What our social studies teachers neglected to mention was that Langston Hughes spent most of the 1930s churning out poem after poem and play after play unflinchingly advocating revolution, calling on Blacks and whites to unite worldwide for the overthrow of capitalism and oppression.

While Hughes insisted that he was never a member of the Communist Party, poems like Good Morning Revolution, Goodbye Christ, and Put Another ‘S’ in the USA (“to make it Soviet”), made his radical convictions abundantly clear.

Upon returning from the Soviet Union in 1933, Hughes took up residence in Carmel, California where he helped organize support for a strike of migrant cotton pickers in the San Joaquin Valley.  It was this experience that inspired him to begin work on the play HARVEST (originally under the title BLOOD ON THE COTTON and then BLOOD ON THE FIELD) in collaboration with white Communist Party activist Ella Winter.

Outraged by such left-wing pursuits (and incensed by suggestions of an interracial affair between Hughes & Winter), a vigilante mob attacked Hughes’ lodgings in October of ’33.  Hughes was forced to leave the area and Winter withdrew her name from their co-authored script.

HARVEST was eventually produced by the radical troupe The Living Newspaper (of which our playhouse’s namesake Manny Fried was a proud member).  With a gargantuan cast, this documentary play tried to capture almost every detail of the 1933 Strike (the script calls for over 30 actors – for our rendition, we had to wheedle it down to a more manageable ensemble of 18).

One of Hughes’ earliest plays, HARVEST was written with much more concern for issues than dramatic structure – in fact, the script is filled with typos and mislabeled character names, even the numerical listing of scenes is out of sequence!
Inevitably, some literary aficionados will turn up their nose at this play for its lack of this or that theatrical convention.

But to do so is to miss the entire point.  Langston Hughes did not write this work to dazzle audiences with his command of dramatic technique, he wrote it to make a statement on our world and share with us the struggles of downtrodden people who he knew would be left out of the history books.

Here at Subversive Theatre, we take pride in telling the part of the story that social studies teachers leave out.  So we are very pleased to have this opportunity to present HARVEST as the fourth installment of our annual “Workers’ Power Play Series” and do our small part to help reclaim the full legacy of Langston Hughes . . . as well as the full story of the American Labor Movement!  

                                                                      Kurt Schneiderman.