ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

of the play to connect with African American audiences with intrinsically defined artistic
expectations. Though Chesse’s production is ultimately a fiction of blackness, it gestures
toward an imagined, albeit imaged by Eugene O’Neil and interpreted by Chesse’,
authenticity as previous productions with blackface characters had not. He chose a live
black actor as a template for the object, incorporated a reading of “The Congo,” a
folkloric poem by populist poet Vachael Lindsay, and applied his usual meticulous
artistic strokes to this short play. Chesse’s Emperor Jones suggests that high artistic
principles draw theatre makers toward sincere portraits of race, as they drive them away
from the grotesque fantasies of more commonplace art.
Chesse’ chose to base his Brutus Jones puppet, his representation of the lead
character in O’Neill’s drama, on the living African American actor Charles Gilpin.
Chesse’ observed Gilpin playing Brutus in a 1926 performance. According to the
puppeteer, Gilpin’s performance and the play, “impressed [him] with its exciting
dramatic climaxes that built gradually toward a powerfully suspenseful finale.” 267 Gilpin,
a co-founder of the Lafayette Players, won the NAACP Spingarn Medal for his
performance in Emperor Jones. The choice of Gilpin was somewhat obvious and the
practice of basing puppets on real black actors began with Frank Paris, a year before
Chesse’s constructed his first Brutus marionette (1929). Yet the artist’s decision to base
his object on someone who was both a respected African American actor and an
individual lauded by a national organization concerned with African American equality,
places his artistic practices in closer proximity to living black Americans than previous
examples covered in this study (see figure 50).
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