The Emperor Jones

Eugene O’Neill is considered to be the quintessential modernist American playwright, and this play reflects the immense skill and craftsmanship he possessed even at the start of his professional writing career. The Emperor Jones helped establish O’Neill’s status as a major figure in American theater. The play is delicately structured: Scenes 1 and 8 frame the narrative— only in these two scenes do characters speak other than Jones—while Scenes 2 through 7 consist almost entirely of a single-character interior monologue. All of O’Neill’s character dialogue is written in various forms of dialect, reflecting each character's background, current status, and inner psychology.