Setting

The Green Pastures takes place in several key settings, all of which interpret Old Testament Biblical stories in the context of Southern, rural, locations inhabited by African Americans. Connelly chose these settings as the context in which to retell biblical stories because he imagined that rural, Southern African Americans probably imagined the stories of the Bible to take place in the same type of locations with which they were familiar. (Today, Connelly's representation of such African-American conceptions of the Bible can be seen as stereotyped and without basis.) Heaven, for instance, is represented as a giant fish fry picnic, attended by angels, cherubs, an archangel, and God Himself. The Garden of Eden is set in the rural South, and is described in the stage directions as filled with trees, plants, bushes, and flowers native to the South. Babylon is depicted as "a Negro night club in New Orleans...