Ruling Off-Broadway

What a treat to end 2009 with the wit and imagination that’s been brought to the Irish Repertory’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, especially at the end of a year that was long on stars and safe revivals and short on creativity.

A transfer of this fall’s production of the 1920 play, Jones lives up to the hype that accompanied its earlier incarnation. The taut, short (just over an hour) play is almost a monologue for the actor playing Jones, an African-American man who escaped from prison in the U.S. and fled to a Caribbean island, where he convinces the natives that he’s their emperor, unkillable without a silver bullet. But when the natives get restless and turn rebellious, Jones sets out through the forest to retrieve the money he’s buried there on his way to escape.

Playing out like a stage adaptation of an episode of The Twilight Zone or one of those bizarre early 1930s tropical horror movies like White Zombie, The Emperor Jones is heavy on irony and expressionism. As Jones wanders through the forest, increasingly lost and frightened, his past rears up and confronts him from behind every tree. But the brilliant part of the Irish Rep’s take on the play is the utilization of macabre masks and puppets to recreate Jones’ increasingly surreal hallucinations.

Reminiscent of gaunt-faced Day of the Dead dolls, Bob Flanagan’s masks and puppets are legitimately ghoulish, whether they’re genteel southerners attending a slave auction or the ghosts of the men Jones has killed. Little wonder that John Douglas Thompson becomes believably unhinged as Jones is confronted with them over and over again.

Thompson is spellbinding throughout most of the show, but the play’s expository first scene between Jones and a cynical, scheming white man (Peter Cormican) offers little hint of the theatrical magic to come. As Jones, he seems to be convinced in that scene that bellowing is acting. Whether he’s supposed to be scared, angry or amused, Thompson roars out his dialogue, punctuating it with the teeth-flashing grin of an irascible movie pirate, interrupting his sentences with sudden gasps. Luckily, he and the play improve drastically once Jones heads into the woods.

Rarely do plays that utilize puppets and masks succeed as admirably as does The Emperor Jones. Director Ciarán O’Reilly deserves all the critical accolades coming to him for making O’Neill’s somewhat dated play about despots in power come to crackling life once again. The clashing theatricalism and realism of the play are seamless in this production; with just a shift in lighting and the rustle of the chorus members’ costumes, O’Reilly manages to evoke the dark recesses of a power-hungry man’s mind as he comes to terms with the life he’s led.

And those chorus members (helped by inventive choreography from Barry McNabb) do an excellent job of staying creepy rather than campy, even in their disco-reminiscent pantsuits. Whether they’re shaking as trees or manipulating the puppets, Michael Akil Davis, Jon Deliz, David Heron, Sameerah Harris and Sinclair Mitchell sear themselves into your memory, all the more impressively given that we never see their faces. They’re the apparitions in everyone’s nightmares, the faceless creatures taunting you as you try to find your way in the deepest part of the dark woods. That Jones never does is justice; that we get to go along for the wild and frightening ride is great theater.

>Emperor Jones Through Jan. 31, SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam St. (betw. 6th Ave. & Varick St.), 212-691-1555; $65.