Martin column: Book has NC writers put playwright Green in context

Many North Carolinians know who Paul Green is or was, but most can't tell you much about him.

He was certainly North Carolina’s greatest modern playwright as many of us learned when our teachers told us about the outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony,” the story of attempted colonization of North Carolina by the British, including, of course, the birth of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the “new world.”

Written by Green and first staged in 1937, it claims to be “the nation’s premier and longest-running outdoor symphonic drama.” Although it has been substantially revised, it is adapted from Pulitzer Prize Winning playwright Paul Green’s original script.

When he wrote “The Lost Colony, Green was already an established playwriter, having won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his Broadway play, “Abraham’s Bosom.” The Pulitzer Prize committee wrote, "The play does not sentimentalize on the tragic situation of the Negro. It is scrupulously fair to the white race. But it brings us face to face with one of the most serious of the social problems of this country and forces us to view this problem in the light of tragic pity.”

A new book, “Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State's Most Celebrated Playwright,” can help us understand why Green is still important as we try to find our and his place in changing times. The new book is edited by Georgann Eubanks, a prolific writer and executive director of the Paul Green Foundation, and Margaret Bauer, the Rives Chair of Southern Literature in the Department of English at East Carolina University and editor of the “North Carolina Literary Review.”

Eubanks and Bauer selected a varied group of current North Carolina-connected writers to help connect Green and his writing to current times: Jim Grimsley, Lynden Harris, Marjorie Hudson, Kathryn Hunter-Williams, Jill McCorkle, Ray Owen, Philip Shabazz, Mike Wiley, Synora Hunt Cummings, Ian Finley, Debra Kaufman and others.

If you expect these award-winning contemporary writers to be of one mind about Green, you will be disappointed.

For instance, Finley writes about Green’s effort to work in 1940 with famous Black author Richard Wright to prepare a script for a Broadway adaptation of Wright’s novel, “Native Son.” At first, they worked smoothly together with Green taking the lead in developing the dialogue.

Then they had a disagreement about the ending when the lead character, a murderer, is on death row. How and why will he die? What will be the message to the audience? Wright wanted him to die because he was driven to murder by the horrible conditions a Black man faced in a white-dominated world.

Green, on the other hand, wanted the murderer to accept some responsibility for his actions. They couldn't agree and their friendship faded.

Grimsley attempts to explain the racial setting of Green’s times and how both whites and Blacks contributed to the problems of the South. Both groups blamed their problems on the other, the regrettable ignorance of Black people and the intractable ignorance of the “white trash.” It was as if poor white people invented slavery and caused its problems to blossom while the aristocracy stood by helpless.

“So, we are left with a portrait of Green as a man who had liberal ideas about Black oppression, but also the baggage of unrecognized racism. As we all do,” Grimsley wrote.

If Green, who died in 1981, were alive today, he would have much to say about our current racial and other challenges.

Those of us who read the new book about Green will have a good idea about what he would say to us.