In case you haven’t heard, the Wooster Group’s blackface production of Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 drama The Emperor Jones, in which an African-American escaped killer runs a Caribbean island, is tearing up the Goodman Theatre this week as the kick-off of the O’Neill festival. And the fact that the titular character is played by a white woman has caused a predictably controversial stir (though, as is often the case in these situations, not among anybody who’s actually seen it).

Kate Valk’s masterful shuck-and-jive performance will be off-putting to anyone who can’t bear the conceit of a white actor mimicking black vernacular, and more offensive still to proper theater audiences who won’t dig the Wooster Group’s techno-fused production. But audiences willing to enter into it simply to watch an accomplished actor take on a historically important role will be stunned by it.

The Emperor Jones gets a bad rap for a number of reasons, including a very poor 1933 screen version starring Paul Robeson. After the dawn of the civil rights movement, the play was particularly stigmatized; O’Neill being considered a white son of relative American privilege, his Voodoo-voiced character became anathema to social progressives, who considered it as irresponsible a depiction of blacks as Amos ‘n’ Andy (the once-popular, Harlem-dwelling radio characters played by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who went on to become unfortunate symbols of back-of-the-bus race relations).

But Wooster Group’s approach to the play reveals the animalistic Brutus Jones is a wonderful character—were the play about a white guy in the exact same circumstances, Jimmy Cagney would have played him—and the watusi voice he speaks in is merely street language of the period. The play is actually a very close cousin to Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionistic play The Adding Machine—which, unlike O’Neill’s drama, is still regularly produced—about a similarly beat-down character who goes violently berserk. Both Brutus and Adding Machine’s Mr. Zero speak almost exclusively in mad rants that emote bottom-of-the-totem-pole rage.

What Valk’s performance, which sounds startlingly contemporary for a play almost a century old, does is reveal that The Emperor Jones is classic American hip-hop theater. And, given the angry backlash it sometimes garners (she’s been performing it for years), it’s contemporary hip-hop theater, also, even a near-century later.

But the other thing I left her performance thinking about was Fred Armisen’s Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live. I understand why critics were frustrated by the fact that Lorne Michaels didn’t have an actor of color or three in his stable who were ready to step directly into the part; lack of diversity is a problem the show has battled since its inception in 1975. (In the case of SNL, it’s not an affirmative action issue but a problem of equal-opportunity exploitation. It’s tough to adequately satirize the entire country when you only look like a select portion of it.)

But watching Valk display her astonishing technique, I was reminded that great performance artists are interested in playing every kind of character imaginable, in pushing their limits just to find out what their limits are. (Such artistic ambition was satirized to the hilt this summer by Tropic Thunder’s Robert Downey Jr., who also had the audacity—in blackface himself—to kick self-serious Australian actors in the groin.)

Like Valk, who plays Brutus Jones, Armisen also regularly bends gender to inhabit yentas like Penny Marshall and Joy Behar. And like Valk, who bases so much of her performance on the modulated rhythm of her character’s speech pattern, Armisen found his groove with Obama by recreating the slow/slow/rapid speed of Barack’s podium delivery style. (I understand why he and Michaels were criticized when their version of Obama first debuted, but that was before he’d built his muscles in the role. His Barack is now a confident, nuanced performance.)

Of course, unlike Valk, who uses pitch-black shoe polish in her routine, Armisen’s makeup is the color of creamy cappuccino foam (read any class-ascension metaphor you like into that). As long as actors exist, there will be artists who want to play characters far outside their personal boundaries, race included.

All we can hope is that they’re this good.