Their Eyes Were Watching God, I fell in love with Hurtson's language and the world of Eatonville.

It wasn't until years later that I learned the two of them had a friendship - a beautiful yet tumultuous friendship that truly made a rift in the history of literature.

I was drawn to this period of their lives because we often learn of our idols after they've been actualized and accomplished. In this play, we meet Zora and Langston in their youth. And both are in a state of discovery, trying to determine not only who they are as artists, but also as individuals. It was an exciting period of curiosity and exploration.

I wanted to tell a story that allowed these two literary icons to be human and flawed. To explore some of their mistakes, while also holding up a mirror to ourselves. When researching for the play, I couldn't help but find myself in Zora and Langston. The obsession of the artist. The longing for greatness. The killing of our egos. The need for inspiration. And the lifelong question of: am I enough?

This story is only possible through the incredible work of our actors, who committed themselves for the past few months to research, character development, and tedious amounts of scene work. I have been extremely privileged to work with such an amazing group of professionals, and I can't wait for you to see their artistry.

To Aaliyah, our incredible stage manager, who's tireless efforts, diligence, and organization was invaluable to the success of the show. Thank you!

To Rebecca, my mother, who encouraged me to create this script and provided copious materials along the way for research. Your unwavering support throughout the years has made me into the artist I am today. I love you!

And to William, my partner, whose love and encouragement has grounded and supported me throughout this process, knowing that with you by my side, anything is possible. Je t'aime, mon amour! 

This script took over five years to complete and it has truly been a labor of love. My hope is that you will leave this production with a new perspective of these heroes and that you might find yourselves somewhere in their stories. I know I have.

Imani Mitchell

PRODUCTION TEAM

Stage Manager
Aaliyah Peters

Costume Design
Imani Mitchell

Hair Design
Corey D. Winfield 

Set Design
Eric Broadwater

Sound Design
Imani Mitchell

Set Builders
James Ellison III
Tony Parker

Seamstress
Tasia Turner

Box Office Manager
Rhonda Clark

Volunteer Coordinator
Voress Franklin

Marketing
Elizabeth Baidoo

Photography
Jonathan Martinez

Angel Rodriguez Loza

Poster Art
Hans Bennewitz

Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early 1920s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England.

Hughes returned to the United States in 1924 and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in 1929. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926. Hughes’s influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation: “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

Hughes penned novels, short stories, plays, operas, essays, works for children, and an autobiography. Hughes’s sexuality is debated by scholars, with some finding homosexual codes and unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover to indicate he was homosexual. His primary biographer, Arnold Rampersad, notes that Hughes exhibited a preference for African American men in his work and his life, but was likely asexual.

Writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston celebrated the African American culture of the rural South. She wrote several novels as well as books of black mythology, legends, and folklore.

Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Ala. Although she claimed to be born in 1901 in Eatonville, Fla., she moved with her family to Eatonville only as a small child. When she was 16 years old she joined a traveling theater company and ended up in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston attended Howard University from 1921 to 1924 and in 1925 won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas. She graduated from Barnard in 1928 and for two years pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University. She also conducted field studies in folklore among African Americans in the South. One result of these studies was the book Mules and Men (1935), a collection of folklore presented within the framework of a unifying narrative.

Hurston’s background was also reflected in her novels, most of which incorporated elements of folklore to some degree. After studying in Haiti and Jamaica in 1936, she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which was widely considered her finest novel. It told the story of a young black woman’s growth toward self-awareness and independence. Hurston’s other novels were Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the tale of a black preacher; the allegorical Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948).

For a number of years Hurston was on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham. She also was on the staff of the Library of Congress. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an autobiography, is highly regarded. Despite her early promise, by the time of her death Hurston was little remembered by the general reading public, but there was a resurgence of interest in her work in the late 20th century. Several other collections were published posthumously, including Spunk: The Selected Stories (1985), The Complete Stories (1995), and Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales from the South. In 1995 the Library of America published a two-volume set of her work in its series. Hurston died on Jan. 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Fla.

Alain LeRoy Locke was a philosopher, writer, and educator born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a family of educators and distinguished civil servants.

Locke, a sickly but bright child, excelled academically throughout his schooling. He graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1907 and became the first African American to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar. As a Rhodes Scholar we was admitted to Hertford College at Oxford where he studied literature, philosophy, Greek, and Latin. He also studied philosophy at the University of Berlin in Germany.

As work was limited for African American scholars, he joined the faculty of Howard University in 1912,teaching English. After receiving a PhD in philosophy at Harvard in 1918, Locke returned to Howard and formed one of the first philosophy departments at a historically black college.

Locked created a booklet series, Bronze Booklets on the History, Problems, and Cultural Contributions of the Negro, based in social science and race relations and partnered with National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) to educate the masses. The booklets became a standard reference for teaching African American history.

Locke is best known as the creator of the philosophical concept New Negrowhich would initiate the Harlem Renaissance (1925–1939), a period of significant contributions of African American artists, writers, poets, and musicians. In 1925, he edited the book, The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African American art and literature. Locke also organized traveling art exhibitions of African American artists and mentored many talented writers and poets including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Locke identified as gay among his friends and peers, but never disclosed this information publicly. He also reportedly encouraged and supported African American LGBTQ+ artists and writers during the Harlem Renaissance. Locke retired from Howard University in 1953 and moved to New York City. After being in ill health for some time, Locke died from complications of heart disease on June 9, 1954, at age 69.

Carl Van Vechten was born on June 17, 1880 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. At an early age, he developed an interest in music and theater, which he found hard to satisfy in his hometown. He left Iowa in 1899 to attend the University of Chicago. In Chicago he was able to explore art, music, and opera. He became interested in writing and contributed to the University of Chicago Weekly.

After college, Van Vechten's first job was with the Chicago American. In addition to covering a broad range of topics, he was occasionally asked to provide photographs to go along with his copy.

In 1906, when Van Vechten moved to New York City, he was hired as the assistant music critic at the New York Times. His interest in opera prompted him to take a leave of absence from the Times in 1907, to examine this art form in Europe. While in England he married his long time friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Snyder. The marriage would end in divorce in 1912.

Van Vechten returned to his job at the New York Times in 1909 and soon became the first American critic of modern dance. At that time, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York.

In 1914, Van Vechten married actress Fania Marinoff. He left his full time newspaper job in the spring, but he continued to write, and published several collections of his essays relating to music, ballet, and cats. Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works, Van Vechten's first novel, was published in 1922.

Van Vechten became very interested in promoting black artists and writers. He was an avid collector of ephemera and books pertaining to black arts and letters and a frequent visitor to Harlem. These experiences provided the inspiration for his controversial novel, Nigger Heaven, which was published in 1926. In the future, he would photograph many of the creative people he met in Harlem.

In the early 1930s, Miguel Covarrubias introduced Van Vechten to the 35mm Leica camera. He began photographing his large circle of friends and acquaintances. His earlier career as a writer and his wife's experience as an actress provided him with access to both fledgling artists and the established cultural figures of the time. Some of his subjects from this period include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude Stein.

Van Vechten's portraits are frequently busts or half-length poses, in front of bold backdrops. Dancers were usually photographed on stage. Van Vechten did his own darkroom work, but frequently used an assistant to help set up lights for the portrait sittings.

Charlotte Osgood Mason was a white-American socialite and philanthropist. 

Born Charlotte Louise Van der Veer Quick, she was from Franklin Park, New Jersey. She was the daughter of Peter Quick and Phoebe Van der Veer. She was raised by her maternal grandfather, Schenck Van der Veer, whose last name she took.  She married Rufus Osgood Mason on April 27, 1886.  She came from a rich family, and her wealth increased after the death of her husband, Rufus Osgood Mason. 

She used her wealth to support artists such as Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, Arthur Fauset, and Miguel Covarrubias of the Harlem Renaissance, particularily Zora Neale Hurston's project of Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", 1927, unpublished until 2018.  While all of the supportive black interest and in­tervention on behalf of Mason, her role in Harlem Renaissance scholarship was also controlling, demeaning, and patronizing.  

Critique of Mason and dismissal of her as a delusional tyrant, scholars have attacked her essentialist views glossing over the fact that other white and prominent black leaders shared her tendency toward essentialist thinking.  Mason’s biography confirms that “the most detailed information on her life is in the auto­ biographies and biographies of the major Harlem Renaissance figures she patronized.” 

Mason achieved much of the anonymity and obscurity she sought, even avoiding a published obituary in the New York Times. Tracing her portrayal through autobiographical, bi­ographical, and other scholarly accounts reveals a loss of the nuances of complex human relationships and the evolution of an immediately recognizable caricature of a white-haired, racist tyrant perched high atop her throne. 

Inseparable in Harlem Renaissance studies is her search for spiritual illumination through the art of what she saw as primitive peoples; Mason typified the evils of white patronage in the face of essentialist agendas for racial uplift that extended from Harlem Renaissance leaders like Alain Locke to modern scholarship on the age of the New Negro.

Louise Alone Thompson Patterson was a prominent American social activist and college professor. Patterson's early experiences of isolation and persecution on the West Coast had a profound impact on her later activism. She recognized the ways in which racism and discrimination affected individuals and communities and dedicated her life to challenging these systems of oppression.

Her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural awakening in African American communities, allowed her to connect with other artists and activists who were similarly committed to social justice. In addition to her notable contributions to civil rights activism, Thompson Patterson was also recognized as one of the pioneering Black women to be admitted to the University of California at Berkeley.

2024 SEASON OF BLACK GIRL MAGIC

SEASON/FLEX PASSES ON SALE NOW!

FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

ZORA & LANGSTON

TOPDOG / UNDERDOG

MUD, RIVER, STONE

CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY

TINKER THE TOY MAKER

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TOPDOG / UNDERDOG

Written By Suzan-Lori Parks

Directed by Melinda Wilson-Ramey

June 7 – 23, 2024

TOPDOG/UNDERDOG is a darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, telling the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names, given to them as a joke, foretell a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by their past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2023 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play!

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Celebration Arts cannot exist without the generous support of our donors. As a volunteer-run organization for more than 36 years, all proceeds from ticket sales are applied towards operational costs to produce shows and keep our doors open. Unfortunately tickets sales do not come close to covering these expenses.

We are dependent on your generosity to continue bringing theatrical productions and educational opportunities to our community. Contributions of any amount make a significant impact to the livelihood of our theater from helping us pay our rent and upkeep of our facilities, to giving small stipends to our performers and helping us spread the word to attract patrons to the theater.

Thank you so much for your support!

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We are incredibly excited to announce a collab with BLACK ARTIST FOUNDRY to bring the BLACK GIRL MAGIC ART EXHIBITION to the community!

For the 2024 Season of Black Girl Magic, our walls have been transformed into an art gallery, and patrons will experience awe-inspiring works from 11 talented Black women artists who call Sacramento home.

We thank Abayomi Brownfield, Aliyah Sidqe, Beth Consetta Rubel, Michaela Stewart, Nataki Owino, Noelle Tavares, Nia Brown, Omonivie Okhade, Shani Zuberi, Shawntay Gorman, and Tasha Nichole King for sharing their works in a celebration of the Black woman in beauty, strength and complexity.

Stay tuned for more info about the artists and upcoming special events.

Be sure to leave time to explore the gallery and your opportunity to add works for sale to your personal collection!

Image Credits: 
Noelle Taveres, “Jerrod: An Ode to Solange,” 2023. Mixed media on canvas, 24”x30.”

Aliyah Sidqe, “Family Portrait,” 2022. Oil on canvas, “16x20.”

Shawntay Gorman, “Asaili Dickson,” 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 36”x36.”