in the process of interpretation, The Wooster Group empowered the viewers and gave them an active writerly part in the artistic creation. I. FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE: STAGING (DIS)ILLUSIONS FROM THE PAGE TO THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS’ STAGE: PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF ILLUSION In his introduction to “Brutus Jones ‘n the ‘Hood: The Provincetown Players, The Wooster Group, and the Theatrical History,” Roger Bechtel sets Elizabeth LeCompte’s company as the rightful heir of George Cram Cook (1873-1924) and Susan Glaspell (1876-1948)’s amateur theater troupe, which was greatly influential in the emergence of an off-Broadway stage in the 1910s-1920s. As Bechtel notes, the similarities between the Provincetown Players and The Wooster Group abound: Geographically, both of these companies were literally born downtown (below 14th Street in Manhattan), and more importantly, aesthetically and ethically they typify “downtown,” a term that has become synonymous with a nonconformist and noncommercial attitude. The Provincetown, like The Wooster Group, was committed to experimentation, and was a—if not the—preeminent member of the theatrical vanguard of its day. Occupying roughly the same neighborhood (in more than one sense), even their performance spaces are similar: the Provincetown converted a storehouse and stable into a theatre, while The Wooster Group occupies a modern equivalent, a converted garage (130).1 To Bechtel’s list can also be added, among other things, the emphasis on collaborative work for both troupes: Cook and Glaspell dreamt of a “community [of artists] working together, developing unsuspected talents” and, in interviews, LeCompte emphasizes “the collaborative nature” of her approach (Glaspell 193; Quick 10).2 Eugene O’Neill was a member of the Provincetown Players. The Provincetown production of The Emperor Jones on the first bill of the 1920-1921 season consolidated O’Neill’s growing success and launched his Broadway career at the 1 The garage, known as “the Performing Garage,” is central to The Wooster Group’s work as it both serves as their creation and rehearsal home and as a performance venue as The Garage. 2 In the case of the Provincetown Players, the members of the group were expected to get involved in every facet—artistic but also administrative—of the production process. Although LeCompte stood as the director of The Wooster Group, being thus the one who had the final say, the active collaboration of the actors throughout the creation was central to LeCompte’s theatrical process. 64 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 expense of the company.3 A turning point in the history of American drama and theater for many reasons, The Emperor Jones is rarely remembered as the play which caused tensions to flare up among the Players, whose pioneering historical adventure was eventually brought to an end. However, the play is often referred to as a landmark in African-American theatrical history. With The Emperor Jones, an African-American actor was offered a leading role by a white company for the first time. Another important feature of The Emperor Jones concerns the playwright’s aesthetic experimentations with expressionism, breaking thus away from the realist tradition of the time.4 The Emperor Jones is considered “as a remarkable tour de force both as drama and as an exposition of expressionist techniques” (Gassness and Quinn 259). Although the first and last scenes can be qualified as realistic, the six intermediary scenes, in which “the forest and the night appear to embody the limitations of his mind,” read as projections of Jones’s inner world (Styan 101). As Mardi Valgemae explains in his pivotal Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s, expressionism is regarded as the attempt to “penetrate through life’s surface reality and portray man’s inner world” (2). Expressionism extols subjectivity and puts “inner experience above external life” (4). If expressionism typifies the modern quest to go beyond objective reality, its intention is however not to break the boundaries of theatrical illusion but instead to unveil its hidden facet by giving the readers and spectators access to the intimacy of the character’s mind. To immerse the spectators in the infinity of Brutus’s mind, George Cram Cook, who directed the play, was eager to experiment with the set in order to render visually the author’s expressionism and thus launched himself upon the construction of a dome. Ivonne Shafer writes: By 1920, when O’Neill had written The Emperor Jones, Cook realized a dream he had long held. He installed a sky-dome in the theatre. It was modeled on the famous Kuppelhorizont in Max Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin. This was a dome 3 The day after the premiere at the Provincetown Playhouse, Provincetown Players member Edna Kenton remembers, “offers came in from half a dozen Broadway managers to take The Emperor Jones uptown” (127). For Kenton, and most probably for her friends Cook and Glaspell, the Players’ decision to take O’Neill’s play uptown signed the death warrant of the founders’ dream of an amateur theater on the fringe of Broadway and its commercial traditions. In 1922, the troupe split over disagreements concerning the Players’ internal policy. 4 In his preface to Realism and the American Drama Tradition, the editor William W. Demastes even refers to the “tyranny of realism” in order to emphasize the tremendous impact that realism has had on American drama and theater. He writes: The tyranny of realism. This phrase summarizes the impression expressed in numerous critical analysis of twentieth-century American drama. It is true that since the beginning of the twentieth century, realism has been the dominant mode of expression (Demastes ix). Demastes’s collection was published in 1996, that is three years after the first production of The Emperor Jones by The Wooster Group. Through the Looking-Glass… 65 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 which backed on the stage and which reflected light in various directions, increased the impression of size, and allowed many possibilities for theatrical lighting effects […] Amazingly, this amateur group was the first to use this theatrical device in America (76). In The Provincetown Players’ 1920 production, the power of illusion was reinforced thanks to Cook’s dome, which gave the illusion of limitless space, thus enabling the members of the audience to discover every recess of Jones’s mind. THE WOOSTER GROUP’S THE EMPEROR JONES: “ARTISTRY AND ARTIFICIALITY” If illusion prevails in the Provincetown Players’ production of The Emperor Jones, The Wooster Group, on the other hand, deconstructed illusion to lay bare the artificiality of representation. The Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones was first produced in 1995. Due to its original success, the production was revived in 2006 and again in 2009. The present analysis of The Wooster’s staging of O’Neill’s play is based on the performance given on January 10th, 2009 at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, during the O’Neill Festival.5 The Wooster Group has often been hailed by theater critics as an epitome of what Hans-Thies Lehmann defined as postdramatic theater.6 Lehmann coined the phrase “post-dramatic theater” to account for the theatrical tendencies which have been dominating the avant-garde stage since the 1960s, tendencies in rupture with modern theater as defined by Peter Szondi and others. The text is no longer central for post-dramatic artists, who consider it as a mere ingredient of the theatrical experience which blends together different media such as cinema, music, plastic arts…. The Emperor Jones stands however as an exception in The Wooster’s repertory since O’Neill’s text does remain central: as Bechtel notes, in 1993, “it was the first time the Group had presented a play under its original title, largely uncut and unaltered textually, and without the interpolation of any other scripted text” (128). Apart from this major change in their work approach, a change which seems to depart from the stylistic character of postdramatic theater, The Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones was faithful to their nonrealistic multi-media aesthetic. 5 The show has been made available on DVD by The Wooster Group, who sells it in their on-line shop. Besides the revivals of the show, the marketing of this by-product also proves that The Emperor Jones was a great success. 6 The Wooster Group is not only introduced as “postdramatic” or “postmodern” theat er in Lehman’s seminal Postdramatic Theatre (1999), but also in Johannes H. Birringer’s Theatre, Theatre, Postmodernism (1991), Kerstin Schmidt’s The Theatre of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (2005), Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson’s Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010), Nicola Shaughnessy’s Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (2012), Maggie B. Gale and John F. Deeney’s The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook. From Modernism to Contemporary Performance (2012), to name just a few. 66 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 The Emperor Jones starred three performers: the Black-faced Kate Valk playing Brutus, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd who alternated in playing Smithers and the Stage-Assistant.7 Brutus and Smither’s outfits were akin to Japanese Kabuki costumes with African undertones. This blend of cultural aesthetic disoriented the spectators, who had but few signs to help them define the location of the scenes. The two plastic palm trees on each side of the raised boxing ring-like stage hinted at the fact that the plot takes place in an exotic location but they also worked as signifiers referring to the artificiality of representation: the ostentatious fakeness of these props made clear that the spectators were watching a world made of “plastic,” a construction, a fiction. The fabric of the performance was made all the more apparent by the presence of visible cables and backstage equipment, which were manipulated by the Stage-Assistant, who came and went on stage and whose activities back stage were also visible because of the absence of curtain between the stage and the wings. Two TV monitors were placed at the rear of the stage. The screens displayed the faces of some of the characters, creating an effect of spatial and temporal multi-layers calling into question the “here and now” essential basis of theater. Asian-like music to which Jones and Brutus danced was played. Electronic sounds and the sounds of African drums punctuated the play. This mixture of performance, cinema, dance and music is characteristic of the intermediality of postdramatic theater. The creation of a heterogeneous universe, both in terms of cultural references and of the nature of the media used, departs from the realist tradition. The attempt at making apparent the fabric of the show through the profusion of media and of technological devices whose cables are left apparent is metafictional, a strategy which transgresses the boundary of illusion. As Werner Wolf writes: “explicit metafictional laying bare of [artificiality] is one of the important processes responsible for breaking illusion” (284). In his book devoted to the company, The Wooster Group Work Book, Andrew Quick declares that “the most important preoccupations in the work of The Wooster Group” resides in “the search for a profound form of experimental reality that challenges the ordinary, which is, paradoxically, always negotiated and filtered via the very artistry and artificiality of performance itself” (8). I would argue that, in the case of The Emperor Jones, LeCompte’s troupe experiments with the “artificiality of the performance itself” to “challeng[e]” an “ordinary” which, in fine, is artificial. II. ALL THE WORLD’S A S TAGE: STAGING (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS 7 In the 2009 production under study, the part of Smithers is played by Ari Fliakos and that of the Stage Assistant by Scott Shepherd. Through the Looking-Glass… 67 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 RES US CITATING THE “ DEAD AUTHOR” : REPRES ENTING AUTHORIAL AUTHORITY In its theatrical endeavor to lay bare the fabric of illusion, The Wooster Group represented on stage the very agents of the artistic process. The black face and the Kabuki costumes, emblems of the actor’s impersonation in the American Minstrel tradition and the classical Japanese tradition, identified Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos as actors. The stage assistant was present throughout the play: his conventional offstage role was put in the limelight. The character of Smithers was staged as a figure of authority. Physically absent from the stage at the beginning of the first scene, the white trader was however “technologically” present on the TV screen; he could also be seen off-stage, speaking his lines into a microphone. Jones turned his back to both the technological and the real off-stage Smithers as if the emperor were interacting with a voice only. This presence-absence strategy conveyed the impression that, from the start, Smithers was both literally and figuratively “behind” Jones, that this character, who can be seen as the narrative catalyst of Brutus’s doom, stood as a voice-spirit triggering Jones’s actions and thus controlling him. 8 Smither’s control over Jones was akin to that of the stage-director or of the author over her or his actors or characters. Smither’s made-up moustache bore a striking resemblance to Eugene O’Neill’s. This “metatextual” echo established Jones as “the representational creation of [O’Neill], the seemingly ‘absent’ playwright but the true arbiter of Jones’s fate” (Bechtel 148). Rather than staging Jones, a character created by a “scriptor” and freed from the author’s authority, as Rolland Barthes puts it in The Death of the Author, The Wooster Group resuscitated the author and staged Eugene O’Neill’s Jones, the creation and the vision of the authorial authority. As mentioned above, The Emperor Jones departed from The Wooster Group’s previous works in that it was the first time that the troupe kept the original title of the play and did not alter much of the original script. This eagerness to go back to the original The Emperor Jones further shows that The Wooster was interested in exploring the play as the product of an author’s interpretation of complex themes including that of identity. It was thus their interpretation, or in other words their staging, of O’Neill’s interpretation that the company was eager to present to the audience. RACE AND TRANSGRESSION: BLACKNESS AS A THEATRICAL AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION 8 I refer to Smithers as the “narrative catalyst” of the play because it is his narration of the islanders’ rebellion that initiates Jones’s journey into the forest. 68 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 “For featuring a central black character and for actually casting a black actor to play the role,” Aoife Monks notes, O’Neill and his works “were seen to be radically progressive in an era of widespread black-face minstrel practice on the stage” (540). In 1924 in “The Negro and the American Stage” and two years later in “Negro Art,” African-American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois praised The Emperor Jones, which he saw as “splendid tragedy” (“The Negro and the American Stage” 228). Du Bois’s views were however not shared by all his contemporary peers and, in his 1926 article, he actually deplored the protests against the play: [O]nly yesterday a protest of colored folk in a western city declared that ‘The Emperor Jones’ is the kind of play that should never be staged under any circumstances, regardless of theories, because it portrays the worst traits of the bad element of both races (“Negro Art” 228). Scholars have often argued that The Emperor Jones betrays O’Neill’s stereotypical vision of black men. If the play is stylistically remembered for its expressionism, the first and last scenes are nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, realist, that is, representative of what the author sees as objective reality, which thus amounts to a representation of O’Neill’s subjective reality. Matthew H. Wikander, among other critics, has underscored O’Neill’s caricatured description of Jones: “In The Emperor Jones, the stage directions abound in stereotypes (‘Jones’s eyes begin to roll wildly. He stutters …’) and the dialect is reminiscent of the minstrel show” (225). A man with “typically negroid” features, as indicated in the didascalia of character description, Jones is indeed reduced to a “type” (O’Neill 8). Thus, in spite of his attempt to depart from minstrelsy—“one of the few truly indigenous American entertainments”—by giving center stage to a Black protagonist performed by a black actor, O’Neill paradoxically fell back on some of the stereotypes which were conveyed in minstrel shows (Banham 682). As David Savran writes in “Obeying the Rules,” The Wooster Group used “The Emperor Jones to interrogate O’Neill’s dependence on the very stereotypes of minstrelsy he attempts to displace” (67). The black actor entrusted by O’Neill and the Provincetown Players with the part of Brutus Jones was Charles Gilpin, who, “by the time he took on the role of Emperor Jones was a veteran of minstrel shows” (Aberjhani and West 102). When in 1946 O’Neill declared that Gilpin was the sole and only actor who could “carry out every notion of a character [he] had in mind,” he seemed, as Wikander points out, to “have forgotten his dispute with Gilpin in 1920” when he learned that the actor “‘suddenly finicky about using the word nigger (called for in the script), was rewriting the role.’” O’Neill was reported to have threateningly said to Gilpin: “‘If I ever catch you rewriting my lines again, you black bastard, I’m going to beat you up’” (Wikander 224-225). The Wooster Group’s staging of Scene 7, when the Witch-Doctor summons a crocodile god to eat Jones as a sacrifice, could be seen as a staging of O’Neill’s threat to Gilpin. The crocodile is performed by the O’Neill- Through the Looking-Glass… 69 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 like character, who pantomimes a fight against the prostrate Jones embodied by Valk, who wears the black-faced mask of the minstrel “nigger” to which Gilpin was thus reduced not only as a character but also as an actor who had to obey the white authorial authority. Kate Valk impersonated the stereotypical vision of the black man conveyed in minstrelsy: she was black-faced with exaggerated red lips; she spoke with caricatured booming elongating words; at the kinesic level, she made grotesque gestures and expressions as she bulged her eyes, for instance. Blackness became the subject and the object of representation in The Wooster Group’s play as they represented on stage the way theater traditionally represented black people for about a century in the United States. In the words of Aoife Monks, “The Wooster Group foregrounded the performative nature of theatrical representation,” they showed that “theatre itself is implicated in the construction of racial identity” (555). In explicitly representing race as a theatrical representation, The Wooster Group appeared to break the boundaries not only of theatrical illusion but also of social illusion. The final scene of The Emperor Jones could be seen as an invitation to transcend the socially constructed concept of races which engenders misconceptions that were staged as representations. In this closing scene, the characters of Smithers and Lem, the Native Chief, appeared on the TV monitor. The characters were both played by Fliakos: the black negative image (with a white mouth) represented Lem and the positive image stood for Smither. “The use of technological masking [...] called into question the stability of racial origins.” If the “technological masking worked to break down the opposition between the black Lem and the white Smithers by containing both figures in the body of [the same actor]” it also underscored the inherent racism of Eugene O’Neill’s American culture which viewed blackness as negative and whiteness as positive (Monks 556). As Brechtel argues, basing himself on Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, racial representations are consequently staged as cultural and thus social misrepresentations (152). To tie up Brechtel’s point with my previous conclusion, it can be said that the theatrical representation of race—the physical or technological black-facing—was thus emblematic of social misrepresentation. Interestingly, however, LeCompte declared in an interview about their 1981 show Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), in which they experimented with black-facing, that her staging should not be interpreted sociologically: “the blackface is not sociological. It’s a theatrical metaphor” (qtd. in Savran, Breaking 31). This claim appears ambivalent in that theater being a social product, it seems contradictory to negate the sociological dimension of black-facing. This statement, which was made at a time when the company was heavily criticized for their use of black-face, considered as ideologically problematic, reads as an attempt to respond to the storm 76 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 spectators saw Kate Valk appearing on stage with a blackened face, they identified this code with the Minstrel genre. However, The Wooster’s The Emperor Jones fell short of the audience’s preconstituted horizon of expectations, since the play did not meet the other defining requirements of this traditional American genre. In fact, the Minstrel genre was denied at the same time as it was introduced, since by having a woman play a man, The Wooster disbanded from the start the Minstrel codes of representations. The spectators should have thus reconstructed the codes for themselves, questioning the old artistic but also any social preconstituted horizons of expectation. By dismantling the literary codes, The Wooster Group challenged the viewers, shaking them out of their intellectual and political lethargy. Besides, with their deconstruction of the Minstrel show, The Wooster Group moved away from what Ralph Ellison defined as a “‘ritual of exorcis m’” in which the minstrel mask, by reducing the African in A merica to a ‘negative sign,’ managed both “to veil the humanity of negroes thus reduced to a sign, and to repress the white audience’s awareness of its moral identification with its own acts and with the human ambiguities pushed behind the mask,” as Marjorie Garber puts it (275). Instead of repressing the audience’s awareness of their moral responsibility as regards Black Americans, the company used black-facing as a consciousness raising strategy. The play with “the rules of expectation,” in Fiona Shaw’s words, may explain the contrast in terms of reception between Route 1&9 and The Emperor Jones.17 If Roger Bechtel argues that the difference as regards reception lies in “the historical evolution of authorial license,” it also may be assumed that the negative critical feedback was also due to the fact that, with Route 1&9, unlike with The Emperor Jones, the company did not depart enough from the tradition of the Pigmeat Markham comedy, enough for the spectators’ horizon of expectations to be smashed, and was at risk, therefore, of giving the impression that they actually embraced what was seen as a racist tradition.18 [The] horizon of the expectable is constituted for the reader from out of a tradition or series of previously known works, and from a specific attitude, mediated by one (or more) genre and dissolved through new works. Just as there is no act of verbal communication that is not related to a general, socially or situationally conditioned norm or convention, it is also unimaginable that a literary work set itself into an informational vaccum, without indicating a specific situation of understanding. To this extent, every work belongs to a genre —whereby I mean neither more nor less than that for each work a preconstituted horizon of expectations must be ready at hand (this can also be understood as a relationship of ‘rules of the game’ [Zusammenhang von Spielregeln]) to orient the reader’s (public’s) understanding and to enable a qualifying reception (79-80). 17 In her foreword to The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Liz Goodman, actress Fiona Shaw gives an account of her experience as Richard II in Deborah Warner’s staging of Shakespeare’s play and writes: “ Being a female and Irish, I thought that there were no rules in the world of imagination. But of course there are other rules. The rules of cultural history, the rules of expectation and the rules of timing (xxiii).” Shaw’s crossing of both gender and ethnical boundaries in Richard II is akin to Valk in The Emperor Jones in which the white actress breaks the rules of expectation by playing a black man. 18 Roger Bechtel writes: Through the Looking-Glass… 77 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 FROM DISTANCIATION TO REFLECTION If the use of black-facing by The Wooster Group disoriented the spectators whose expectations were defeated, it also worked for Kate Valk as a mask ensuring psychological distance, as Andrew Quick explains in his conclusion to The Wooster Group Work Book. Quick argues that the mask serves three functions including that “of establishing a sense of distance between the performer and the audience, creating a barrier between a two-way process of potential psychological identification: the performer with the audience and the audience with the performer” (274). Psychological distance and physical distance with the spectators were two of the tenets of the company’s approach. Contrary to Richard Schechner’s Environmental Theater, “there is no place,” as Quick notes, “for a physical interaction between performers and viewers; [t]he audience is always spatially separated from the scenic landscapes that she constructs” (9). The Wooster Group emerged from the Environmental Theatre in which members of the company, including Elizabeth LeCompte, who served as Schechner’s assistant, were initially working with Richard Schechner. However, they broke away from the director’s “subjective theatre concentrate[ing] solely on ‘the psychology of perception’” to establish a more distanced relationship with their spectators (Innes 271). This psychological and physical distance in The Wooster Group’s works and in The Emperor Jones counteracted the spectators’ identification with the characters and thus favoured intellectual reflection. Distanciation with the characters was also conveyed by the use of different media on stage, attracting the audience’s attention to the fabric of the show: the spectators, who were thus constantly reminded that they were watching a performance, were thus prevented from “suspending their disbelief” and therefore from sympathizing with the world of fiction. A member of The Wooster Group, Ron Vawter, confided to Andrew Quick that his and Elizabeth LeCompte’s theatrical quest was to “figure out what’s there,” that is, “the necessity to have an ethical relationship with what takes place on the stage and before audiences. […] The relationship is ethical,” he explained, because to “figure out what’s there’ entails a willingness (an openness) to surrender themselves to the immediacy that is the experience of what is being encountered. […] To do this,” he added, “they have to abandon all predetermined modes of thinking , to set aside the rules through which the world might be known (this would be a moral order), to be receptive to what is really happening in the room.” Quick concludes: Historical perspective can help explain why the critics seemed to perform such an abrupt about -face: the negative reviews and NYSCA’s revocation of funding were, in a sense, just the beginning of a very public dialogue on Route 1&9 […] Ideally, perhaps the public dialogue actually served a suasive function; or perhaps, in the face o f such formidable support for the Group’s aesthetic choi ces, it became very unfashionable, if not intellectually suspect, not to support the blackface (either explicit or implicit) (160). 78 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 Ethics is not necessarily a mode of discovery, although finding out is inevitably part of the ethical process. The openness to experience, to being present provokes a practice of judgment: what to do next, now that I know this; how to be in the future, now that I have had this experience? It is a mode of judgment that proceeds with criteria, one that demands an imaginative or inventive way of responding to the immediacy—the occurrence—of the event that is the performance. This form of ethics, of thinking the future, like the work itself, is always a matter of pragmatics (274). This ethical relationship of the artist with the work could be applied to the relationship between the work and the spectators, who, because they could not rely on preconceived patterns, since these were always deconstructed, and could not be led astray by their emotions, should also have responded to the “immediacy […] of the performance.” As Postmodern political theater, The Wooster Group’s production of The Emperor Jones could thus also be defined as ethical theater empowering its spectators with the power of judgment. WORKS CITED ABERJHANI, and Sandra L. West. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Facts On File, Inc, 2003. AUSLANDER, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. BANHAM, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. BARTHES, Roland. “The Death of the Author” Web site. (2000). 13 Nov. 2012. <http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf>. BAY-CHENG, Sarah. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. BENEMANN, William. Male-male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006. BECHTEL, Roger. “Brutus Jones ‘n the ‘Hood: The Provincetown Players, The Wooster Group, and the Theatrical History.” Past Performance. American Theatre and the Historical Imagination. Ed. Roger Bechtel. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. 128-167. Through the Looking-Glass… 79 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 BIRRINGER, Johannes H. Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. DEMASTES, William W. “Preface: American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought.” Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition. Ed. William W. Demastes. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. ix-xvii. DU BOIS, W. E. B. “The Negro and the American Stage.” The Crisis 28 (June 1924): 55-59. ---. “Negro Art” (1926). Du Bois on Reform. Ed. Brian Johnson. Lanham: Alta Mira Press, 2005. 227-230. FOSTER, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press, 1985. GALE, Maggie B, and John F. Deeney. The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. London: Routledge, 2010. GARBER, Marjorie B. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. GASSNER, John, and Edward Quinn. The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama. New York: Crowell, 1969. GLASPELL, Susan. The Road to the Temple (1926). New York: Frederic A. Stokes, 1927. HOLDERNESS, Graham. Introduction. The Politics of Theatre and Drama. Ed. Graham Holderness. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. 1-10 INNES, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992. London: Routledge, 1993. JAUSS, Hans R. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. KENTON, Edna. The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915-1922 (Ts. 1930s). Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2004. LEHMANN, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge, 2006. MONKS, Aoife. “’Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds’: Cross-Dressing, Eugene O'Neill, The Wooster Group, and the Emperor Jones.” Modern Drama. 48.3 (2006): 540-564. MULVEY, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. O'NEILL, Eugene. Emperor Jones. Sitwell: Digireads Com, 2009. 80 Emeline Jouve Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 17 (2013) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.61-80 PFISTER, Joel. Staging Depth: Eugene O'neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. QUICK, Andrew. The Wooster Group Work Book. London: Routledge, 2007. SAVRAN, David. Breaking the Rules. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991. ----. “Obeying the Rules.” The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. Ed. Johan Callens. Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2004. 63-70. SHAUGHNESSY, Nicola. Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. SCHMIDT, Kerstin. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. Kenilworth: Rodopi, 2005. SHAFER, Yvonnes. Eugene O’Neill and American Society. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia Press, 2011. SHAW, Fiona. “Foreword.” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. Eds. Liz Goodman and Gay J. De Gay. London: Routledge, 2002. xxiii-xxv. SOLOMON, Alison. “It’s Never Too Late to Switch. Crossing Toward Power.” Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing. Ed. Lesley Ferris. London: Routledge, 1993. 144-153. STYAN, J. L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Expressionism and Epic Theatre. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. VALGEMAE, Mardi. Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. WIKANDER, Matthew H. “O’Neill and the Cult of Sincerity.” The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Ed. Michael Manheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 217-235. WOLF, Werner. “Illusion and Breaking Illusion in Twentieth Century Fiction.” Aesthetic Illusion. Eds. F. Burwick, and W. Pape. New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1990. 284-298.