A man with "typically negroid " features , as indicated in the didascalia of character description, Jones is indeed reduced to a "type" (O'Ne ill 8). ...in spite of his attempt to depart from mins trels y-"one of the few truly indigenous American entertainments"-by giving center stage to a Black p rotagonist performed by a blac k actor, O'Neill parado xically fell back on some of the stereotypes which were conveyed in mins trel s hows (Banham 682). ...if Jones lost power at the end of both O'Neill's text and of The Woos ter Group's production, the actress embodying him in Le Co mpte's work recovered her dignity, contrary to the stripped Charles Gilp in. According to Philip Auslander, this deconstructive purpos e typifies "postmodernis t politica l theatre" that is a "theatre of resistance that 'investigates the processes which control g iven representations' through the examination of iconography and the effects of mediat ization on political imagings" (104). Demastes's collection was published in 1996, that is three years after the first production of The Emperor Jones by The Woost er Group. 5 The show has been made available on DVD by The Woost er Group, who sells i t in their on-line shop. Besides the revivals of the show, the marketing of this by -product also proves that The Emperor Jones was a great success. 6 The Wooster Group is not only introduced as "post dramat ic" or "postmodern" t heat er in Lehman's seminal Postdramatic Theatre (1999), but also in Johannes H. Birringer's Theatre, Theatre, Postmodernism (1991), Kerst in Schmidt's The Theatre of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (2005), Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelso n's Mapping Intermediality in Perform ance (2010), Nicola Shaughnessy's Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (2012), Maggie B. Gale and John F. Deeney's The Routledge Drama An thology and Sourceb oo k. From Mod ern ism to Contem porary Perfo rma nce (2012), to n ame just a few. 7 In the 2009 production under study, the part of Smithers is played by Ari Fliakos and that of the St age Assist ant by Scott Shepherd. 8 I refer to Smithers as t he "narrat ive cat alyst " of the play because it is his narrat ion of the islanders' rebellion that initiates Jones's journey into the forest. 9 In a note to her article " 'Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds': Cross-Dressing, Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones," Aoife Monks explains: