Zora

Presented in a single evening as “Two One-act Plays by Laurence Holder” with When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

From Frank Rich’s review in the NY Times, July 15, 1981

Mr. Holder’s heroine, the novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, …[was] born in Eatonville, Fla., at the turn of the century, [and] she arrived in New York on a Barnard scholarship in anthropology in 1925. She became a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, only to fall out later on with such associates as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Though an independent-minded black nationalist to the end, she embraced conservative Republicanism late in life before dying in poverty and obscurity in 1960.

Mr. Holder has tried to compress this extremely complex story into one tearful, autobiographical monologue that Hurston delivers in a bus station in 1949, shortly after she was slapped with a trumped-up morals charge. …[T]he playwright captures his heroine’s flamboyance and unearned suffering, [and] convinces us that there’s a far bigger play in ”Zora” [that] leaves us equally convinced… he’s just the man to write it.