Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews

Abstract

It was May in Eau Gallie, Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston was headed to church. Shutting the door to her cottage near the shores of the Indian River, Hurston set out to join the local Baptist congregation, where she would hear a sermon delivered by its pastor, the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston had been pondering the question of how to represent the experience of a church service in a theatrical performance. “Know what I am attempting?” she had written to Langston Hughes a few days earlier, in April 1929. “To set an entire Bapt. service word for word and note for note.” Listening to Lovelace's sermon in Eau Gallie, Hurston admired how the preacher's oratory built seamlessly from a creation story into a fiery vision of divine retribution. She was so taken by the poetry of Lovelace's words that she transcribed his sermon in its entirety. This sermon later served as the centerpiece of the play The Sermon in the Valley, a work that testifies to Hurston's aim to render a Baptist service “word for word and note for note.” Like many of her plays, The Sermon in the Valley reveals the intimate entanglement of her ethnographic compositions and her writing for the stage.