Karamu House - Langston Hughes Involvement

Langston Hughes Involvement

Langston Hughes had a special relationship with Karamu Theatre. Born in St. Louis, Hughes early life moved to Cleveland, where he attended Karamu programs and classes; after he left Ohio, he kept in touch with the director, Rowena Jelliffe, and the Gilpin Players, who produced a number of his plays, including the premiers of 'When the Jack Hollars (1936), 'Troubled Island' (1936), and 'Joy to My Soul'. In an interview with Reuben Silver of Karamu, Hughes said: "It is a cultural shame that a great country like America, with twenty million people of color, has no primarily serious colored theatre. There isn't. Karamu is the very nearest thing to it. My feeling is not only should a Negro theatre, if we want to use that term, do plays by and about Negroes, but it should do plays slanted toward the community in which it exists. It should be in a primarily Negro community since that is the way our racial life in America is still...It should not be a theatre that should be afraid to do a Negro folk play about people who are perhaps not very well-educated because some of the intellectuals, or "intellectuals" in quotes, are ashamed of such material" By 1940, according to Hughes's biographer Arnold Rampersad, "Langston consigned all his skits and sketches, divided into three classes--Negro Social, Negro, Negro Non-Social, and white--to his agent, who had alerted him that Cafe Society, a novel interracial cabaret founded in New York by Barney Josephson, was planning a revue. Hughes sent twenty skits, collectively titled 'Run, Ghost, Run'. He also sent a copy to Karamu; there is no record that the revue was staged there or anywhere. Three of those skits appear here in print for the first time, and these three may have been produced by the Suitcase Theatre (135 performances), at different times Hughes added to the program a short satirical skit: 'Limitations of Life', or 'Little Eva'...(331-332).