A decades-old rift between literary giants Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, sparked by a collaborative playwriting project, is being revisited onstage in Trenton, New Jersey. Passage Theatre’s production of David Robson’s Muleheaded, running through February 15, dramatizes the fraught creation and ultimate collapse of “Mule Bone,” a folk epic intended to be a landmark work of Black life.
The partnership between Hughes and Hurston, which flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, began to unravel over questions of authorship and copyright, effectively halting their creative collaboration and, according to some scholars, signaling a turning point for the artistic movement. Brishen Miller, artistic director of Passage Theatre, noted that many writers and Hughes himself have linked their friendship’s beginning and finish to the Harlem Renaissance.
Hughes and Hurston first met at an awards dinner in 1925, a pivotal year for the Harlem Renaissance marked by the publication of Alain Locke’s influential anthology, The New Negro, and the awarding of literary prizes to promising Black writers. They quickly began plotting collaborations, co-founding the short-lived magazine Fire!! with Wallace Thurman and embarking on a memorable road trip from Alabama to New York City in 1927. Hughes subsequently introduced Hurston to Charlotte van der Veer Quick Mason, a wealthy patron whose financial support was instrumental in funding many Harlem Renaissance projects, though her influence was often complicated and at times problematic.
It was Mason’s financial backing that enabled the development of “Mule Bone,” providing funds not only for Hurston and Hughes but too for a typist, Louise Thompson, to transcribe their work. Robson’s play focuses on the dynamic between Hurston, Hughes, and Thompson during the play’s conception, composition, and eventual disintegration at Hughes’s home in Westfield, New Jersey, from 1930 to 1931.
Robson, a writing instructor at Delaware County Community College, has condensed the timeline and deliberately avoided depicting the legal disputes that followed the project’s failure. Instead, he concentrates on the intimate relationships between the three collaborators. “What comes from intimacy,” Robson explained, “is tension and secrets, telling one person one thing but maybe telling someone else another—that creates an engine for drama.”
When the partnership dissolved amid claims of authorship and resentment, it had a ripple effect throughout the Black artistic community, contributing to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance. The loss of “Mule Bone” itself was a significant blow. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Later wrote that the play was conceived as an alternative to minstrel shows, aiming to reclaim Southern archetypes from racist caricatures and allow Black art to “speak in its own voice, without prior restraint.” A successful Broadway production in the 1930s, Gates suggested, could have profoundly impacted the development of Black theatre.
The legacy of Hurston and Hughes has continued to resonate in American theatre. George C. Wolfe adapted three of Hurston’s stories into the play Spunk in 1990, and Tamilla Woodard staged Hurston’s “lost” play Spunk at Yale Rep more recently. James Ijames is currently adapting Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God for Orlando Shakes, and Hughes’s Black Nativity remains a popular holiday production. Despite these revivals, “Mule Bone” remained unproduced in their lifetimes, with a version finally staged at Lincoln Center in 1991.
Miller emphasized the interconnectedness of the Harlem Renaissance artistic network. “Langston followed Bessie Smith on tour and would join her backstage, and Aaron Douglas did several of his paintings for Langston Hughes poems. The circles were very tight, so this one rift kind of rippled out.”
Passage Theatre’s production of Muleheaded, set just an hour’s drive from Westfield, New Jersey, offers a chance to revisit this pivotal moment in American literary history. The play features performances by Constance Thompson as Zora and Anthony Vaughn Merchant as Langston, with direction by Miller and design by Jaelyn Alston-Frye.
Elsewhere in the American theatre landscape, NYU Skirball Center is hosting a production of Daniel Fish’s Kramer/Fauci, recreating a 1993 televised interview between playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer and National Institute of Health director Anthony Fauci. The play explores their complex relationship during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, a period marked by frustration over the slow pace of government research and advocacy for increased funding and care. The production runs through February 21.
Fish’s recreation of the interview highlights the performative aspects of the exchange, noting that both Kramer and Fauci were aware of the roles they were playing. He also emphasized the power of an individual to speak truth to power and the importance of disagreeing respectfully, qualities he believes are increasingly lost in contemporary discourse. The play’s relevance is underscored by ongoing debates about public health funding and trust in institutions.
Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses is currently running at the Public Theater, offering a unique theatrical experience based on the notoriously complex novel. The production, known for its durational and experimental approach, aims to compress the novel’s vastness into a manageable evening of theatre.
