Staging Zora Neale Hurston

Join Tony-nominated playwright Christina Anderson and Beinecke Library curator Melissa Barton for an insider look at the process of adapting Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" for the stage. Based on Hurston’s 1931 interviews with Cudjoe Lewis—one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—Barracoon spent decades unpublished before becoming a landmark literary event. In this event, Anderson examines the unique artistic and ethical demands of transforming Hurston’s posthumously published masterpiece into live theater. Together with Barton, Anderson will discuss the responsibility of staging historical testimony, how Hurston captured vernacular speech and personal memory, and the dramatic choices required to translate raw historical record into compelling stagecraft. This discussion offers a fascinating, candid look at the intersection of archival research, adaptation, and modern theater.

Melissa Barton is Curator of Drama and Prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, which includes the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, at Beinecke Library. She is an alum of Morse, having received her BA in English from Yale; she earned her PhD, also in English, from the University of Chicago.

At the Beinecke, Melissa has curated exhibits including “Casting Shadows: Integration on the American Stage,” “Richard Wright’s Native Son on Stage and Screen,” “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and the Beinecke Library,” and, in 2022, “Brava! Women Make American Theater.” Her catalog Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album was copublished by Beinecke and Yale University Press.