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Like “The Emperor Jones,” “The Hairy Ape,” which premièred in 1922, is one of O’Neill’s more directly political plays.

About midway through the 1933 film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” the black leader of an unnamed Caribbean island orders his guards to shoot a fugitive named Brutus Jones, played by Paul Robeson.

Adding to the sense of coming full circle: the set of “Early Plays” is the same design as for O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” the production he observed in 1994 as a newcomer to New York.