Michael Gold’s Hoboken Blues: An Experiment that Failed

Hoboken Blues: or The Black Rip Van Winkle: A Modern Negro Fantasia on an Old American Theme by Michael Gold, author of Jews Without Money (1930), is an almost forgotten American play. Gold hoped to have the Provincetown Players in New York City produce the work, since they had produced three of his one-act plays, Down the Airshaft and Ivan's Homecoming in 1917, and Money in 1920. Yet when Paul Robeson was asked to play Sam Pickins, the leading role, he refused: he would not play the part of a Harlem black who did not work, but spent his time playing the banjo and singing and dancing.(1) Nonetheless, the play was selected for publication in the first American Caravan (1927) and was eventually produced in February 1928 by the New Playwrights' Theatre, which Gold helped found.(2) It ran for 35 performances (Knox and Stahl 124). Gold's play was certainly not the first by a white author that focused on black characters. The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) by Eugene O'Neill and Porgy (1927), a dramatization of DuBose Heyward's novel by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, were just some of the ones that preceded it. In fact, Porgy, with Paul Robeson in the cast, appeared as a Theatre Guild production throughout the run of Hoboken Blues.(3) In addition, during the late 1920s, Carl Van Vechten's writings about Harlem were making a strong impact on New Yorkers. Yet Hoboken Blues is worth studying for a variety of reasons. First, as part of the New Playwrights' Theatre season for 1928, it gives insight into the kinds of leftwing experimental work being produced during this era. Labeled "the revolting playwrights" by Alexander Woollcott,(4) the founders of the New Playwrights' were John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, Em Jo Basshe, Francis Edward Faragoh, and Gold himself. Gold was perhaps the most important founder, having somehow managed to get the financier Otto Kahn to put up $30,000 for the half-dozen experimental plays the theater staged. Second, the play gives insight into Gold's ideas and work at this time. According to Lawson, of all the founders of the New Playwrights' Theatre, Gold alone represented left-wing orthodoxy.(5) It is interesting to note that, looking back from the vantage point of 1934, Gold, in spite of his involvement in the venture, labeled the New Playwrights' Theatre one of several "fellow-travelers' ventures" characterized by "shoddy liberalism" ("Stevedore" 28). Although he was editor of New Masses when he helped found the New Playwrights' Theatre, Gold had not yet achieved the stature he had during the 1930s, after the publication of his best seller Jews Without Money, and toward the end of that decade, when he became a sort of unofficial literary spokesperson for the Communist Party in America. Nonetheless, Gold's later prominence in left-wing literary circles and success as an author alone make this play worth studying. Third, the reactions to some of Gold's ideas about the play's content and its staging give interesting insights into the temper of its time. Thus, a study of the play provides some interesting insights into the life and works of Gold as well as the state of American culture during the late 1920s. In the stage directions to the version of Hoboken Blues in American Caravan, Gold writes: "No white men appear in this play. Where white men are indicated, they are played by Negroes in white caricature masks" (549). When the play was eventually produced, Edward Massey, the director, used an entirely white cast who played blacks by wearing blackface. Thus, what Gold intended at least in part as an attack on American racism became itself a basically racist production in the tradition of the minstrel show. Ironically, in an announcement of the show's opening, the Daily Worker even called it "a minstrel show comedy" ("Michael Gold's Play"). Actually, the text of the play itself may in some ways be racist, as Paul Robeson's reaction to it implies. …