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1931 interviews with Cudjoe Lewis—one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—Barracoon spent decades unpublished before becoming a landmark literary event.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 and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Beinecke Library. Her essay “Zora Neale Hurston’s Scrapbook” was published in American Literary History in fall 2025, and she is currently editing an edition of Hurston’s 1935 play Spunk for Yale University Press.