Dreams Deferred: Joseph Papp’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964) and Gloria Naylor’s “Cora Lee”

Abstract: This article analyzes Gloria Naylor’s transformation of Joseph Papp’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964) for the then-brand-new Mobile Theatre in New York into an imagined Afrocentric version of the play in “Cora Lee,” one of the interlocking stories in Naylor’s novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982). The article first historicizes Papp’s then-radical color-blind casting practices, documents the Public Theater’s outreach to underserved communities, particularly in Harlem, and addresses contemporary plaudits and critique of the Public Theater’s project in the Black and white press and from audience members whose responses were collected and analyzed by sociologists at the time. Then it offers close readings of Naylor’s chapter to support its argument that Naylor’s story fulfils multiple aesthetic and cultural tasks: it acknowledges her lifelong love of Shakespeare and the need for the arts and for public theater in all communities, especially in poor or minority ones; it implicitly limns the limitations of even well-meaning outreach projects such as Papp’s; and it offers a new vision for community building among the women, one that is radically inclusive, loving, realistic, and built through shared, culturally specific, creative expression.