The Political Plays of Langston Hughes by Susan Duffy (review)

Reviews 159 Conventional Ireatment also characterizes chapter 6, where the success of Arizona (1899) and The Virginian (1904) serves as prologue to discussions of The Squaw Man, The Girl ofthe Golden West, The Great Divide, The Three of Us, and The Rose of the Rancho, "the only dramas by American-born authors to enjoy runs of more than two hundred performances in 1905 and 1906" (226). "Dominance" achieved, the survey ends (though frontier plays continued to be produced). In the brief summary that ends the text of the book (endnotes and a welcome bibliography follow), Hall states that frontier dramas were geared "to reinforce [an audience's] own sense of righteousness and destiny" (228). In a similar vein, Hall cites a 1997 article by David Radavich maintaining that the Western narrative is "s one-dimensional tale of 'colonizing, taming, and settling' with no connection to serious issues,"and that, in sum, "'the myth of the frontier can be regarded as inherently and insistently undramatic'" (qtd. in Hall 228). In order to draw conclusions like these, one must ignore several excellent recent studies of frontier entertainments - for example, L.G. Moses's Wi/d West Shows and the Image ofAmerican Indians, 1883-1933 (1996), Philip Deloria's Playing Indian (1998), and Joy S. Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wi/dWest: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000) - that make clear that the performative exchange is never that simple. Given Hall's passion for his subject and his skillful recovery of its history, these assessments are disappointing and surprisingly disparaging. Clearly, the evolutionary success narrative - from "[re]emergence"lo "dominance" - imprisons the frontier subject in an outworn tale that has been under deconstruction for some time, a tale which robs the material Hall has painstakingly uncovered of the cultural scrutiny that race, frontier, and nation in the U.S. in the nineteenth century demand. That said, Hall 's book is unquestionably the best survey of its subject. It recovers the texts, productions, and careers of the purveyers of frontier plays and shows in the United States in the latter nineteenth century, identifies and analyzes frontier plots and characters, and assays their receptions by audiences, reviewers, and other contemporaries. In accomplishing these, Hall achieves better than half of the interpretive possibilities detailed in his introduction. No scholar can now move on to what Performing the American Frontier has left unsaid without acknowledging a considerable debt to what it has articulated. SUSAN DUFFY. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. Carbondale, IL: Southern JIlinois Press, 2000. Pp. 221. $39.95 (Hb); $16.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Joseph McLaren, Hofstra University With the 2002 centennial of Langston Hughes's birth, his legacy and reputation have been heralded, and it is important that his dramatic works be included in 160 REVIEWS such acknowledgments. Devoted to Hughes's little known 1930S "political" plays, this anthology is also a critical work, in that each of the four plays included is preceded by an analytical essay or brief introduction. Though Hughes wrote a host of plays in various styles and genres, from agitprop to comedies to tragedies and musicals, the small number covered in this text are Scottsboro Limited, Harvest, Angelo Herndon JOlles, and De Organizer, a blues opera written in collaboration with James P. Johnson. This selection of Hughes's plays focuses on labor themes and leftist issues of the 1930s. Duffy's overall introduction places Hughes within the context of the political left, but also raises questions about his commitment to an ideological position and the possibility that he used the left as a way of sustaining his literary career. Because Hughes was associated, for example, with the John Reed Club and the League of Sttuggle for Negro Rights and journeyed to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, he was considered by the FBI as a writer to be monitored (his later ordeal before the McCarthy Committee in the 1950S dramatized the dilemmas of his acknowledging an association with the left). Hughes's friendship with cenain individuals, as well as his poetic works, published in such periodicals as New Masses and the Daily Worker, also contributed to his image as a radical writer, though he never joined the Communist...