Although written in 1931, Mule Bone was not performed on stage until 1991. In those intervening sixty years the world changed a great deal. Where Hurston and Hughes had envisioned a need for authentic black theatre in 1931, playwrights like August Wilson (The Piano Lesson), Amiri Baraka (Dutchman), and Alice Childress (The Wedding Band) had stepped in to fill the void. Black theatre had moved from minstrel shows to dramas that reflect the black experience, and Mule Bone, which sixty years earlier might have been the start of black theatre, now seems more like a dated epilogue. This is the problem most often noted in the mixed reviews that greeted the play's debut at the Barrymore Theatre in February of 1991. In his review for the New York Times, Frank Rich found the play "innocuous." Rich.....
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