STAGE : A Discovery Worth the Wait? : Sixty years after ‘Mule Bone’ emerged from the Harlem Renaissance, it opened to a mixed reception on Broadway

In the Broadway production of “Mule Bone,” the characters gathered on the teeming porch of Joe Clark’s general store in Eatonville, Fla., tease and cajole each other, laughing at the small-town follies at the heart of this 1930 comedy written by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Given the familiarity with which the all-black cast of 30 inhabit their roles, it seems as though these folks have been sitting on that porch forever. But “Mule Bone” is coming to the stage 60 years after writer Hurston and poet Hughes, the royal couple of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, collaborated on the project. Featuring a half-dozen songs added by blues composer Taj Mahal, “Mule Bone,” subtitled “A Comedy of Negro Life,” opened earlier this month for a limited run. While some critics found the material thin, others acknowledged its place in America’s cultural history.

Indeed, “Mule Bone” is one of the curiosities of this Broadway season--a Rip Van Winkle awakened to entertain audiences in a Spike Lee era. Based on a Hurston short story, the play was intended to liberate the stage of its time of the black stereotypes which were then popular--the cavorting “darkies” of minstrel shows, vaudeville and musical revues. In April of 1928, Hurston described her concept to Hughes as “ real Negro theater . . . we shall act out the folk tales, however short, with the abrupt angularity and naivete of the primitive ‘ ‘bama Nigger.’ ”

After sketching a couple of drafts of the three-act play, the collaborators had what has been called a “mysterious falling-out” and the production was canceled. The play lay neglected in a drawer until 1983, when Henry Louis Gates Jr., the noted Duke University English professor, brought the unfinished manuscript to Gregory Mosher, then the artistic director at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, who, intrigued, brought the script with him when he moved to Lincoln Center in 1985.

However, in the decades since the play was written, playwrights from Lorraine Hansberry (“Raisin in the Sun”) to August Wilson (“Fences”) had liberated the “stage darkie” far beyond the scope of the “Mule Bone” creators’ intent--so much so that Hurston’s “primitive” figure might now appear offensive to blacks and whites alike. In a “post-Tawana Brawley decade,” as Mosher describes it, what could be gained from a play in which blacks insulted each other in a rural dialect? Was “Mule Bone” simply a socially regressive museum piece better left dormant? The caricatures of Deacon Hambo, Old Man Brazzle, Lum Boger, Teets and Bootsie, among others, appeared, verbally at least, akin to characters in white-written works such as “Song of the South,” which had raised questions of their own.

Lincoln Center Theater undertook the current production only after the play was hotly debated at a 1988 reading, a discussion that revealed the sensitivity heightened by racial tensions. Some argued that hewing to “political correctness” could be devastating to black creativity, whether one was talking about “Mule Bone” or the portrayal of male characters in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”

Prof. Gates later stated in a New York Times essay that “60 years after ‘Mule Bone,’ many black Americans still feel that their precarious political and social condition within American society warrants a guarded attitude toward the way images of their culture are projected. Even a work by two of the greatest writers in the tradition cannot escape these concerns, concerns that would lead some to censorship, presumably because of ‘what white people might think.’ . . . “

The producers felt confident enough that the authenticity of the material would override these concerns. Michael Schultz, who after a distinguished tenure with the Negro Ensemble Company, had worked in television and film (“Cooley High,” “Car Wash”) was enlisted as director; writer George Houston Bass, provided a new prologue and epilogue; and Taj Mahal set Langston Hughes’ poems to music to fill in the slots where the creators had indicated there should be traditional folk songs.

Still, there were concessions to “what white people might think” in the editing of the play. The word “nigger” was deleted from the dialogue, as were all sexist allusions to women as chattel.

Other more troubling issues of “political correctness” remained. Was the play worthy of a production simply because the title page featured the names, as Gates noted, of “two of the greatest writers” of the black tradition, despite its limitations as theater? Might it not be historically important but theatrically feeble?

After all, these townfolk were in service to a leisurely driven plot, the rivalry between Jim and Dave, a song-and-dance team, for the affection of the coquettish Daisy. When guitar-twanging Jim whacks his best friend over the head with “de hock bone of an old yaller mule,” his trial divides the town’s Baptists and Methodists who argue whether a mule bone can be considered a weapon, according to the Bible. In the play’s vernacular, the minister’s argument clinches Jim’s conviction: “Since de further back on a mule you goes, do mo’ dangerous he gits, by de time you gits clear back tuh his hocks he’s rank pizen (poison).” This was hardly compelling material for a Broadway audience familiar with playwrights like Wilson whose emotionally rich “Piano Lesson” is set in the same decade as “Mule Bone.”

Mosher says that he was not bothered by the skimpiness of the script Gates sent to him. Apart from the importance of producing a “lost work” of the Harlem Renaissance, he says that he was captivated by the “richness of detail and uniqueness of spirit” of the story-telling--the first instance of African-Americans themselves turning a light on a world which was merely a shadow in most dramas written up to that time.

Though the play is about a people “60 years up from slavery,” racial conflicts happen beyond the railroad tracks of Eatonville. Because Hurston’s hometown was the first incorporated black municipality in the United States, the play’s comic spirit could emerge untainted by the victimization occurring in other communities. The central social structure of “Mule Bone” is determined not by color but by divisions between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, Baptists and Methodists.

“But the point of the play is not social work,” Mosher adds. “What Hughes and Hurston did was to come along and tap into an entire people’s dream life. It addresses the subconscious of an entire community. It brings us no nearer to an understanding of problems of racism, but its effect on the imagination can be joyous.”

At 39, Hurston had by then mastered in her numerous short stories the colorful dialogue of a small-town existence and embroidered it with humor. A decade younger, Hughes is credited with giving the play dramatic structure, most specifically in changing the plot so that the boys come to blows over a pretty girl rather than over a turkey, as happened in the original story. This was merely a vehicle which the authors then used to elaborate their cultural legacy. In this regard, “Mule Bone” might be considered as representative of a community’s “dream life” as Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”--which captured the archetypes and vernacular of New England, even as it transcended them.

“And nothing happened in the first act of ‘Our Town’ either!” says Mosher, who directed a revival of it on Broadway a few years ago. “It used to drive me crazy. Why would anybody want to come back for the second act? I wondered. And yet, like in ‘Mule Bone,’ they’re saying these things for the first time, unraveling this tapestry of life which, at least for me, is thrilling to behold and absorb.”

While “Mule Bone” might strike some whites as an entertaining dip into African-Americana, the play appears to viscerally engage the blacks in the audience, attesting to its familiarity and authenticity. The enjoyment stems at least in part from the simplicity of a show in which the biggest crisis is whether or not to build a municipal jail--this before a multi-racial audience that has seen a frightening crime wave in their hometown.

“There are more burning issues out there,” says director Michael Schultz, “but this wasn’t meant to address those. I’ve always thought of this as ‘a black valentine’ to revel in. To say to both whites and to blacks, but blacks especially, ‘this is part of your heritage, too.’ “‘

Rousing the dream life concocted by Hughes and Hurston was no easy task, he adds. “And those guys were dead, they couldn’t help.” The burden fell mostly to the cast to flesh out the broadly comic, sketchily written characters and to add whatever resonance the play might have for a 1991 audience. The difficulty of casting was exacerbated by the fact that many actors simply couldn’t handle the rural dialect. Says Schultz, “It had to do with how much in touch with their roots they were.”

Theresa Merritt had no problem filling out the ample Katie Pitts, who sassily sings “Shake That Thing” in the show. “My people were from Emory, Ala., and there were Katie Pittses around there,” she says. “You know, those women who are a little more worldly because they’ve been up to the sinful North and come back home.”

Merritt herself journeyed up to the “sinful North” in the early ‘40s to pursue a singing career birthed in the Alabama Baptist camp meetings where, as a child, she learned to express herself singing before the congregation. The arc of the actress’s career--from her Broadway debut in “Carmen Jones” (1943), to her featured role in August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” for which she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1985--reflects the transformation black theater has undergone as it has explored and refined the process begun by Hurston and Hughes.

For Merritt, as well as for other veterans, “Mule Bone” signifies a “comin’ around again,” as the actress puts it. “My early life was a lot like in ‘Mule Bone,’ people sittin’ around telling tall tales about ghosts in graveyards and who’s sleeping around with whom. During the day, we’d sing hymns and then on Saturday night, the grown-ups listened to the jazz records they’d put on the Victrola. Jazz was sin music, not fit for children so we’d have to sneak down. Years later, when I was asked to play Ma Rainey, I knew she’d sung, ‘Shake That Thing.’ I didn’t get to sing it then so I was delighted when they asked me to sing it in this show.”

Unlike Merritt, 25-year-old Eric Ware had no memories of his own to draw upon in creating suave Dave Carter, who seduces Daisy with his hip-rolling shuffle. But he used certain historical references his grandmother from Greene, Ala. gave him--”She said they used to call a guy like Dave ‘a jelly’.” But Ware says he drew inspiration from rides on the uptown IRT subway as well.

“Dave is fast-paced, nonchalant and cocky,” he says, “and you can see that on the subway. There’s that same physicality in a group of boys together and one of them is talking about what he did last night, and it’s ‘Hey!’ or ‘Ya-cha-cha!’ It’s that same enjoyment of telling the stories and the effect the words have on people.” What anchors the show for a contemporary audience is the score played by an off-stage combo complementing the work of Kenny Neal, who plays the guitar-picking Jim.

Once Taj Mahal started reading the poems, he says, the music leaped from the page to his guitar. “I was shocked at how well versed Langston was in the blues,” says Mahal. “My parents were always saying Langston this and Langston that, but I thought he was bourgeois, all that search for connectedness. The blues didn’t care whether you were listening to it or not. It just had to sing its song.’

His songs for “Mule Bone,” says Mahal, were intended to take the audience back to a certain period but also to give them the feeling that they were moving forward. “If you listen carefully,” he says, “you can hear cultural relatives of the blues: r&b;, soul, gospel, even a little bit of jazz and calypso. There’s a certain crying blues you could put out there, but once I started reading through the poems, I started rocking.”

Mahal says he saw the fusion between African-American storytelling and the blues in both Hughes’ poetry and the play. “The art of laughter was one of the black folk’s gift to American culture. But, “it’s the art of laughing to keep from crying. That’s what the blues is about too.”