ABSTRACT
As the curtain rose on the stage of the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro on May 8, 1945, for the opening of the Teatro Experimental do Negro’s fi rst full-length production the streets of Rio were exploding with the celebration of V-E Day. Unlike the carnivalesque scene unfolding outside the theater, where the rhythms of the Afro-Brazilian music of samba reenacted the pre-Lenten carnival festival, the mood inside the Teatro Municipal was somber and even confrontational. Rather than choose a Brazilian author who might have celebrated the congenial race-mixing that Brazil reputedly maintained in the 1940s, the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN) chose Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones for its debut. The play had premiered in 1920 in New York City, with Charles Gilpin in the leading role, and was captured in celluloid with the 1933 fi lm starring Paul Robeson. The tortured devolution of a Pullman porter would seem to have little to do with the situation of the black man in Brazil. However, in choosing this play TEN showed at its inception an awareness of transnational connections among blacks in the diaspora and affi rmed the congruency of their material and psychic conditions.
