SOURCE: “From ‘Spears’ to The Great Day: Zora Neale Hurston's Vision of a Real Negro Theater,” in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1998, pp. 34-46.

In the following essay, Speisman surveys Hurston's career as a dramatist and her influence on American theater.

On 12 April 1926, in a letter to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston asked Hughes a question: “Did I tell you before I left about the new, the REAL Negro art theater I Plan? Well I shall, or rather we shall act out the folk tales, however short with the abrupt angularity and naivete of the primitive 'bama Nigger. … What do you think?” (Hemenway 115). From 1927 to 1930 Hurston had the opportunity to interpret what “had gone unseen for three hundred years” (113), and she shared many of her discoveries with Hughes, her colleague and friend. Traveling to isolated, rural African American communities, such as Magazine Point, Alabama, as well...