In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Research in African Literatures 31.3 (2000) 198-201



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-1943


Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-1943, by Joseph McLaren. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997.

At a time when Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures were leading the assault on the image of Black humanity, Langston Hughes attempted to use drama to interpret the failure of American society to live up to its creed. The odds against which Black dramatists like Hughes created alternative images of Black people, and the negative stereotypes that they had to overcome, exacted a heavy price upon the psychological condition of Black people in general. In particular, the toll on the psyche of Black creative intellectuals has had serious repercussions for the course of Black theater in the United States.

In chapter one of his book, McLaren's contextualization of Hughes's theatrical contribution, especially the Black theater community's reception of the controversial play Mule Bone, reminds me of Harold Cruse's disappointment in joining a Black theater group only to find that its "members were overwhelmingly in favor of doing white plays with Negro casts" (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual [New York: Morrow, 1967]: 3). In addition to the controversy surrounding its authorship (the play was a collaborative project with Zora Neale Hurston) the dialogue of Mule Bone gave rise to the ever present uneasiness and contempt that the Black middle class has had for the rural working-class vernacular of Black southerners.

In the 1920s and '30s, the restoration of vernacular speech by creative artists like Zora Neale Hurston and George W. Henderson competed with established stereotypes and linguistic stigmas identified with creative work of T. D. Rice, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and others already mentioned. The sophisticated urban dweller, or "the New Negro," was coming into being and was replacing the naive, rural migrant personality depicted in pieces like Rudolph Fisher's The City Of Refuge. Attitudes towards Black vernacular die hard. Citing an observation made by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., McLaren's account of critical reactions to the 1991 production of Mule Bone at the Ethel Barrymore Theater makes this point quite well: "For Gates, the 'image' dilemma persists for a number of reasons [. . .] many blacks still seem to believe that the images of themselves projected on television, film and stage must be policed and [End Page 198] monitored from within. Such convictions are difficult--even painful--to change. And never more so than in the case of 'Mule Bone'" (21). According to McLaren, Gates suggests that the difficulty in accepting Mule Bone's 1920s images is a direct result of Black theater-goers' continuing discomfort with rural speech (21).

McLaren asserts that "[a]lthough Hurston is primarily responsible for the language of Eatonville folk in Mule Bone, Hughes shared her interest in folk expression as a valid and authentic way to represent black characters. [. . .]Hughes recognized that as a playwright he would create folk characters of both the rural South and the urban North who would be authentic only if they were portrayed as speakers of vernacular" (28-29).

Clearly Hughes identified with the working class in his choice of expressive language and his plays were inevitably centered upon issues close to this population. Scottsboro Limited (1931), Blood on the Fields (1934), and Angelo Herndon Jones (1936), which McLaren examines in the second chapter, represent Hughes's concern for current events that exemplified the miscarriages of Southern justice and the injustice done to Black working-class people. The central themes of these plays are racism, labor activism, and classism, as McLaren points out, the kind of subject matter that identified Hughes with the Left.

In chapter three McLaren discusses Hughes's most successful play, Mulatto, the longest-running play on Broadway by an African-American before Lorrain Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun. In this chapter McLaren is concerned about Hughes's enactment of the tragic mode...

pdf

Share