The Yale Repertory Theatre is on a roll of rediscovery. The theater’s current production of Zora Neale Hurston‘s” Spunk” is an even bigger deal than last season’s revival of Steve Carter’s “Eden.”
“Spunk” is a spirited, fun-loving, community-building, thought-provoking folk musical drama about life, love, death, spiritual and moral quandaries, silliness, dancing, the South, the 1930s and more, filtered through the Harlem Renaissance sensibility of one of the greatest Black writers of the 20th century.
“Eden,” staged at the Yale Rep in January, was a gorgeous new production of a play from the experimental and radical downtown New York theater scene of the 1970s, realized on a scale its playwright could have only dreamed about. “Spunk” is a 90-year old script from a much earlier era of black theater in New York, given the same high productions but in a different style — more open, less set-bound, a deft melding of old-fashioned melodrama and modern ensemble drama styles.
“Spunk” is unbelievably making its world premiere. Hurston’s script, based on her own short story of the same title, was literally lost by the Library of Congress (where it had been sent for copyright purposes) sometime between the 1930s and when it was rediscovered in 1997. Catherine Sheehy, who runs the dramaturgy program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and is one of the two dramaturgs on this production, got her hands on the script nearly 25 years ago and has been championing it ever since. In Tamilla Woodard, who attended the Yale School of Drama and now runs its acting program, “Spunk” has a director who understands both the play’s legacy and its potential.
One of the lively musical scenes from the 1930s melodrama “Spunk” at Yale Repertory Theatre. (Joan Marcus)
This production works on many levels. You could see how other directors might feel the need for an onstage band to back the actors, but this one makes the daring move of having the performers be the musicians, and letting the songs be as prominent as the dramatic scenes.
“Spunk,” which is not to be confused with a completely different Hurston-based theater project also titled “Spunk” that New York’s Public Theater did in 1990, has got a sturdy structure, an engaging story about a charismatic guitar-playing grifter who turns a small southern Black community upside down with his brash ideas, dozens of songs and the potential for intense special effects due to its life and death issues.
The Yale Rep’s “content guidance” statement notes that the play contains “profanity, racial slurs, violence, depictions of ritual practices and brief moments of intimate contact,” which will give you sense of the Hurston’s adventurousness as a writer. Hurston based the play on a 20-page short story which has less frantic plot twists, far fewer characters and a very different ending. The story also has little of the play’s boisterous humor. Of course, the passionate singing takes the stage production to a different level all its own.
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The “Spunk” short story sets its plot and tone within a few sentences, while the play delivers a work song, a solo blues number and a gospel song all in quick succession at the top of the show before you barely have a handle on who these people are and what’s going on.
The audience gets excited by the vigor of the dancing and joking and expressions of undying love. The drifter theme has been trendy lately, what with the Elvis-styled “All Shook Up” at the Goodspeed a couple of months ago, August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at Hartford Stage this past February and the success of Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s.” These are all shows about loners who unexpectedly find themselves in loving and welcoming communities and are changed as a result.
At the heart of “Spunk” is a love story. The title character is played by J. Quinton Johnson, whose Broadway credits include “Hamilton” (as Hercules Mulligan) and “Choir Boy” (as the bully Bobby Marrow). Johnson combines an outwards goofiness with inner strength. He sings with great spirit, accompanying himself on guitar, which completes the full emotional picture of a character who’s still finding his place in the world.
As Evalina, the woman with whom Spunk falls in love much to the consternation of her husband Jim Bishop, Kimber Elayne Sprawl (who just played Emilia in the Denzel Washington/Jake Gyllenhaal “Othello” on Broadway) comes off as a self-aware heroine making her own choices. As Jim, Naiqui Macabroad expands the range of the character’s anger and avoids being a one-note cartoon villain.
The love story at the center of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk”: Kimber Elayne Sprawl as Lina and J. Quinton Johnson as Spunk. (Joan Marcus)
In the arguments between Spunk and Jim there is some awkward sexist dialogue about the disparate roles of men and women in a relationship, but the production parries this nicely by lifting Spunk and Lina’s love into a stratosphere that disregards old societal values, just as it builds the vengeful anger of Jim Bishop’s father Hodge (a blistering performance by Charlie Hudson III, last seen at the Rep in the revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 2011) into a pageant of psychological distress and sorcery filtered through some magnificent special effects credited to sound designer Justin Ellington and projection designer Ke Xu.
Woodward, whose only previous directing gig at the Yale Rep was the sensitive civil rights drama “the ripple, the wave that carried me home” in 2023, makes full use of the wide, deep proscenium stage at the University Theater. Not only does “Spunk” have a large cast, the characters do things like play croquet and hold funeral processions, which can take up a lot of room. Woodward’s spatial sense is matched by her special sense of pacing, crucial when a tragic or dramatic moment is followed by a comic line that brings the house down.
The supporting actors, stay firmly in character — most of them are small community archetypes like gossips, good-natured working folk and those whose fan-like attraction to Spunk is unrequited — so that when the melodramatic moods abruptly shift, they can safely shift back at any moment with a well-timed quip by an easily recognizable comic relief character.
This is one grand play, grounded in uplifting music and community spirit and good old surefire theater tricks.
One has to wonder why this fun melodramatic folk musical hasn’t been done until now. Yes, it was stuck in a filing cabinet for decades, but it was also found over a quarter century ago. We can only imagine the range of interpretations, dramatically and musically, that could have happened if this script had been given the attention it deserved all along. This script deserves to have many other productions, and none of them would be like this one — which, if you haven’t figured that out yet, is astounding. Let this production pave the way for many more.
“Spunk” runs through Oct. 25 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 222 York St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. $15-$65. yalerep.org.
