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Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones's Production of Langston Hughes's Mulatto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Jay Plum
Jay Plum
Affiliation:
Jay Plum is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate School, and University Center.
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Extract

Although Langston Hughes's Mulatto holds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case of Mulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto is melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying that Mulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 5 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1995

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References

ENDNOTES

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