"From stowaway to emperor in two years—that's going some!" he bellows to Smithers (Michael Ruiz), his seedy white lieutenant. With boundless braggadocio, Jones creates his own mythology, claiming he can only be killed by a silver bullet. He lives luxuriously by levying huge taxes. Pumped with power and inflamed by ego, he's a tin-pot Idi Amin.
But when the natives revolt, Jones goes on the run through the forest and starts spiraling toward madness. First he's plagued by his sordid past, seeing the man he murdered in a craps game. Then his visions grow increasingly terrifying, plunging him into the black history and consciousness he's callously dismissed. In powerful vignettes, he goes from king to property at a slave auction, struggles with invisible shackles on a chain gang and cowers before a black witch doctor in a frenzied dance of African pride, thinking he's about to be made a ritual sacrifice to an alligator. Wild-eyed and firing his pistol at his apparitions in escalating panic, his uniform reduced to ratty rags as he stumbles through the darkness, Jones devolves into a sweaty, fear-riddled shell of his former self. Finally, he is captured by the islanders and killed by those silver bullets, metaphors for unchecked greed and racial denial.
Credit CCSN for attempting a rarely performed play with a provocative racial premise that it explores largely through abstractions. Plus, director Sarah O'Connell had to cope with a double setback, replacing actors for the roles of Jones and Smithers, who have nearly all of the dialogue. And though there's a vague sense of apprehension hanging over this production—the hallucinations feel too rote to be as riveting as written—it remains upright via O'Connell's atmospheric staging and the work of Hennington and a competent supporting cast.
An actor whose physical girth makes up for the intimidation his portrayal doesn't quite capture, Hennington does reveal the emperor's preening arrogance, galloping self-importance and gleeful disregard of his own cruelty. In a uniform festooned with medals, and caressing a pistol, he's the high-school bully as despot, but, more critically, he effectively illustrates Jones' utter disintegration. Right through the moment his bedraggled body—uniform stripped away, torn undershirt smeared with mud—is dragged to his former throne by the natives, his collapse is complete. Ruiz is believable as the henchman executing Jones' harsh laws while regarding the emperor with sneering insolence—and who may be a collaborator in his downfall. And with her voodoo vibe and shrill trills as the totem of island tradition, Sara Michelle Norton's priestess symbolizes the heritage Jones can't escape.
O'Connell creates a foreboding island aura in a small space with the less-is-more concept: dry-ice fog effects; a simple array of stones, boulders and ridged, palm tree-style columns carried on and off by tribeswomen performing native chants; and a primitive riser, behind a block of seats, where a tribesman bangs out the steady tom-tom beat that haunts Jones throughout his hellish journey.
Despite the play's age and the production's limitations, this Emperor is still a king-size allegory.