Chapter 15 - Zora Neale Hurston’s Early Plays

Summary

This chapter examines Hurston’s early dramatic works during the period popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that a more comprehensive reading of the Harlem Renaissance must include Hurston’s early career in playwriting and that Hurston’s early plays – Meet the Mamma, Spears, The First One, and Color Struck – reflect key concerns of the Harlem Renaissance period. Within this context and combined with the fairly recent discovery of her plays, a fuller view of Hurston’s efforts becomes possible. Given the role of ritual and vernacular folk idioms that would come to dominate her creative writing and her social science career, Hurston’s early plays can be interpreted as testing ground for the theories of culture she would later develop in her novels and essays.