Restoring 'Emperor Jones' to Power

"I have always felt guilty that a theater with our mission has not done more O'Neill," American Century Theater Artistic Director Jack Marshall says. The Arlington troupe, which revives rarely done American plays, is presenting Eugene O'Neill's 1921 expressionist drama "The Emperor Jones" through July 23 at the Gunston Arts Center.

After the company's success a couple of seasons back with Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal," Marshall thought "The Emperor Jones" would offer a similarly satisfying challenge. Expressionist plays of the early 20th century, with their avant-garde manifestations of characters' thoughts and fears, "give a lot of opportunities to directors and designers" to experiment, he says.

Bus Howard, whom longtime viewers of HBO's "The Wire" will recognize as Ott and who appeared in "Polk County" and "The Great White Hope" at Arena Stage, plays the title character, Brutus Jones. A former Pullman porter and convicted murderer, Jones escaped a chain gang and fled to a Caribbean island, where he bamboozled the gullible locals, became their much-feared emperor and robbed them blind. As the play opens, his "subjects" have had enough and Jones prepares to make a run for it. His guilt and paranoia materialize from the jungle as shadowy phantoms.

Howard says rehearsals with director Ed Bishop became an investigation into how someone like Jones, who came from a background of relative privilege compared with the islanders, could, as Howard puts it, "dog someone else. What is in their character that allows that to happen?" That, Howard says, is "the darkness of the human spirit that O'Neill is looking at."

The actor ascribes some of Jones's behavior to the brutal legacy of slavery. "When he gets the opportunity to become the leader . . . everybody else is going to feel his wrath," Howard says. "It's an unfeeling, unflinching kind of arrogance that he has."

A source of controversy when it debuted, the play soon became a star vehicle for the legendary African American actor Paul Robeson. In the 1960s and after, Marshall says, its portrayal of a fatally flawed black antihero speaking in a heavy dialect was condemned as racist.

Marshall argues that "O'Neill was making a much broader universal statement about the human state, about human hubris." Howard finds it remarkable that O'Neill "was able to capture the feeling of this man as an African American and then wrote this for an African American man [to portray] in 1920."

To handle the physicality of the role, the 6-foot-2 Howard began working out soon after he was cast. He lost 36 pounds, slimming down to 220.

During a family vacation, he memorized all his lines in the short but text-heavy piece, which is nearly a monologue.

"It is such a journey that he takes emotionally," Howard says. "I didn't want to be fighting the words when I came into rehearsal.

"Then you have all kinds of time to explore all types of different things. You can just stretch it and go as far out as you want to -- or as far in."

Theater Alliance Season

The Theater Alliance will open its new season at the H Street Playhouse with Moises Kaufman's fact-based drama "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" (Aug. 18-Sept. 18). Artistic Director Jeremy Skidmore recently guest-directed the play at his alma mater, the North Carolina School of the Arts.