Kate Valk

New York performance troupe the Wooster Group—which spawned careers for Spalding Gray and Willem Defoe, among others—has always been in the controversial avant-garde. But few of its shows have caused the stir drummed up by the company’s famous staging of The Emperor Jones, Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 expressionistic play about an escaped con who takes over a Caribbean island. That’s because its titular character, a black man, is played by white woman Kate Valk. Her legendary performance gets revived this week in the Goodman Theatre’s O’Neill festival.

As a white woman, how do you approach playing Brutus Jones, a black man?
The voice of Brutus Jones is all there on the page for me. That character has been in my life since I was a girl: I saw a ballet version of The Emperor Jones, and I was just awestruck. And then Paul Robeson [who played Jones to acclaim on stage in 1924 and on screen in 1933]: He’s as big for me as Gertrude Stein, one of the people who shows that anything and everything is possible. The first performing I did with [Wooster Group cofounder] Liz [LeCompte] was a re-creation of [the black vaudeville] Pigmeat Markham routine, in blackface, dealing with minstrelsy. I’m usually careful to say it’s a black mask, because it’s not straight-up minstrelsy. For me, it was about passing, about passing for black.

It’s interesting how minstrelsy haunts performing arts. Think about Amos ’n’ Andy, which originated in Chicago: It was this enormously influential and popular thing, and now it’s as though it’s vanished, but not really.
I’ve read some about the history; I’m not a scholar. But there are some very interesting books about the history of minstrelsy. It really gives you an idea of the history of playing the other. [Minstrelsy is] something that’s been repressed. It’s like we closed the door on that, and that can’t happen, or it never happened, or it’s so horrifyingly bad you can’t look at it. But The Emperor Jones is something that we came to for the love of the character, the story, and Eugene O’Neill’s language. We didn’t do it because we had something over here we wanted to say about race. We did it because we had to.

What’s the process of rehearsing the piece?
For me, I have to get my Jones on, you know? The biggest thing for me is I’m playing a man. So I have to contact a certain kind of energy, which does not happen overnight. You might see me jogging in the freezing cold. I have to get a certain kind of almost athletic energy. It’s mostly vocally demanding, but I’m feeling pretty good.

For more on the festival, read "Long play journey."