A rave in the New York Times about Kate Valk and the Wooster Group’s "Emperor Jones"at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

A performance of much more recent vintage has inspired similar
effusions among a certain subset of New York theatergoers. Mingling at
an art opening or lounging in a club on the Lower East Side, some among
you may have been subjected to a harangue, delivered through a smug fog
of cigarette smoke, on the strange glory of Kate Valk in the Wooster
Group’s acclaimed production of "The Emperor Jones," in the latter days
of the last century.

Alas for these downtown hipsters and their
velvet ropes, this performance has not conveniently retreated into the
V.I.P. room of theater legend, never to re-emerge. The Wooster Group
production of "Emperor Jones" is back onstage at St. Ann’s Warehouse in
Brooklyn, and there, at its center, is Ms. Valk again, riveting,
haunting, altogether astonishing.

She is attired in
tatterdemalion regalia befitting a legend-in-the-making, in a
voluminous garment that resembles a cheapo king’s costume arrested in
the process of swallowing a kimono. But the oddity of this ensemble may
take a while to register, since the most arresting aspect of Ms. Valk’s
aspect is the thick, oily black makeup covering her entire face. The
petite, Caucasian, obviously female Ms. Valk is playing the title role,
Brutus Jones, a venal black train porter turned despot, in O’Neill’s
hypnotic play about the destructive impact of history on the shaping of
personality. And she is playing it in blackface.