Watching the Boa Constrictor Uncoil: Sexual Desire and The Emperor Jones

Abstract

In the spring of 2006, the Wooster Group re-staged its 1998 production of The Emperor Jones at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.  The re-staging largely retained its original elements, most notably in the embodiment of the title role of Brutus Jones by Kate Valk, a forty-nine year-old white woman, who performed the show in blackface.  The implications of casting a white woman in the role of a “tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded Negro of middle age” will serve as the main inquiry of this paper.  I hope to argue that the decision to cast Valk as Jones did more than, as Hilton Als suggests, “[equate] the female with the black outsider.”  Instead, by reading Charles Gilpin’s performance of Jones in the 1920s alongside Valk’s, I will argue that Valk’s destabilizing presence as a white woman in drag and blackface undermined the sexually charged, essentialized, and fetishized responses of white audiences to Gilpin’s black body. After all, at the end of the play Valk’s costume appeared intact, while Gilpin’s psychological journey stripped him both mentally and physically, forcing him to sport a bathrobe during the curtain call to cover his naked body.