The Emperor Jones
Directed by Akiba Abaka

Cast
Narrator ... Will Lyman*
Smithers ... Will Lebow*

CAST BIOS

Akiba Abaka

Akiba Abaka is a director, actor, playwright, dramaturge and producer. In 2000 she founded and currently helms Up You Mighty Race Company, a professional theatre company dedicated to the research, preservation, and advancement of black heritage and culture. She is currently the In-Resident dramaturge at the Citi Center for the Performing Arts, and plays the title role of Harriet Tubman in the national tour of Are You Ready My Sister for Underground Railway Company. Directing credits include: Dreams of My Ancestors, The Drinking Gourd, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Patience of Nantucket, 409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill and In The Continuum. Ms. Abaka is the recipient of the 2008 IRNE Award for Best Director for her production of In The Continuum and an Elliot Norton Award nomination for the same. She is honored to be invited to participate once more in the American Voices staged reading series with Commonwealth Shakespeare company. Previously she served as the assistant director to Steve Maler for the American Voices presentation of A Raisin In The Sun. She dedicates this performance to the people of Haiti.

SYNOPSIS

A former Pullman Porter, Brutus Jones is an African American who winds up on "an island in the West Indies not yet self-determined by white Marines." Within two years he successfully crowns himself Emperor and oppresses the natives with unnecessary taxes and arbitrary laws. The endeavor makes rich men of him and his British cohort Smithers. Yet all is not well on this island in the sun. Despite warning the natives that only a silver bullet and his own hands can kill him, the natives run to the hills to plot the Emperor’s demise. Brutus Jones is made aware of his impending end by his conniving sidekick Smithers, the cockney trader who colors the Emperor's mind with visions of his past transgressions before ushering him off to sojourn through the forest.

With confidence the cunning Emperor accepts his situation and calls his reign a draw. He runs to the hills hoping to make it to the other side of the palm tree dense forest and board a French gunboat to freedom. At the edge of the forest he embarks on a psychological odyssey where "Little Formless Fears" and successive apparitions lead him from his past sins to a primordial Africa. With every encounter the Emperor is stripped mentally and physically until he resembles the natives whom he so passionately despises. As the Tom Tom drums play the soundtrack to his death, the Emperor Jones lives and dies in the psyche of Smithers and the natives whose land he once possessed.

Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, best known for its free summer Shakespeare performances on Boston Common, is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to bringing the works of William Shakespeare in vital and contemporary productions to the people of Boston. CSC was founded in 1996 by Steven Maler, who has directed all of its productions.