The Emperor Jones

The Emperor Jones
Poster for a 1937 Federal Theater Project production
Written by	Eugene O'Neill
Date premiered	1 November 1920
Place premiered	Neighborhood Playhouse New York City, New York
Original language	English
Subject	A Black porter attains power in the West Indies by exploiting the superstitions and ignorance of an island's residents.
Genre	Tragedy
Setting	A West Indian island not yet self-determined, but for the moment, an empire.

The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African-American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.

The play is one of O'Neil's major experimental works, mixing expressionism and realism, and the use of an unreliable narrator and multiple points of view. It was also an oblique commentary on the U.S. occupation of Haiti after bloody rebellions there, an act of imperialism that was much condemned in O'Neill's radical political circles in New York.The Emperor Jones draws on O'Neill's own hallucinatory experience hacking through the jungle while prospecting for gold in Honduras in 1909.

It was O'Neill's first big box-office hit, and the one that established him as a successful playwright, after he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his first play, also in 1920, the much less well-known Beyond the Horizon. The Emperor Jones was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1920-1921.

The play is virtually a monologue for its leading character, Jones, in a Shakespearean range from regal power to the depths of terror and insanity, comparable to Lear or Macbeth. Scenes 2 to 7 are from the point of view of Jones, and no other character speaks. The first and last scenes are essentially a framing device with a character named Smithers, a white trader who appears to be part of illegal activities. In the first scene, Smithers is told about the rebellion by an old woman, and then has a lengthy conversation with Jones. In the last scene, Smithers converses with Lem, the leader of the rebellion. Smithers has mixed feelings about Jones, though he generally has more respect for Jones than for the rebels. During the final scene, Jones is killed by a silver bullet, which was the only way that the rebels believed Jones could be killed, and the way in which Jones planned to kill himself if he was captured.