By MAIDA CASTELLUN

The Provincetown Players have done it again.  Down at 133 Macdougall street in their dingy hall, with its stiff benches and its dim lights and its thick atmosphere, they are producing another chef ’d’oeuvre, Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.”  They are giving hundreds the most thrilling evening of their theatrical lives.  They are turning away dozens.  People squat on their coats on the hard and not immaculate floors, or sit cheerfully on radiators, or stand patiently for two hours while the tragedy of fear of a Negro porter and ex-convict, turned primitive man again, unfolds itself before the fascinated imagination.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!  Goes the drum of the Provincetown Players behind the scenes for a steady hour and a half, through eight scenes and seven intermissions, until the brain throbs to its monotonous beat and the world of reality is forgotten.  You see only Brutus Jones, who came as an escaped convict to “a West Indian island not yet self-determined by white marines,” as the author grimly describes it, and turned it into an empire by the power of arrogance and braggadocio.

Jones had learned the difference between mere stealing and high finance as a Pullman porter in the States, by listening to the rich white folds tell how to get money and power without getting into jail.  It was easy to practice his arts on the poor black trash, and he ruled and flourished and stowed away large sums for the day of wrath when he should be overturned.

So when he hears the monotonous sound of the tom-tom rousing his people into an orgy of frenzy against him, he starts off philosophically on the lonely march that is to take him to Martinique and the world beyond where wealth and freedom await him.  And then things begin to happen.  You see the disintegration of the Emperor Jones.  Through the dark night, the lonely forest, the fears and the terrors of his ancestors sweep over him.  The ghosts of those he has killed and other “hants” mock him.  He throws away the trappings of the Emperor to walk more easily, but he has thrown away the armor of civilization as well.  He becomes and abject creature, reverting to his ancestral life.  In his dreams he lives through his convict days, through the slavery of his fathers, and goes back to the life of his race on the Congo with Witch Doctor and Crocodile God exercising their spell.  He shoots away his precious bullets at the figments of his fears until, blindly returning to his starting place, he is shot by the native chief at dawn, a victim of something deeper and stronger than his acquired cleverness.

Absolutely nothing happens in the play except this.  Yet by his vivid imagination and relentless power the author casts his spell over even the most pedestrian listener.  Jones’ hallucinations and reversions to the primitive savage are depicted with the simplicity and directness of a master.  One thins of Poe and Conrad and H. De Vere Stacpoole’s story of Africa for anything to match this achievement.

The acting of the name part by Charles S. Gilpin is an extraordinary achievement.  The rich and varied tones of a voice that changes from boastful arrogance to whining, contrition, the variety and power of his performance are amazing.  The stage settings, too, are effective, and the beating of the tom-tom is hypnotic in its effect.  Altogether this is a rare and richly imaginative feast for lovers of true drama.  No one should miss it.