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The Green Pastures is a play written in 1930 by Marc Connelly adapted from Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun (1928), a collection of stories written by Roark Bradford. [1] The play was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930. [2] It had the first all-black Broadway cast.
The Green Pastures is a 1936 American film depicting stories from the Bible as visualized by black characters. It starred Rex Ingram (in several roles, including "De Lawd"), Oscar Polk, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.
Marc Connelly was an American playwright, journalist, teacher, actor, and director, best-known for Green Pastures (a folk version of the Old Testament dramatized through the lives of blacks of the southern United States) and for the comedies that he wrote with George S. Kaufman.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Marcus Cook Connelly was born on December 13, 1890, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. His father, Patrick Joseph Connelly, was an actor and hotel owner, while his mother, Mabel Louise (maiden name Cook), was an actress. From 1902 until 1907, Connelly attended Trinity Hall, a private school in Washington, Pennsylvania. From 1908 until 1915, he was a repo...
Part 1
In Part I, Scene I of The Green Pastures, Reverend Deshee teaches Sunday schoolto a group of children in a Louisiana town. He explains the first five chapters of Genesis, after which the children ask him questions. Scene II takes place at a fish fry in pre-Creation Heaven. The fish fry is attended by angels of all ages. An Archangel arrives and hands out diplomas to all of the children. Then Gabriel arrives, followed by God. After tasting the boiled custard, God decides that the recipe needs...
Part II
Part II, Scene I takes place in God’s office. God is once again unhappy with the abundance of sin among human beings. He calls Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into his office and informs them that he has chosen one of their descendants, Moses, to lead his people to the Promised Land of Canaan, which God has set aside especially for them. In Scene II, God speaks to Moses, explaining the task for which he has been chosen. Moses is not convinced that he is hearing the voice of God until God first sets...
Adam
Adam is the first man created by God to inhabit the newly created Earth and to cultivate the land. Adam is at first puzzled by his existence. He is described as a man “of thirty, of medium height, dressed in the clothing of the average field hand.” God decides that Adam needs a family because “in yo’ heart you is a family man.” After Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit, they are thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
Archangel
An Archangel appears at the “fish fry” in Heaven. He is described as older than the other angels and has a white beard. His clothes are “much darker . . . and his wings a trifle more imposing.”
Cain
Cain is a son of Adam and Eve. When God comes down to Earth, he finds that Cain has just slain his brother, Abel, by hitting him on the head with a rock because, he claims, Abel had been making a “fool” of him. God tells Cain that he has committed a crime. He tells Cain to go as far away as possible. After traveling for a long time, Cain takes up with a country girl that he meets along the way.
Sin
A central theme of Connelly’s retelling of the stories of the Old Testament is sin. Ward W. Briggs, Jr., commented in Dictionary of Literary Biography,“The theme throughout is that man sins and is either punished or renounced by God.” The play presents the Earth and humans primarily from the perspective of God. Adam and Eve are the first sinners, and are punished by being thrown out of the Garden of Eden. After Cain has killed his brother Abel, God tells him, “I’m yere to tell you dat’s calle...
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
1. Connelly wrote and directed the 1936 film The Green Pastures,which was produced by Warner Brothers. 2. Connelly wrote an adaptation of The Green Pasturesfor a television broadcast in 1959. After the flood, when a prophet is killed in Babylon, God becomes so enraged that He renounces humanity. God tells the people By the end of the play, however, God realizes that He needs to be a more “merciful” God, sympathetic to human “suffering.”
Faith
While God finds mostly sinners upon the Earth, there are a few men who maintain their faith in him. Noah, for instance, appears as a country preacher, discouraged by the sinning of those all around him. Noah is rewarded for his faith when God gives him the plans and instructions to build an ark and save his family from the flood. Moses is another who maintains his faith in God. When God first speaks to him, however, he is not convinced, until He performs several miracles, at which point Moses...
Setting
The Green Pastures takes place in several key settings, all of which interpret Old Testament Biblical stories in the context of Southern, rural, locations inhabited by African Americans. Connelly chose these settings as the context in which to retell biblical stories because he imagined that rural, Southern African Americans probably imagined the stories of the Bible to take place in the same type of locations with which they were familiar. (Today, Connelly’s representation of such African-Am...
Costumes
The costuming of the play combines and translates traditional conceptions of biblical characters into a rural southern African-American setting. Some of the stage notes describing the costumes, however, contain elements of the stereotyping Connelly employed in attempting to represent African-American culture. The angels in Heaven wear “brightly colored robes and have wings protruding from their backs”; however, they otherwise “look like happy negroes at a fish fry.” God wears “a white shirt w...
Biblical References and “Artistic License”
Almost all of the characters in The Green Pasturesare drawn directly from the Old Testament: God, Gabriel, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Moses, etc. Connelly, however, took “artistic license” in creating several supplemental fictional characters to tell his version of these traditional biblical stories. The term “artistic license” is used to describe a writer’s claim to the right to bend or alter facts, events, or characters in an unrealistic way to better suit her or his narrative conce...
African-American History and Culture in the 1920s-1930s
The Green Pastures was first produced in 1929, the year of the stock market crash that brought on the Great Depression. One reason for the play’s continued popularity throughout the 1930s may have been due to the massive migration of African Americans from the Southseeking employment in Northern cities. Since Connelly’s play was seen primarily by white audiences, his portrayal of rural, Southern African Americans as humble, pious, “simple” people may have held a particular appeal to white Nor...
COMPARE & CONTRAST
1. 1930s: America is in the midst of the Great Depression, caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929—the same year in which The Green Pastures was first produced. The Great Depression is characterized by the worst unemployment in U. S. history, with about twenty-five percent of eligible workers unable to find jobs. 1990s:America enjoys a period of economic prosperity, characterized by low unemployment, and many middle-class Americans profiting from investments in the stock market. 2. 1920s-193...
The Prohibition Era
In The Green Pastures, drinking alcohol—particularly on Sunday—is one of the sinful activities that God observes among the people he has created. Reference to drinking in 1929 is especially significant because it was in the midst of the Prohibition era in the United States, during which the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol was prohibited by federal law. Prohibition began in 1919, with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, and lasted until 1933, when it was rescinded by the...
The Green Pastures is Connelly’s most outstanding literary achievement, garnering him a Pulitzer Prize, and, according to Ward W. Briggs, Jr., “theatrical immortality.” Paul T. Nolan states, “The Green Pastures is the finest single piece of writing that Mr. Connelly has ever done,” adding, “‘The Green Pastures’. . . is the one play by Connelly that...
Liz Brent
Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in film studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema. In the following essay, Brent discusses elements of legitimate African-American culture in Connelly’s play. In the “Author’s Note” to the 1929 edition of The Green Pastures,Marc Connelly explains his intent in depicting stories from the Old Testament as peopled by everyday African Americans and set in rural Louis...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Voices Off-Stage: A Book of Memoirs(1968), by Marc Connelly, is Connelly’s autobiographical account of his life on Broadway and in Hollywood. 2. Marc Connelly(1969) by Paul T. Nolan provides discussion of nearly all of Connelly’s major works to the late 1960s. 3. “De Lawd”: Richard B. Harrison and The Green Pastures(1986) by Walter C. Daniel is an account of the history of Connelly’s play, as produced in the early 1930s. The discussions focuses on actor Richard B. Harrison, whose role as G...
Paul T. Nolan
The following chapter essay discusses elements within and surrounding Marc Connelly’s play, including the composition and history of the work, its critical and social status, and its thematic elements. The Green Pastures is, undoubtedly, among the half dozen or so most respected plays in American dramatic literature. It gave Mr. Connelly an international reputation, a private fortune, and a great deal of personal satisfaction. Unfortunately for his other works, it also gave many theater criti...
Briggs, Jr., Ward W., “Marc Connelly,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists,edited by John MacNicholas, Gale Group, 1981, pp. 124-30. Connelly, Marc, The Green Pastures: A Fable,Farrar & Rinehart, 1929, pp. XV-XVI. ———, Voices Offstage: A Book of Memoirs,Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, p. 258. Daniel,...
Baker-Fletcher, Garth, ed., Black Religion after the Million Man March: Voices on the Future,Orbis Books, 1998. Bascom, William, African Folktales in the New World,Indiana University Press, 1992. Bryan III, J., Merry Gentlemen (and One Lady),Atheneum, 1987. Filler, Louis, ed., American Anxieties: A Collective Portrait of the 1930s,Transaction, 1993...
The Green Pastures: Directed by Marc Connelly, William Keighley. With Rex Ingram, Oscar Polk, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Frank H. Wilson. God, heaven, and several Old Testament stories, including the Creation and Noah's Ark, are described supposedly using the perspective of rural, black Americans.
The Green Pastures is a fable written by Marc Connelly. The book tells the story of a group of African American children who gather under a tree to listen to their elders tell stories about the Bible. The stories are retellings of the Old Testament, but with a twist.
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The Green Pastures, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Marc Connelly, is a reenactment of stories of the Old Testament in which all the characters (including God) are African American and speak in a black southern dialect. The play was first performed at the Mansfield Theatre in New York City in 1930. Connelly attributes his idea for the play ...
