AMERICAN THEATRE: Maybe the title should have been a warning. In attempting to adapt one of her short stories into a major theatrical work with the poet Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston might have looked twice at the name “The Bone of Contention.” That’s precisely what the writing project between this pair of Harlem Renaissance icons turned into, when their efforts to turn Hurston’s story into an ambitious folk epic of Black life, which they gave the new title Mule Bone, imploded over copyright claims and recriminations, with disastrous ripple effects on an entire artistic ecosystem.
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