It’s one thing to celebrate the discovery of a lost play by a Harlem Renaissance giant.
It’s quite another to gamble that a play written in 1935 will strike a chord with a 21st century audience, said Tamilla Woodard, who will direct Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk,” at Yale Repertory Theatre, through Oct. 25. This will be the first full staging of the play, considered lost until the Library of Congress uncovered it in 1997.
Two years ago, Woodard tried Hurston’s “Spunk” out in a residency at the Mercury Store in New York.
“We wanted to see if these twentysomethings could get into this play,” said Woodard, who also serves as chair of the acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She was delighted with the response. “They were leaning into this thing about deserving people getting what they deserved. It was like, ‘Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice?’ They were hungry for this old-fashioned parable in this confused and absurd world that we live in right now.”
Although the theater received a notice from the National Endowment for the Arts in May that it would cut $30,000 for the production of the play, Woodard said, “The commitment is really strong for the play to open this 100th year of drama school season and I really wasn’t worried that we would not be able to make our way forward.”
In July, Caitlin S. Griffin, a spokesman for the theater, said the cut was “damaging but not destructive,” and referred to an earlier statement by Yale School of Drama Dean James Bundy that the theater’s “commitment to producing the play is unwavering.”
Playing with themes like fate, destiny, love, ghosts, small-town gossip and the power of “hoodoo,” or conjure work, Hurston wrote the short story “Spunk” in 1925, while she was studying at Columbia University, the first black woman to do so.
“Spunk” was published in Opportunity, A Journal of Negro Life, an academic journal for Black Americans, and included in Alain Locke’s anthology of up-and-coming Black authors, “The New Negro” the same year. Ten years later, Hurston adapted the story as a play, including more of the folklore and local customs she had observed as an anthropologist and grown up with in the south.
By the time she wrote the play version of “Spunk,” she had conducted her own ethnographic research and was herself so steeped in the traditions of the south that she infused the play with it, according to the Roundabout Theatre Company, which produced “Spunk” in 2021.
“Spunk” begins with the arrival of a tall, handsome stranger with “undeniable charisma and divine musicianship,” according to a news release from the theater. When Spunk locks eyes with the married Evalina, passion ignites. “Spunk” is a love triangle with a twist – the aggrieved husband is also the local conjurer. That’s where “Spunk” gets a little … ghostly.
Hurston had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study voodoo and other African religions in Jamaica and Haiti, which she later described as “like explaining the planetary theory on a postage stamp.” Hurston had grown up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Fla., where hoodoo or “root work” was common. In “Spunk” and works like “Of Mules and Men,” its hold on the writer’s imagination is tenacious.
Although many of her contemporaries assailed Hurston for her use of Black vernacular in her plays and stories, claiming it turned Black people into caricatures, Woodard disagrees.
“That was a great tension with her,” she said. “She herself was – this is my language – excommunicated” by many in the Harlem Renaissance, Woodard said.
“She was a bit of a troublemaker. She was an outlier. Not always. Many of the folks, her peers, in what is called the Harlem Renaissance really had an agenda about ‘uplifting the race’ and (believed) there was a particular way in which to do that,” Woodard said.
Woodard said Hurston agreed, but “the fact is that, culturally, Black folks are diverse. Not everybody has to have the same idea and thought in order to be legitimate or authentic. That’s something that we struggle with currently, right now. The work she was bringing forward was so wholly herself. It was authentic to her and her expression of herself. Putting that forward was was an expression of her own authenticity.”
“Spunk” was a way for Hurston to assert that “these stories matter,” Woodard said. “These people are as significant and as important people to know as people that are suffering or thriving in the Northeast or Chicago or wherever they lived. They exist. They love. They are wholly, fully complex, beautiful humans.”
Yale Repertory Theatre will present the first-ever full staging of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk,” through Oct. 25, at the University Theater, 222 York St., New Haven. For information, visit yalerep.org or call 203- 432-1234.
This article originally published at New Haven’s Yale Rep will stage ‘Spunk,’ a rediscovered work by Zora Neale Hurston.
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