Television: New Pastures

Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures won an affectionate place on the U.S. stage and screen as a Negro folk version of the Old Testament. This week, on NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame (Thurs. 9:30 p.m., E.D.T.), TV will catch up to it with an adaptation by Playwright Connelly himself. But in the 27 years since Green Pastures excited Broadway, public attitudes toward both religion and the Negro have changed—and so has this week’s script. Many a theater lover might wistfully recall when Pastures looked greener.

In the new edition, De Lawd becomes The Lord; he speaks grammatically now, no longer smokes 10¢ see-gars, is not addressed by irreverent gamblers any more as Liver Lips or even High Pockets; instead they call him Preacher Man. According to a spokesman, the whole cast will speak with “a soft rural-type intonation” rather than the Negro dialect in Connelly’s Pulitzer Prizewinning script. Nobody will wear a derby. Cain still slays Abel, but morals are tightened up all through Genesis, e.g., instead of getting high on his keg of whisky, Noah just gets rosy. Perhaps the unkindest cut will fall on those who especially relished a Babylon that looked like a New Orleans nightclub or a celestial throne that resembled a Negro lawyer’s office in a Louisiana town. Said the spokesman: “There has been special emphasis in the physical production to point up the timelessness of the story—the fable aspect rather than any specific place or period.”