Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones's Production of Langston Hughes'sMulatto

Abstract

Although Langston Hughes'sMulattoholds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry'sA Raisin in the Sun), 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 ofMulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defendsMulattoas a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist thatMulattois melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” 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 thatMulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”