Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life is a 1930 play by American authors Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
Both critics suggested the play might have been much better had Hughes and Hurston finished their collaborati.
Also writing in The New York Times, David Richards said of Mule Bone: it\'s just not a very good play.
He described it as a broad, often bland quasi-musical.
Reviewing Mule Bone for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that it was an evening that can most kindly be described as innocuous.
It opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway on February 14, 1991, to generally negative reviews.
Mule Bone was produced for the first time in 1991 by the Lincoln Center Theater, more than 60 years after it was written.
The two men return to Eatonville.
Jim and Dave are reconciled, and neither remains interested in courting Daisy.
The contest ends when it becomes clear that Daisy expects her man to work for the white people who employ her.
The two men engage in a war of words to try to show which of them loves Daisy more.
She demonstrates the sincerity of her affection and Dave comes upon the couple.
She tells him she\'s been worried about him, but he\'s skeptical.
Act III takes place some time later, with Daisy encountering Jim outside of town.
Joe Clarke declares Jim guilty and banishes him from town for two years.
Elder Childers, representing Dave, says Samson used a donkey\'s jawbone to kill 3,000 men (citing Judges 18:18), so the hock bone of a mule must be even more powerful.
Elder Simms argues on Jim\'s behalf that a weapon is necessary to commit a crime, and nowhere in the Bible does it say a mule bone is a weapon.
Jim admits he hit Dave but denies it was a crime.
The issue to be decided at the trial is whether or not Jim has committed a crime.
The townspeople are divided along religious lines: Jim\'s Methodist supporters sit on one side of the church, Dave\'s Baptist supporters on the other.
On Monday, the trial begins in the Macedonia Baptist Church.
Jim is arrested and held for trial in Joe Clarke\'s barn.
The two men come to blows, and Jim picks up a hock bone from a mule and knocks Dave out.
The play begins in Eatonville, Florida, on a Saturday afternoon with Jim and Dave fighting for Daisy\'s affection.
Mule Bone was not staged until 1991, when it was produced in New York City by the Lincoln Center Theater.
The process of writing the play led Hughes and Hurston, who had been close friends, to sever their relationship.
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life is a 1930 play by American authors Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston
