Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays

Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (MELA)

by Jean Lee Cole (Editor), Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Mitchell

Though she died penniless and forgotten, Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in African American literature. Best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she also published numerous short stories and essays, three other novels, and two books on black folklore.

            Even avid readers of Hurston’s prose, however, may be surprised to know that she was also a serious and ambitious playwright throughout her career. Although several of her plays were produced during her lifetime—and some to public acclaim—they have languished in obscurity for years. Even now, most critics and historians gloss over these texts, treating them as supplementary material for understanding her novels. Yet, Hurston’s dramatic works stand on their own merits and independently of her fiction.

            Now, eleven of these forgotten dramatic writings are being published together for the first time in this carefully edited and annotated volume. Filled with lively characters, vibrant images of rural and city life, biblical and folk tales, voodoo, and, most importantly, the blues, readers will discover a “real Negro theater” that embraces all the richness of black life.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, African American

389 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection contains 11 plays by Zora Neale Hurston spanning over three decades. Some of the plays were ok to me, others were really good like "Color Struck", "De Turkey and De Law", "Spunk", and "Polk County". If you have read any of Zora's collected folklore then you will notice that there are iterations of it used throughout the different plays, especially the work songs. These plays show the range of topics/genres she covered during her life (colorism, comedy, Biblical stories, dramas, etc.), it mirrors what she displayed in her other writings.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zora Neale Hurston takes us on a journey into the Jim Crow South in her plays. I have been a big fan of August Wilson for several years now. I had heard that he was indebted to Hurston for her groundbreaking work writing the dialect of Black folk authentically and valuing the unmatched richness of Black English. I now see just how vast that debt was. I had not known previously that she had written plays. Their publication is a great service to the literary heritage of humanity.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of fourteen plays written between 1925 and 1944, including all of Hurston's plays except her collaboration with Langston Hughes. It's a very uneven collection; most of them are more in the nature of variety shows, with a minimum of actual plot, the earliest ones mainly commercial, the later ones with the purpose of presenting her collected folksongs, dances, and folktales in a dramatic fashion. The four that are most like real plays are De Turkey and de Law (1930), based on one of her stories and growing out of her controversial collaboration with Hughes; The Fiery Chariot (1932), which foreshadows her novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain; Spunk (1935), also based on one of her stories; and Polk County (1944) which is based on her visit to a sawmill community to do collecting -- this is the one which is most likely to continue to be performed.