TV Reviews : Rich Salute to an American Folklorist

Ruby Dee has fashioned a rich salute to an obscure American folklorist whose voice is as authentic as Mississippi mud. “Zora Is My Name!” on “American Playhouse” tonight (at 9 on Channel 28, 9:30 on Channel 15) infers that the little-known Zora Neale Hurston was a 20th-Century Joel Chandler Harris who recorded adult folk tales told by those “who lived on the other side of the crik.”

The production, written, performed and narrated by Dee, is expressionistically staged and visually bountiful under the liquid direction of Neema Barnette. But it is the ore of idiom and anecdote that Dee assembled from Hurston’s books (notably “Dust Tracks on the Road” and “Of Mules and Men”) that make this show sing.

The program is obviously a labor of love, but here that’s not a limpid sentiment. The KCET production introduces to most of us a Southern Afro-American literary figure whose portrayals of black life in the rural South in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s catch the map of Dixie from a unique aural perspective.

The aptly-named Zora (the “uncolonized African” as she’s admiringly called in a scene depicting the Harlem Renaissance) was born at the turn of the century in an all-black town in Florida, where we see her luminously played by Lynn Whitfield. Juxtaposing the young girl and the adult woman, the production dramatizes Zora collecting the oral stories of Southern and Haitian blacks so Negro folklore would not disappear.

It is quite clear that Zora Hurston, who died in 1960, leaving a trunk of manuscripts that were nearly destroyed, would be a major name today if she hadn’t been a black woman who came to flower in the Depression.

The show, which is loaded with flavorful characters played by Paula Kelly, Oscar Brown Jr., Beah Richards, Roger E. Mosley, Louis Gossett Jr., and Flip Wilson (as God), among others, catches the same cultural totems and spirits that earmark August Wilson’s plays, notably “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “Piano Lesson.”

Dee’s teleplay mines the language of metaphor and lively invective (“shovel-footed,” “butt-sprung”) and ends with Dee’s Zora reminiscing on a backwater front porch: “I been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots,” she says. “I’ve been raggedy but right, patchy but tight, stringy but I will hang on.”

Black History Month can feast on this one.