"Deep River Did It": Fuenteovejuna , Harlem Suitcase Theater, and the Performative Potential of Archival Marginalia

Abstract: This article witnesses a performance that only happened within the archive: a partial translation of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna created by African American writer Dorothy Peterson during the Harlem Renaissance. She intended for Langston Hughes to take her literal translation and rework it poetically for Harlem Suitcase Theater. The project did not come to fruition because the theater folded in 1926. This performance that never happened lives within Hughes's collected papers, chronicled in the letters Peterson and Hughes exchanged about the project, as well as in Peterson's hand-notated blueprint for Hughes's never-completed adaptation. It crackles with archival potential energy, ready to resituate Lope's play within the context of the Harlem Renaissance. This article examines these archival traces, mining Peterson's nuanced interventions into Lope's text to innervate both the state of suspended animation of Peterson and Hughes's vision and the resonance this potential performative energy carries today.