Mulatto (play)

Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South is a play about race issues by Langston Hughes. It was produced on Broadway in 1935 by Martin Jones, where it ran for 11 months and 373 performances. It is one of the early Broadway plays to combine father-son conflict with race issues.
Plot.
Act One
On the Norwood Plantation in Polk County, Georgia, Colonel Norwood and his African slave, Cora Lewis, have four children together: William, who still lives on the plantation and who has a son of his own; two daughters, Bertha and Sallie, who are light enough to pass for white; and Robert, a.k.a. Bert, who is 18 and who has Norwood's facial features. Robert has been away at an all-Colored school since he was a young boy and is visiting the plantation for the first time in many years. In Act One, we learn that Robert has been refusing to follow all the expected behaviors for Mulatto people and has been asserting himself as Norwood's heir, much to the shock of the local townspeople and to Norwood's anger. Cora, meanwhile, is revealed to have secretly sent her daughters to secretarial school, so that they can move up north and have good jobs, but has been telling the Colonel that they are learning to be cooks.
Act Two
Reception.
Historian Joseph McLaren notes that the play was popular with audiences because they were intrigued by the tragic mulatto theme. Critics, however, were more negative, perhaps in part because director/producer Martin Jones altered much of the plot, moving the play away from tragedy and into melodrama. Melinda D. Wilson notes that Jones's addition of a rape scene may have helped sell tickets, but also may have reinforced stereotypes of violent and promiscuous blacks—the kinds of stereotypes that Negro and Mulatto writers of the time were trying to stamp out.
Literary scholar Germain J. Bienvenu argues that the play also examines the ways Negro/Mulatto people of the time held prejudices against other Negro/Mulattoes.