On Being Forty was mostly negative, but it did hint at dramatic depth that would make Spence's 1927 play Undertow one of her lasting works, and one of the few plays from the Harlem Renaissance era that can be successfully produced today. Undertow is about a woman who returns to Harlem after many years in the South to take back the man she loves, from his wife. The hint of racial overtones is also present in the script, as the man's dark-skinned wife is obsessed with light skin of his former lover, and she eventually destroys their attempt to reunite. Spence uses the ethnicity of the characters in Undertow as part of plot development, instead of racial propaganda. Spence did not agree with Du Bois' political views in regards to the theater, but her plays are not entirely apolitical. She frequently addressed issues such as racism, infidelity, and the roles of women, using comedy as a medium because she felt it provided other ways, such as satire, to bring awareness to the African-American experience. While her characters "were undeniably black", Spence avoided racial themes in her plays in favor of universal themes. Use of black dialect Spence was a disciple of Alain Locke, who believed that black theatre "should woo its audiences into appreciating its African roots." During the mid-1920s, a time when there was conflict about how African-Americans should be represented on stage, she insisted on using Black dialect in her plays. In 1929, when asked by Willis Richardson to submit a play without dialect, she replied that she was "very sorry indeed, that I have no play on hand suitable for the book you have in mind." This response is an example of how important she felt the use of dialect was to accurately portray the characters she wrote about, many of whom were poor and lived in urban environments that included prostitution and gambling. Spence's use of black dialect onstage, considered "a bold and dangerous choice", actually "underscored race consciousness" by dramatizing black women's struggle to maintain racial and gender identity. According to Adrienne Macki Braconi, "Spence's work serves as a paradigm to examine the presence of dialect on the stage in black drama, taking into account how linguistic patterns confirm ethnicity on-stage and what that suggests in performance." Legacy Eulalie Spence was considered one of the Harlem Renaissance's rising young playwrights, although she did not have