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his own self-identity, Gilpin overpowers the original text in just such a way that he self-consciously fashions his own identity as an actor even as he refashions Brutus Jones’ into a character of his own making. And in this self-conscious appropriation, the production of the play tips over into an explicitly self-conscious and self-correcting endeavor that highlights the constructed nature of text, performance, and even character.
Norman proceeds to track this potential in The Emperor Jones to tip over into the postmodern into the present, describing how the Wooster group reinvented the play with “Kate Valk play[ing] Brutus Jones in Blackface in 1993 and 2006” (88 in this volume), in a production that “not only calls attention to theatrical representations of race” (86 in this volume) but also “calls attention to the impossibility of subverting a historical text more than momentarily by privileging O’Neill’s language and title” (103 in this volume). In turn, Norman makes clear the way in which a single play can tip over into revealing its constructed nature, only to tip away again once a particular theatrical run has been completed. We can, then, add actors to that list of items “equally visible to the audience and (if they are permitted to recognize it) the characters.” Looked at one way, Brutus Jones is simply a character fulfilling his part in a realist narrative. Look again, and he is obviously an actor’s construct. Look again, and all you see is the character.
Teresa Requena PelegrÍ sees Gertrude Stein as one of the earliest thoroughly postmodern playwrights and as embodying many of those same characteristics that Patricia Waugh would eventually find to be definitive of postmodernism: