Green’s playwriting debut was stupendous. His
first staged work, INABRAHAM’SBOSOM(1927),
won the PULITZER PRIZE in drama. Additional
plays were Broadway successes and included a the-
atrical version of RICHARD WRIGHT’s NATIVE
SON.He also wrote film scripts, and his credits in-
clude the script for Black Like Me,based on the au-
tobiographical story of John Griffiths.
Like JULIAPETERKIN, Green believed that his
works on African-American life were shaped by his
early exposure to people of color. He recalled, in a
somewhat romanticized manner, that his “first
memories [were] of negro ballads ringing out by
moonlight and the rich laughter of the resting
blacks, down by the river bottom.” His works re-
flected his deep ties to North Carolina and his in-
terest in racial politics. His biographer Barrett
Clark suggests that the play White Dresses(1920)
was the first to reveal “unmistakable signs of ge-
nius.” The plot centered on a young white man
whose father prevents him from marrying a young
woman of color. To prevent any interracial union,
the white patriarch arranges for the girl to marry
an African-American man against her will. The
girl’s grandmother counsels her to accept her fate,
in large part because it appears that her white true
love is in fact her half brother.
Green’s work returned to the themes of fami-
lies in disarray, miscegenation, and thwarted love
relationships. The play In Abraham’s Bosom(1927)
revisited these themes as it traced one man’s efforts
to provide education for his African-American
community. By the play’s end, the aspiring teacher
has inadvertently killed his white half brother.
Green’s flair for tragic story lines and evocative
scenes brought new intensity to the Harlem Re-
naissance drama community and the larger theater
world.
Bibliography
Clark, Barrett. Paul Green. New York: Robert M.
McBride & Company, 1928.
Krasner, David. A Beautiful Pageant: African American
Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Re-
naissance, 1910–1927.New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2002.
Roper, John. Paul Green, Playwright of the Real South.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
Green Pastures, The: A FableMarc Connelly
(1930)
A PULITZER PRIZE–winning play by the white
dramatist MARC CONNELLY that delivered an
African-American perspective on the Old Testa-
ment. The script was based on Ol’ Man Adam an’
His Chillun,a collection of short stories by the
white Tennesseean Roark Bradford. Bradford, like
RIDGELEYTORRENCE, used childhood encounters
with African Americans to influence his stories of
African-American life.
The Green Pasturesopened at the Mansfield
Theatre on BROADWAYin February 1930 and had a
record run of 640 shows. It won the Pulitzer Prize
for Drama later that year. The Green Pasturesen-
joyed five national tours, and in February 1935 it re-
turned to Broadway for 73 shows at the 44th Street
Theatre. In 1936 Connelly and the William Keigh-
ley produced the film version starring Rex Ingram
and George Reed. The play was revived in March
and April 1951. Marc Connelly directed the 44 per-
formances that were staged at the Broadway The-
atre, and Robert Edmond Jones, the director who
worked with a number of African-American-related
dramas, was the production designer.
The play’s reception confirms that the play ap-
pealed to Harlem Renaissance–era audiences.
While the theater-going public turned out in
droves, many African Americans regarded the
work as patronizing and driven by racial stereo-
types. Influential figures such as such as W. E. B.
DUBOIS and ZORA NEALE HURSTON, however,
disagreed with Bradford and Connelly’s representa-
tion of African-American life and thought. In his
August 1930 CRISISreview of the play, DuBois sug-
gested that “the difficulty with the Negro on the
American stage, is that the white audience... de-
mands caricatures” and urged African Americans
to protest “the incompleteness of art expression...
the embargo which white wealth lays on full Negro
expression.” Two years later, in a summer 1932 let-
ter to NAACP secretary WALTERWHITEand his
wife Gladys, Hurston, discussing one of her own
folk stories projects, voiced her frustration with
The Green Pastures and other white-authored
works that purported to offer reliable windows into
black life. “I want the reader to see why Negroes
tell such glorious tales,” she wrote. “He has more
images within his skull than any other human inGreen Pastures, The: A Fable 199