Big Sweet, Dicey, Lonnie and My Honey took center stage at the Coolidge Auditorium on Dec. 11 and 12, when 19 performers from the Arena Stage did a concert reading of Zora Neale Hurston's unpublished play Polk County after only nine hours of rehearsal time.
Playwright Zora Neale Hurston
The event, which nearly filled the Coolidge Auditorium for both performances, was a co-production of Arena Stage in Washington and the Library of Congress in celebration of the Library's Bicentennial and the 50th anniversary of Arena Stage. It was made possible in part through an award to Alice Birney, the specialist in American literary and cultural history in the Manuscript Division, from the James H. Billington Endowment, funded by the generous support of Madison Council members Abraham and Julienne Krasnoff.
Characterized as "a comedy of Negro life in a sawmill camp" by Ms. Hurston and her collaborator, Dorothy Waring, the play was copyrighted in 1944 but never published or produced professionally. The script was one of 10 "rediscovered" Hurston plays in the Library's Copyright Deposit Drama Collections brought to light in 1997 by retired copyright specialist John J. Wayne.
Once Alice Birney started publicizing the discovery, scholarly interest in the scripts was overwhelming.
"The discovery of the unpublished Hurston play scripts radically changed scholarly appraisal of this important Harlem Renaissance author," said Ms. Birney. "It now seems that the theater may have been her best medium for integrating folklore, autobiography and music. Hurtson's goal to create a ‘new Negro art theater' was brilliantly demonstrated in this concert reading. Rather than musicals, her plays are comedies with music—theater about people for whom making music was a natural and important part of their lives. It has been gratifying to co-produce this production that brought the pages to life."
Cathy Madison, literary manager at Arena Stage, was one of the earliest readers of the typescripts and soon chose Polk County as the one that she thought would work best as a cooperative venture between the theater and the Library. This spring, Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith met with Diane Kresh, director for Public Service Collections at the Library, and they agreed to join forces on a reading of the play.
"Our Literary Manager Cathy Madison and Director Kyle Donnelly have been fascinated with Polk County since Cathy's first introduction to it," said Ms. Smith. "Hearing the vibrant voice of Zora Neale Hurston through this wonderful group of actors is reason for celebration. This program by the Library of Congress [affects] American Theater everywhere."
The setting: the Lofton Lumber Co. big mill and quarters deep in the primeval woods of south central Florida.
On stage: 19 actors sit in chairs in a semicircle, each with a music stand and script in front of them. Two of them hold guitars. They are all dressed in black except for the actress who plays the voodoo queen, Ella Wall; she sports a bright purple cloak.
The play is in three acts. Through Zora Neale Hurston's words, using only their own voices, a few songs and body language, the actors are able to bring to life the characters of Polk County and convey the complex interplay among the members of this sawmill community. Archival audio clips of Ms. Hurston's singing voice add texture and authenticity to the event.
Big Sweet is the strong, dominant female figure who keeps everyone in line in the camp. Lonnie, the dreamer and one of the hardest working men in the camp, is her sweetheart. Dicey is jealous of Big Sweet. When newcomer Leafy Lee comes into the camp to learn their music, Big Sweet shows her tender side and takes her under her wing. Leafy quickly captures the heart of My Honey, whom Dicey (without justification) considers to be her man, and the vitriol begins to flow.
Ida Elrod Eustis, a Library staffer in the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service, played the supporting role of Bunch. She said she has been acting in area theaters for the past 25 years and usually appears in one production a year at the Arena Stage. "It was a lot of fun," she said. "Hurston did a really good job with that script."
Asked how the actors could be so successful in "becoming" the characters without costumes, sets or movement around the stage, Ms. Eustis said, "You put yourself in that scene, and even without sets and costumes you can get the idea across to the audience. You want to do as much as you can to make the scene come alive."
Zora Neale Hurston, who died in 1960, was an anthropologist, novelist and folklorist as well as a playwright. She was born not far from Eatonville, Fla., America's first black incorporated town, and she drew on the culture in which she grew up for the characters and stories in her plays. Director Kyle Donnelly observed during the question period following the production on Dec. 11 that Hurston's work documented real women like those in Polk County. "She knew a Big Sweet and a Dicey," said Ms. Birney.
Hurston studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Barnard College. She conducted folklore studies in the South during the 1920s and made folk recordings there and in the Caribbean area with Alan Lomax between 1935 and 1939 during her association with the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.
The objective of the two evenings of Hurston readings was not only to expose patrons to the play itself, but also to give them an opportunity to view some items about Hurston from the Library's collections in a small display in the foyer of the auditorium and to watch archival silent film footage that Hurston herself shot during her folklore travels in the South in 1929. This footage was saved by anthropologist Margaret Mead and donated to the Library.
Items in the display included the original script of Polk County; a Hurston letter to B.A. Botkin of the Archive of American Folk Song expressing her views on race relations in America; the first page of a seven-page typescript Hurston prepared on a "Proposed Recording Expedition into the Floridas" in her role as "Negro editor of the Florida Project" of the Work Projects Administration; photographs of and by Hurston; and two cardboard film containers for some of the 16mm footage Hurston made to document activities during her folklore collecting trips.
"What would you take away from the play? How would you describe it"? asked Cathy Madison of the audience members who stayed to discuss the production the first evening.
Answers included "the sense of community" that Hurston conveyed through the play; the way "Zora created such wonderful women characters"; "a love story and not just between the men and the women but also caring between the men"; the strong sense of moral issues; the storytelling; the earthiness of the language; and the joy and fun the characters were able to make for themselves even in the midst of hardship.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary during the 2000-2001 season, Arena Stage is the oldest and largest of the Washington area's not-for-profit producing theaters. Founded in 1950 by Zelda and Thomas Fichandler and Edward Mangum, Arena was one of the original leaders of the resident theater movement and is still widely regarded by its national peers as the flagship of the American not-for-profit theater. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Molly Smith, Arena Stage has as one of its artistic goals to firmly establish the theater as an artistic home for American playwrights and as a center for the development of new dramatic works in the United States.
