The Green Pastures is not a play utterly different from everything that Connelly had done before; The Deep Tangled Wildwood, The Wisdom Tooth, and The Wild Man of Borneo, for examples, are quite obviously searches for "old dignities." What distinguishes The Green Pastures from these earlier plays is its scope. In this play Connelly selected his materials, not from minor aspects of contemporary society, but from the central religious-philosophical myth of Western civilization, the Hebraic-Christian accounts in the Bible; and he then applied some of the implications of that myth to one group of suffering American humanity, the Southern Negro.

The play is divided into two parts: the first, in ten scenes; the second, in eight. The first part opens in a Negro Sunday School in New Orleans, where the kindly preacher, Mr. Deshee, is beginning a study of the Bible for his young charges. Although, seemingly...