Selling Blackness in the 1930's: Comparing Audience Responses to Hughes' Mulatto and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess

Literary Criticism

Against the backdrop of the social-conscious 1930s, African American theater flourished. As Langston Hughes describes it, "Every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by an all Negro cast. . . . It was the period when the Negro was in vogue" (qtd. Watts 502). With his 1935 play Mulatto and its record-breaking run of 373 performances on Broadway (the only African American authored play with a longer run was Raisin in the Sun in the 1950s), Hughes knew this success first-hand. Yet, despite Mulatto's commercial success, critics of the era considered the play a failure, a view that stands in stark contrast to its contemporary reputation of being one of the first great African American plays. The lack of critical acclaim for Mulatto during the era is even more problematic when compared to the critical acclaim attached to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which, by offering a more submissive and stereotypical view of African American culture, earned its reputation as the first true "American opera" ("Porgy and Bess" 8). Despite the progressive atmosphere of the era, the disparity between the reactions to these plays reveals that America's stereotyped notions of blackness and resistance to racial progress contributed to an almost universal misunderstanding of Hughes' message. Even more disturbing is that both Hughes' and Gershwin's plays evidence the social and economic needs for commercial black theater to ironically reinforce the very stereotypes and social conventions that Hughes and other African American authors sought to overthrow.

Indisputably, African Americans of the era made amazing progress in theater. For example, a 1935 W.P.A. sponsored all-Negro production of MacBeth transposed to a Carribean setting was very well received. Roi Ottley praised the production for placing African American actors in talent-demanding roles, refuting producers and directors who felt that since African Americans could only play stereotyped African American roles, they "had no need of real direction or training" (Ottley 24). Meanwhile, Langston Hughes' Green Pastures, produced a year earlier (but written after) Mulatto, was the first play to allow for a "Negro night" in the same theatre. The all-black cast of Porgy and Bess received so much attention and praise that its producers gave in to its demands to permit an integrated crowd, a first on Broadway ("Theatre News" 326). Still, the reception of African Americans was problematic. For example, Ottley cites the following review by Arthur Polluck as the "high point" of an abundance of positive reviews for the MacBeth production: "They play Shakespeare as if they were apt children who had just discovered him and adored the old man" (qtd. Ottley 24). The reviewer's characterization of African American artists as children emphasizes the public's general inability to understand the emerging African American theater as serious drama.

This is not to say that all critics of the era were influenced by such stereotypes. Herbert Kline, writing for the extremely progressive New Theatre, attacks the public's trend to reduce African America to generalization. In regards to the results of a contest the magazine sponsored to write an African American drama, he wrote:

The most appalling and discouraging facts about these plays were the confusion, ignorance and inexpertiseness of the playwrights, most of them whites whose lack of knowledge of Negro life leads them on the one hand into an unconsciously chauvinistic presentation of what they evidently regard as the admirable 'pecularities' of the Negro and on the other hand into a "lily white" type of idealization that most Negroes would object to as dehumanizing. (Kline 27)

Emphasizing his belief that "there are a thousand and one themes related to Negro life that are literally crying out for dramatization," Kline expressed a hope that "the main impetus and force making for a vital Negro drama will come from Negroes themselves" (27). Mulatto, an exposé on African American life in the deep South, offered the perfect example of this force.

Certainly, the play delivers on this promise to a modern audience. However, reviewers contemporary to Hughes found themselves unable to sympathize for the plight of the black characters in the play, and thus failed to recognize the play's social relevance. The review in Theatre Arts Monthly proclaimed, "More, too, might have been expected of Mulatto. . . . What destroys its effectiveness is Mr. Hughes' weak, amateurish writing, and the unvarnished fact that the Negro protagonist is as ingrate and obnoxious as the villainous whites believe" ("Reviews of New Plays" 902). Similarly, the Stage also found itself uncertain of who to sympathize for: "In spite of some fine moments, its sympathies get all mixed up. You're liable to find yourself on the side of the whites if you're not careful" (April 1936). Indeed, as Plum notes, many reviewers "portrayed [the] relationship [between Norwood and Robert] as one between a caring father and his ungrateful son" (Plum 11). Such a reading would be impossible today, yet the radicalness of Robert's ideas, and his attempt to pass himself off as equal to the whites in the play obviously went too far beyond the era's expected social norm in acceptable black progress discourse. Because Robert indicts all whites as inherently racist, the audience quickly turns against Robert. And because of its tendency to generalize blacks, it assumes that Hughes' intends Robert to represent all of African America. Thus, the audience misses the subtle layers of racism, such as black against black, that Hughes exposes through Robert. Unfortunately, in the minds of these audiences, Robert's insubordinance quickly transforms him from protagonist to antagonist, while Norwood gains their sympathy. As James J. Gentry observed, Norwood's misfortune and eventual murder "preached to the whites in the audience—whether the author intended it or not—the woes that w[ould] befall any white person who harbor[ed] caste-breaking notions and attempt[ed] to carry them out" (qtd. Plum 12).

The audience's response suffered immensely from a one-sided interpretation of the play; that is, it assumed that Hughes' message would be simple and obvious, as was the tendency with most of the popular social playwrights of the era. Thus, while the play is brilliant in its development of sub-plots within the South's racial problems, such as black racism against other blacks, Uncle Tomism, and the ability of the racial prejudice to ironically destroy the white institutions that create it, most reviewers were unwilling to delve into the complexity of these issues. The Stage's first review of the play notes, "An outstanding Negro writer's treatise on the race question in the South. Peculiarly it misses fire because Mr. Hughes takes no stand one way or the other" (Dec 1935). Obviously, this is not the case, as Hughes clearly intends the play as an indictment against racial institutions in the South. But the fact that Hughes intends the audience to see both Norwood and Robert as tragic victims of these institutions confused reviewers of the era. As Plum notes, "Most white reviewers ignored the intended tragic reading" (Plum 10).

The blame for such one-sidedness rests in none other than the one-sidedness of the racial discourse of the era. This discourse preached that whites should admit that blacks were indeed victims, but resisted change by insisting that such victimization occurred outside of the dominant group's sphere of influence. That is, whites were willing to acknowledge that African Americans were victimized by a small group of whites in the South, but were unwilling to acknowledge that all parties in the South were victimized by a more universal racial discourse. In other words, the audience could accept that Norwood—representative of one segment of the white population—could be evil. But when Hughes turns the table and presents the entire white population of the town (and therefore of America) as the party responsible for marginalizing both Norwood and Robert, it is unable to accept responsibility. Thus, the audience seeks a different explanation, and in so doing, turns Robert into the plays antagonist. This transformation becomes easier when one considers that Robert, as a strong and violent character, represented an undesirable response to the racial problem. As with Norwood, the audience's ideology permits sympathy for and even patronage of the other black characters in the play. But Robert threatens the white power structure, and thus Norwood and the audience are less willing to sympathize for Robert. By expressing his own equality, and ultimately, potential to exert power over Norwood, Robert moves out of a comfortable but ultimately perpetuating discourse of victimization, and thus becomes antagonist to the predominant ideology of the audience.

Robert Garland, quoted by Plum, hints at another example of one-sidedness in white responses to the play, saying that as "An attempt to dramatize an inferiority complex which is perhaps unconscious, Mulatto is untimely [and] uncalled for" (qtd. 11). But what Garland considers an "inferiority complex" is actually the audience's self-defense mechanism to refute Hughes' exposure of the disparity in opportunities available to African Americans, even when they are educated and, as do Sally and Robert, manifest a certain degree of outward whiteness. In such manner, the audience not only denies the existence of racial discrimination, but internally justifies it by blaming its outward evidence on internal defects.

Hughes' intended message is uncomfortable for white audiences not only because it indicts them, but because it identifies a much more complicated threat, and therefore the need for a much more complicated solution to the racial problem. This threat is none other than nihilism. By nihilism, I refer to Cornel West's identification of the absence of meaning and identity in black culture. West observes, "The major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather a nihilistic threat—that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning" (23). Robert, who finds himself a member of neither white nor black culture, and furthermore, without a father and by extension family, epitomizes this nihilism. Norwood correctly observes of Robert, "You don't like your own race? Yet you don't like white folks either" (Hughes 518). Robert's murder-suicide at the end, meanwhile, falls in line with what West considers the "frightening result" of this nihilism: "a numbing detachment from others and self-destructive disposition toward the world" (23). In fact, the suicide seems even more detached, because Robert chooses not to fight the mob and participate in its ritual of execution, but rather to retire to an almost nihilistic slumber. Immediately before walking up to his room to shoot himself, he comments "Goodnight, ma. I'm awful tired of running, ma. They been chasing me for hours" (Hughes 524). Interestingly enough, since the logistics of the mob's chase forces Robert to choose between this nihilistic end or participating in the ritual, the play suggests that white institutions are responsible for this nihilism.

Mulatto also clearly supports West's notion that "nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care" (29). Both Norwood and Robert believe that discussion is the way to confront the problem (Hughes 517). But this need to discuss or analyze the problem hides the true motive of discussion—on one hand, Robert's need to be loved, and on the other, Norwood's need to express that love, which love ultimately prevents him from killing Robert. Cora confirms that love was the only possible solution as she describes her son to the dead Norwood: "Good-looking, and kind, and headstrong, and stubborn, and proud like you, and de one I could love most 'cause he needed de most lovin'" (523). However, social conventions made the realization of this love an impossibility, and thus further produce Robert's nihilistic attitude.

That Hughes' message could be discomforting is to be expected. More disturbing, however, is that much of the critical opinion of the play was informed by a need to conform to pre-existing stereotypes of blackness. As Elliot Aronson observes, "The greatest proportion of prejudiced behavior is a function of slavish conformity to social norms" (122). Certainly, the progression in the play's reviews gives evidence to Aronson's observation that this conformity "can lead people to adopt negative attitudes on the basis of hearsay" (122). While the play initially received very little publicity, it began to receive a very large amount of negative hype as time went on, specifically in context of its rape scene. So while early reviewers took little notice of this scene, these same reviewers later focused almost all of their attention on it. In no magazine was the conformity so apparent as in the Stage. Whereas the June 1936 review reads, "Don't let the hype distract you from its important social message," the July 1936 review gives in and proclaims, "Sincere writing on the author's part gone sex-mad in production." In one month the reviewers fell prey to the very interpretation they themselves warned against.

The actual production of this rape scene is even more problematic. Hughes never wrote the scene, in which Sally is raped by the supervisor of Norwood's plantation. However, as Plum notes, "Producer Martin Jones rewrote large sections of the original dialogue and added a gratuitous rape scene to guarantee success at the box office" (Plum 6). In fact, it wasn't until 30 years later, in Five Plays of Langston Hughes, that Hughes even made the original text available (Watt 504). The unfortunate result of this was that the focus of the play in production shifted from Hughes' social commentary to Jones' commercial sensationalism, thus conforming to the white audience's expectation of a connection between sexuality and blackness. Hughes mourned, "I sat and watched my first play—which I had conceived as a poetic tragedy—being turned into what the producer hoped would be a commercial hit" (qtd. Plum 9). Certainly, the sensationalism extended the life of the production. Plum notes, "Mixed and negative reviews usually result in the early closing of a production on Broadway" (11). However, the infamous reputation of the play proved a continual draw for audiences, so much that the point of the play was entirely lost. Says Plum: "Publicity and press accounts suggest that it was the play's sexual (not racial) message that eventually dominated discussions about the production. By 1937, [it] had earned the reputation as 'the sex problem play of the age.' It was advertised on tour as a 'daring drama of sex life in the South'" (5). The disturbing aspect of this is that the scene, which would have been unproducable in white theater, was on some level acceptable because it was African American theater. The play became the outlet for white audiences to observe and participate in the socially unacceptable simply because of its framework in an illusory sex-mad African American culture. Thus, Sally's rape on stage in some respects validated similar violence in real life, since the audience, already siding with the whites in the play, were emotional participants in it. So whereas Kline in calling for a more authentic African American theater decries, "We want to do away with the white man's concept of the Negro as a lazy, superstitious, murderous and sex-starved lout" (Kline 27), the plays producer helps produce this concept by giving the audience what it wanted rather than what Hughes wanted to give it.

The history of Dubose Heyward and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess provides an interesting counterpoint to that of Mulatto. A musical patterned after Heyward's 1925 novella Porgy, Porgy and Bess premiered in the same season as Mulatto, succeeding both with critics and with audiences. Heyward, a member of the group of white writers that Zora Neale Hurston labeled "Negrotarians," viewed African America much differently than did Hughes. The Negrotarians considered African American culture inevitably primitive and naïve, but still deserving of a better life and reputation than it received in their time. Meanwhile, they considered white culture corrupt, insisting that its superior knowledge and modernity had brought about its downfall. Thus, for the Negrotarians, the primitive black culture in America was a final refuge from modernity (Rhodes 192-193). Surprisingly, Heyward's opinions were well received. The novella became the first larger work of fiction featuring all black characters to receive mass acceptance in the white community (194). It even received lavish praise from Langston Hughes and other important members of the Harlem Renaissance such as Countee Cullen (Slavick 66-7). Since Heyward's wife Dorothy was herself a playwright (68), it was only natural that with her help Porgy would be adapted for the stage in 1927, and then as an opera with Gershwin's music in 1935 (Rhodes 193).

The stage versions received the same critical and popular acclaim as had the novella. A November 1935 review read:

Here is your first American opera and as an opera an experience not to be missed. George Gershwin's brilliant and moving transcription into music of Heywards' Negro folk play is authentic and gripping from the first chord to the last. . . . No matter how well you liked the original Porgy, the new opera will thrill you. . . . ("Porgy and Bess" 8)

(In the same section of reviews, Mulatto received only two trivial sentences of commentary). Porgy and Bess has continued to receive great praise and legitimization, though almost solely for its music. It has had many performances since its premier, culminating in its 1985 performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera, one of the world's finest opera company (Mordden 30). Many of its songs, such as "Summertime," and "I've Got Plenty o' Nuttin'," have become popular jazz standards independent of the opera. As a result, and in stark contrast to Mulatto, Porgy and Bess has experienced an almost unrivaled legitimization as a distinctly American masterpiece. While it must be acknowledged that a significant portion of both the contemporary and original praise for the 1935 production was devoted solely to Gershwin's music, and that comparisons to the response that Mulatto received must be qualified by this fact, it should also be noted that Porgy and Bess received significant praise for its artistry the effective expression of its lyrics (Davenport 32). In fact, critics of the era admired the merit of Heyward's story without reservation, being offended by neither the primitivism of the black characters nor Gershwin's adaptation of music in a black idiom.

However, contemporary critics view Heyward's text in a much different light. The text's parody of African-American speech (Thomason 22), including such statements "'Fore Gawd, boss, I ain't never done um" (21), are obviously racist and offensive. In addition to the offensive black dialect, the black characters' animalism, immorality, and lack of sexual restraint indict Porgy and Bess as a racist production. For example, Bess puts forth no resistance to sexual relationships with Crown and later with Sportin' Life. She is also unable to turn down Sportin' Life's offer of drugs. The other characters show a similar unrestraint. Crown, a gambler, brutally murders Robbins. Porgy as the play's most enlightened and disciplined character, murders Crown with the same cruelty that Crown murdered Robbins. Later, in prison, he earns money by gambling. Although Heyward intended to display this primitivism of the black characters in a Negrotarian and therefore positive light, the play instead debases the characters, the work, and the black culture he sought to exalt (Rhodes 198). The bawdy singing, passionate dancing, and generally "fun-loving" he portrays ultimately plays to the expectations of the audience and reinforces the ideology that insists that African American lack self-discipline and self-control, and thus exist in a state of complete moral decay.

In addition to its inherently racist libretto, Porgy and Bess' music also damages to the African American image. In spite of the almost unending praise Gershwin's score has received, it was heavily criticized by jazz legend Duke Ellington, who called it a complete failure in its attempt to copy the "Negro musical idiom" (Morrow 5). The music denies black culture of its individuality by offering a generalized and more easily consumable replacement for the black cultural gems produced by black musicians of the era. In fact, the play in general offers a synthesized version of blackness, relying on the culture's reputation to sell the play to audiences.

Both Porgy and Bess and Mulatto exemplify how popular entertainment of the era sold an inconsistent image of blackness to the public. In the case of Porgy and Bess, we see the public praising the play's depiction of blackness because it reinforced the public's own ideology. On the other hand, Mulatto's more realistic portrayal of black culture was very negatively received, and in fact had to be falsified in order to be sold to the public. The 1935 productions of both of these plays clearly illustrate that despite the appearance of racial progress in the theater of the 1930s, white audiences still demanded and therefore received a generalized and marginalized stereotype of African America. The African American plays of the era, while pretending to advance the black cause, in reality reinforced these stereotypes. These stereotypes were unfortunately so powerful as to not only blind audiences to the true message of Mulatto, but manipulate the message in production so as to deny Hughes of his voice in his own play.

Works Cited

Aronson, Elliot. "Causes of Prejudice." The Social Animal. 6th ed. W.H. Freeman & Company, 1992: 111-123.

Davenport, Marcia and Ruth Woodbury Sedgwick. "Rhapsody in Black." Stage, Nov 1935: 31-33.

Hughes, Langston. Mulatto (1935). American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary. Eds. Stephen Watts and Gary A. Richardson. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 1995: 505-24.

Kline, Herbert. "Drama of Negro Life." New Theatre, Feb 1936: 26-27.

Mordden, Ethan C. "A Long Pull." Opera News, March 16, 1985: 30-3, 46.

Morrow, Edward. "Duke Ellington on Gershwin's Porgy." New Theatre, Dec 1935: 5-7.

"Porgy and Bess." Stage, Nov 1935: 8.

Ottley, Roi. "The Negro Theatre 'Macbeth'." New Theatre, May 1936:24-25.

Plum, Jay. "Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones's production of Langston Hughes's Mulatto." Theatre Survey, May 1995: 5-19.

"Reviews of New Plays." Theatre Arts Monthly, Dec 1935: 902.

Rhodes, Chip. "Writing up the New Negro: The Construction of Consumer Desire in the Twenties." Journal of American Studies, August 1994: 191-207.

Slavick, William H. "Going to School to Dubose." The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. New York: AMS, 1987: 65-91.

"The Show is On: Current Plays in New York." Stage, Dec 1935: 2.

"The Show is On: Current Plays in New York." Stage, Apr 1936: 2.

"The Show is On: Current Plays in New York." Stage, June 1936: 2.

"The Show is On: Current Plays in New York." Stage, July 1936: 2.

"Theatre News." Theatre Arts Monthly, May 1936: 326.

Thomason, Paul. "The Problem with Porgy and Bess." Opera News, Aug 1998: 19-22.

Watt, Stephen and Gary A. Richardson. "Introduction to Mulatto." American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary. Eds. Stephen Watts and Gary A. Richardson. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 1995: 502-4.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Posted June 01, 2001 (08:46 PM)