The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (review)

Many of the major Harlem Renaissance poets and fiction writers tried their hands at play writing at least once. Whether as collaborators or single authors, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer wrote plays, most of which were neither performed nor published during the earlier period. Of this group, Langston Hughes developed the largest body of work, bringing to his scripts several of the innovations that mark his earliest poetry.

The Political Plays of Langston Hughes introduces to the current public four of Hughes's populist plays written during the 1930s. Most of these plays were performed, but none were published. Echoing Hughes's radical poems of the same period, the plays are sharply focused on class conflict in both rural and urban settings. Working-class African Americans, Chicanos, and whites come to realize, even if slowly, a common and materially comfortable enemy. As such, these works coexist easily with Wright's contemporaneous stories in Uncle Tom's Children and his manifesto for African American writers, "Blueprint for Negro Writers." It is in this terrain that we trace a major turn from the characteristic tones and themes of works in the 1920s.

One issue Duffy addresses is how these new plays work effectively as statement and what new insights emerge from Hughes's wedding of creative literature to Marxist ideology. Duffy relies on new historicism—focusing on rhetorical discourse in the context of history—to argue that the plays offer a new look at "American labor and organizing efforts." Duffy attempts to gauge the effects of agitprop theater devices on audiences, suggesting that Hughes employs such techniques as using "plants" in the audiences. Readers will note how labor theater foreshadows the conflicts and the confrontational style of one-act plays during the Black Arts movement. Yet Hughes's plays do not work consistently or effectively as dramatic statements, and in the commentary Duffy wisely refuses to make the claim. Their importance is historical.

A talent as restless as Hughes's would break new ground, however, no matter what the form. Da Organizer is shaped as a rousing one-act opera, exhorting unorganized workers (and the audience) to struggle for humane treatment and fair wages. Harvest introduces a California melting pot and a clear call to class unity. This play is also an attempt by Hughes to break "the old frame of the proscenium."

This volume will be useful to the Hughes student and those exploring the labor plays of the 1930s. Although the introduction to the volume deserves tighter editing, Duffy provides useful and concise prefaces to the four plays.