ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

lecture them on appropriate behavior in the stagehouse. Reportedly, the reprimand did
not diminish their outbursts. 271 The African American educator and playwright,
Randolph Edmunds, also reported a disastrous evening, calling it “disgusting as well as
pitiable.” 272
The exact cause of the Lincoln Theater flop is debatable. Many scholars ascribe it
to an ultimately negative depiction of black leadership and tribal superstition. According
to E. Quita Craig:
It is obvious that [Jones] has a high degree of intelligence common to con artists.
When he is threatened with revolt and revenge for his misdeeds, however, the
Emperor takes refuge in the woods and here his intelligence is gradually
conquered by superstitious fears. Undoubtedly O’Neill [sic] dramatizes the
power of superstition spectacularly. Jones’ [sic] sins and superstitions join forces,
are magnified by the subversive insistence of voodoo drums that mount steadily to
a crescendo, and close in on him in the shadowy darkness. Jones is unable even
to find the caches he had hidden, for just such an emergency, and is ultimately
reduced to stark terror. But the effects of Jones’s African religious heritagewhich
are precisely what O’Neill was attempting to dramatize-are all negative.
Although this heritage is central to the dramatization it is completely shorn of its
positive, all-powerful, life-giving force-the force vitale, and there is no sustaining
strength whatever in it for the man who made himself emperor […] Jones is
robbed of all human dignity and crawls to his death, like a worm, writhing on his
belly in the dust. While the play was considered to be an artistic success, which it
undoubtedly was, as black drama it was a failure. 273
For Craig, the failure of the production was a direct result of faults in the drama. Rena
Fraden is less sure, noting that verbal outbursts were a staple of the Lincoln Theater.
Fraden discusses black middle-class critics who complained about lower class black
271 Ibid., 259.
272
Qtd. in: Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148.
273 E. Quita Craig, Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era: Beyond the Formal Horizons
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1980), 43-44
219