SOURCE: “A Difficult Birth for Mule Bone,” in Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Gloria L. Cronin, G. K. Hall & Co., 1998, pp. 229-31.

In the following review, originally published in the New York Times on February 15, 1991, Rich enumerates several flaws in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Mule Bone, and observes that the play “feels like a rough draft in which two competing voices are trying to reach a compromise.”

If ever there was a promising idea for a play, it is the enigmatic story of what went on when two giants of the Harlem Renaissance briefly collided in 1930 to collaborate on “a comedy of Negro life” they titled Mule Bone.

The writers were the poet Langston Hughes and the anthropologist, folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Both were in their late 20's, and both had the same dream of a new truly African-American theater. Their...