All God's Chillun Got Wings Add a review

All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) is an expressionist play by Eugene O'Neill about miscegenation inspired by the old Negro spiritual. He began developing ideas for the play in 1922, emphasising its authenticity in his notes: "Base play on his experience as I have seen it intimately." O'Neill wrote the play in the autumn of 1923 and revised the text only slightly for its 1924 publication. Arguably one of his most controversial of plays, it starred Paul Robeson in the premiere, in which he portrayed the Black husband of an abusive White woman, who, resenting her husband's skin colour, destroys his promising career as a lawyer.