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Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O'Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway
The early drama of Eugene O'Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O'Neill's dramatic writing—changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used O'Neill's texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater.
Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O'Neill's plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because of the way these works stimulated traffic between Broadway and Harlem—and between white and Black America. These investigations of O'Neill and Broadway productions are enriched by the vibrant transnational exchange found in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic.
Fig. 3. Charles Gilpin in the 1920 production of The Emperor Jones. A closer look reveals a belt buckle with the initials CSA (Confederate States of America), a performative citation of regimes of race. Eugene O’Neill Papers. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Fig. 12. Habib Benglia wearing a costume that recalls the Congo Witch-Doctor role from L’Empereur Jones, 1931. Photo by Studio Henri Manuel. Screenshot by Katie N. Johnson.
Fig. 13. Habib Benglia holding a North African instrument while bending in a ballet first-position plié. Photo by Studio Henri Manuel. Screenshot by Katie N. Johnson.
Fig. 14. Le Train Bleu restaurant in the Gare de Lyon train station, Paris. Select patrons can dine in rooms named after former French colonies, including one called Salon Algerien. Habib Benglia named his Montparnasse club Le Train Bleu after this posh restaurant as well as after the opera-ballet of the same title. Photo by Katie N. Johnson.
Fig. 19. Lawrence Tibbett in blackface performing the title role in the operatic adaptation of The Emperor Jones in 1933. Photo: Carlo Edwards, Metropolitan Opera Archives.
Fig. 20. Final scene from the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Emperor Jones in 1933, featuring Hemsley Winfield’s New Negro Art Theatre Dance Group. Photo: Carlo Edwards, Metropolitan Opera Archives.
Fig. 29. Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones (film version, 1933). This scene, which portrayed the Middle Passage and enslaved people with double exposure, was censored. However, a film still of the scene appeared in The Crisis in October 1933. Photo by George Rhinehart via Getty Images.