Charles Sidney Gilpin in the original Broadway run
November 1, 1920: Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones premieres at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. It is one of the earliest successful American plays with a black lead character, played by Charles Sidney Gilpin. It is O'Neill’s 1st hit, and runs for 207 performances.
It tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African-American, a former Pullman porter who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts Brutus' story in flashbacks, as he makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
O’Neill revived the show in 1925, but Gilpin refused to appear, because O'Neill had insisted upon keeping the N-word in the script. So he hired singer, lawyer and former football player Paul Robeson. Gilpin never recovered from this slight, and drank himself to death in 1930, only 51 years old.
In 1933, O'Neill's friend Dudley Murphy directed a film version, starring Robeson. This remains the only film of it. In 1955, Ossie Davis starred in the 1st TV version, for Kraft Television Theatre on NBC. The racial language has made further adaptations problematic.
The Provincetown Playhouse still stands, at 133 Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, and is run by the theater program at New York University (NYU).
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November 1, 1920 was a Monday. There were 2 other reasons that this was a big day in the history of writing. William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming -- "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" -- was published. I have a separate entry for that event. And conservative newspaper columnist James J. Kilpatrick was born.
Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And the NHL season didn't start until December 22. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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