Primary Sources: The American South: Theater

"Emerging playwright Matthew Lopez and Northwestern University professor E. Patrick Johnson tackle the subject of the Civil War and Jewish slave owners in 19th-century America in this conversation. Lopez’s play The Whipping Man, for which the writer earned the John Gassner Playwriting Award from the Outer Critics Circle, receives its Chicago premiere at Northlight Theatre in January 2013. When Caleb, a wounded Confederate soldier returns to his family’s home at the end of the Civil War, he finds it in ruins and abandoned by all but two former slaves. United by their Jewish faith, the three men celebrate a Seder while wrestling with a shared past they can’t escape—and secrets they can no longer hide. Slavery and war, they discover, warp even good men’s souls."

"...ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. "