Three plays

About

Three plays by Zora Neale Hurston (1930s), each a vignette of Black Southern/urban vernacular life: "Lawing and Jawing" is a raucous courtroom comedy where a wildly biased judge dispenses absurd sentences with more swagger than justice; "Forty Yards" stages a football game as call-and-response crowd songs between rival Howard and Lincoln fans; "Woofing" follows porch-and-street flirtation, checkers, and needling banter among neighbors on a Waycross, Georgia street. Written in Hurston's signature dialect-rich style, the plays trade plot for atmosphere — sharp dialogue, folk song, and comic bravado carrying each scene. Unpublished in her lifetime, they're now preserved via the Library of Congress's American Memory Collection.