You may know Langston Hughes (1902-1967) as a poet, the author of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too, Sing of America," and "Theme for English B." These poems are quite famous. (Below is a link to Hughes reading "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," a poem that he wrote when he was seventeen!)You may also know Hughes from your freshman composition class. Many teachers assign Hughes' "Salvation," a piece from his autobiography, The Big Sea.
However, Hughes was also a playwright, and "Soul Gone Home" (1937) was one of his many efforts in this genre. Here is a link to an article about a recent performance of this play:
I'm surprised that there haven't been other revivals, but here is a review of an opera based on Hughes' play.
Ah, here is a review of a performance of the play at Purdue's Black Cultural Center:
A picture of this 2002 performance is below:
Hughes wrote a number of other plays and librettos for operas, and during the later part of his career, he became increasingly successful. Staging his plays could be frustrating, and he often had to fight for them. In 1930, he collaborated with Zora Neale Hurston on a play, Mule Bone, but their partnership fell apart. Ultimately, she claimed that the finished play was hers and hers alone. As a result, the theater company that had been planning on performing the play decided not to do so, and the play would not be staged until 1991, long after its authors' deaths.
A review of this play is below:
Written in 1930 and performed on Broadway in 1935, Mulatto was Hughes' first play.
Hughes' Black Nativity (first performed 1961) is probably his most famous play. You may even be able to see it next Christmas in DC!
This online exhibit at the University of Kansas gives an overview of Hughes' career as playwright and songwriter:For more of an overview of Hughes' career, see these links:
Above is a picture of the 2010 Broadway cast of Fences. You may notice Denzel Washington as Troy.
Every year the Smithsonian holds a folklife festival at the mall. It focuses on three different cultures and is a great opportunity to dabble in these cultures' music and foods. This year the featured cultures were African-American (with a focus on the oral tradition), Central & South American (with an emphasis on music), and Welsh.
Here are a few links to their YouTube videos:
As you can see from the map above, Wales is a part of Great Britain or the U.K.. The picture above the map shows that Wales can be a very picturesque and rural area. Of course, some of it is quite urban or suburban. We also learned from a member of the Centre for Alternative Technology that the Welsh have been very active in the environmental movement, keeping his organization going throughout the 1980s and 1990s to today.
If I were to put together an anthology of world literature, I would like to include one of August Wilson's plays from his Pittsburgh Cycle. In fact, if I teach EN 202HM again, I would assign one of these plays as the extra reading. I would be interested in seeing how Gem of the Ocean or Fences or Joe Turner's Come and Gone or even Radio Golf would work with our readings, both the African and African-American works as well as our plays.
I thought I'd blow off some of this blog's dust today and write about Bettina Judd's reading at MC. It's been good to read poems from other times and places ("The Ballad of Mulan" and so on), but I've always liked going to readings to hear what other people are writing NOW.
This photo from Syracuse Stage's 2007 production of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean is very striking, but I thought I'd put up some words this evening to go with it. Also, I'd like to find a few good pictures as well.
However, as Gem of the Ocean contains much magic realism, a museum-quality set might be inappropriate. After all, Citizen Barlow travels to the City of Bones in a paper boat made from Aunt Ester's bill of sale, and the play's most prosaic character, Caesar, is clearly an interloper.
