The play "Mulatto" was produced with the intentions of being enjoyably viewed by the American audience. It was, what Turner calls, "the first professional dramatization of a conflict between a mulatto and his father."5.
At this point in American history, it was not intended that white men had sexual relations with the slave women. To do so, would be detrimental to ones reputation. Critic, Doland Hubbard, a professor and chairperson of the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University, stated "The colonel cannot publicly acknowledge his black children; to do so would be tantamount to undermining the credibility of the system that empowers him, and which has shaped his image of himself." And for this reason, a situation such as this was not commonly heard about in America, and up to the production of this play may not have been known of, made for a great reenactment for a play.6.
However, it was not only the events that made this one of Hughes's work worth reading or viewing. Darwin T. Turner gives credit for the lay's strengths to the individuality and power of the characterizations.7 .
First, Robert is an interesting character whom defies customary rituals and has the quality of strong individualism (Turner, 7). Although all of Robert's siblings have adapted to the ways things are Robert refused to back down and to result to submission and doing what the whites thought to be right. .
Hubbard mentions in his criticism that Robert, like other characters Hughes had portrayed, is one to "resist definitional certainty in that they do not conform to the stereo type of the submissive, fawning "darky" (Hubbard, 7). Also, Ella Forbes, critic in Trotman's collection titled Langston Hughes; The Man, His Art, and Contemporary Reviews, reminds us that this part of Robert's character was both the death and freedom of him. She explained that "Robert's resistance to his situations leads him to a self-destructive, but ultimately liberating end.