Spunk at Yale Rep
The Yale Rep in New Haven, Connecticut, has unearthed a treasure in Zora Neale Hurston’s exuberant 1935 play with music, Spunk. It was never produced and lay forgotten before being rediscovered in the Library of Congress in 1997.
Refurbished and lovingly fleshed out with new songs by Nehemiah Luckett, choreography by nicHi douglas, and pitch-perfect direction by Tamilla Woodard, Spunk is nothing less than a triumph and may be the best show I’ve ever seen at the Rep.
Spunk began as a brief but pungent short story. Published in the 1925 anthology “The New Negro,” the story established Hurston as one of the shining lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s stage version makes some telling changes to the story with wondrous effect, so it might be fun to read the story before you see the show.
Spunk (J. Quinton Johnson) is a handsome, charismatic loner with a guitar strapped to his back. When he wanders into a small town he is subjected to the intensity of the female gaze. Ruby (Kimberly Marable) claims first dibs but Spunk is drawn to the willowy Evaline (Kimber Elayne Sprawl) and the feeling is reciprocated.
The small problem is that Evalina is married to Jim (Naiqui Macabroad) who takes exception and confronts Spunk with fatal results. As it happens, Jim’s father, Hodge (Charlie Hudson III), is a “conjure man” skilled in the ways of hoodoo, and he summons his demigods to wreak a hideous revenge on Spunk.
That is the barebones plot of Spunk, one that is as old as the proverbial hills, and if Hurston had left it at that her script might well have been better off languishing in obscurity. What elevates Spunk to the realm of the sublime is Hurston’s own bit of conjuring magic.
Hurston was an anthropologist with a degree from Columbia where she rubbed shoulders with Margaret Mead and Franz Boas. She conducted ethnographic and musicological research in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, and beyond and she brought the fruits of that knowledge to the stage.
The village, the world in which the story of Spunk unfolds, is perhaps the most important character in the play. With the able assistance of Woodard and her creative colleagues Spunk brings to vibrant life a vanished world of African-American struggle, survival, and transcendence in a segregated world of Jim Crow injustice. It’s a world filled with joyful music and dance that I found altogether captivating.
Hurston layers her story with depictions of the folkways of Eatonville. Games like the Toe Party (a sort of dating game) and Ring Play bring joy to a community getting by on very little. And thanks to Spunk I now know that playing croquet was not just a pastime for snooty WASPs in Newport.
Director Woodard is able to create this almost magical world thanks to a cast that simply bursts with triple- and quadruple-threat talent. For starters, virtually every member of the cast plays at least one instrument during the show. Together they constitute a small orchestra, including alto sax and trombone.
Most of the nearly thirty songs in the show are traditional, although Luckett has composed several new ones in the folk tradition and provided new arrangements for others. And the singing is phenomenal. (John Bronston is the music director and Julie Foh the vocal coach.) Outstanding in the vocal department is Jeannette Bayardelle as Mrs. Watson, who belts a roof-raising rendition of “Sing You Sinners,” a 1935 popular song by Coslow and Hearing, the only “commercial” song in the show.
Sprawl as Evaline, and Marable as Ruby also contribute some wonderful musical moments. But everyone in the company has terrific vocal chops and, by the way, they are all terrific dancers.
Most of Spunk‘s 15-member cast play smaller supporting roles and play them extremely well. A few, like the wonderfully comic Shawn Bowers and the tap dancer Alaman Diadhiou, are standouts, but all are impressive. It’s a tribute to casting director Calleri Jensen Davis and Woodard’s skill in forging a tight ensemble.
A spooky hoodoo ritual that is the centrepiece of Act Two goes on perhaps a bit too long but it has the virtue of showcasing Diadhiou’s virtuosic solo on the djembe.
The understated scenic design by Karen Loewy Movilla, lighting by Gib Gibney, and costumes by Kristen Taylor (who also provided smashing skull masks for the hoodoo segment) create just the right setting for this show. Together they have lent Spunk a sort of mythic quality. It would have been far less successful had it been overproduced.
The sound design by Justin Ellington is well done in the contemporary fashion although voices like this hardly seem in any need of artificial enhancement, especially in the confines of the Yale University Theatre, one of the most acoustically blessed venues in the country.
Spunk is a folk musical, perhaps even a folk opera. On the one hand it is quite homespun and yet, by tapping into the rich veins of African-American culture, it achieves a timeless quality that places it in the company of the great works of theatre going all the way back to the Greeks.
In fact, it’s easy to think of Spunk as a lineal descendant of Greek tragedy, with its hero a sort of Black Orpheus and its hoodoo sequence offering a glimpse of the underworld of the sort that captivated Greek poets and dramatists.
The ancient Greeks celebrated their myths in verse and Hurston’s evocative vernacular text rises to the realm of poetry more than once in the course of the play.
Far too many contemporary playwrights ransack the ancients to find borrowed plots on which to drape their own concerns. Hurston and her contemporary collaborators, without any overt references, simply follow in their footsteps to create something utterly new.
Spunk is a remarkable achievement and well worth a trip to New Haven. Presumably the usual theatrical suspects from New York and elsewhere will make the journey and I, for one, will be intrigued to see if this production has an afterlife.
It deserves one.
Spunk continues at the Yale University Theatre through October 25, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Yale Rep website.
Footnote: Eatonville, now completely surrounded by the urban sprawl of Orlando, remembers its famous daughter. The tiny Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, located at 344 East Kennedy Boulevard in Eatonville, is not focused on Hurston herself. Rather it is dedicated to showcasing the art of African and African-American artists. Admission is free but donations are gladly accepted.
For a complete index of reviews CLICK HERE.
Don’t miss another review or blog post! SUBSCRIBE HERE
