{"id":12202,"date":"2011-02-21T03:09:09","date_gmt":"2011-02-21T03:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12202"},"modified":"2011-02-21T03:10:58","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T03:10:58","slug":"accounting-for-the-audience-in-historical-reconstruction-martin-joness-production-of-langston-hughess-mulatto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12202","title":{"rendered":"Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones’s Production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones’s Production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Theatre Survey<\/a>
\nNumber 36, Issue 1<\/a>\u00a0(1995)
\npages 5-19
\nDOI: 10.1017\/S0040557400006451<\/a><\/p>\n

Jay Plum, Ph.D.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although Langston Hughes’s<\/a> Mulatto<\/em> holds the record as the second longest Broadway<\/a> production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry’s<\/a> A Raisin in the Sun<\/a><\/em>), 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<\/em>, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley<\/a>, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto<\/em> as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s \u201cto oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama\u201d because of the recognition of Bert’s \u201ctragic situation\u201d (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto<\/em> is melodramatic, Smalley advises, \u201clet [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South<\/a> as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.\u201d 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<\/em>, even if melodramatic, is \u201cnatural\u201d and \u201caccurate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones’s Production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto Theatre Survey Number 36, Issue 1\u00a0(1995) pages 5-19 DOI: 10.1017\/S0040557400006451 Jay Plum, Ph.D. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20],"tags":[5486,488,5487],"class_list":["post-12202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jay-plum","tag-langston-hughes","tag-theatre-survey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}