by Daniel Johnson
October 12, 2025
Hurston wrote a short story called “Spunk” in 1925 and a decade later she turned it into a play.
In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a short story called “Spunk,” and a decade later she turned it into a play. However, since the play was not produced, it was sent to the US Copyright Office, where it remained for decades until it entered the Theater Collection at the Library of Congress, where it remained until its excavation in 1997.
Now Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, CT is bringing “Spunk” to the stage through October 25th. The production, which opened October 3, features new songs and arrangements. The musical direction is by Nehemiah Luckett and the choreography is by OBIE Award winner nicHi douglas. The play is directed by Tamilla Woodard, chair of the acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama and resident director at Yale Repertory Theater.
According to the New York Times, “Spunk” is similar to Hurston's masterpiece “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and features the wit of a black Southerner and a black protagonist who has the freedom to be herself despite the social restrictions and taboos of the time. In fact, much like Janie Crawford, this protagonist is involved in a love affair that others view with derision, and like Crawford, this protagonist, Evalina, doesn't care about their opinion.
Zora Neale Hurston was born on this day (January 7) in 1891. The anthropologist and author is crucial to our understanding of the black American South. pic.twitter.com/SiiT4thGA4
— Brooklyn White-Grier (@brooklynrwhite) January 7, 2024
Hurston, an anthropologist by profession and training, turned her attention to comedy as she redeveloped the script for the stage, but she also used folk songs, sermons and sacred practices to flesh out the story in the gap between her original interpretation of spunk and its reincarnation as a play.
As Tamilla Woodard, the director of “Spunk” at the Yale Repository Theater, told the New York Times, “You sense Zora trying to figure out what it means to have agency and freedom in your life and not be bound by what people tell you to do and how to do it.”
Woodard was actually a second-year MFA student at Yale when Catherine Sheehy, a playwright and professor at Yale, heard about Hurston's unpublished works through an NPR story in 2001, and after requesting a copy, she read it and began telling everyone around her, usually by passing her copy along to them.
According to Sheehy, Hurston wrote ten plays that were rediscovered after the Library of Congress looked through their files in the late '90s to see exactly what they had in their collection. Before becoming a novelist, Hurston was a playwright, but during her lifetime only one play made it to Broadway, the 1931 production of “Fast and Furious.”
Hurston was ahead of her time in celebrating ordinary black people of the South, and even among her theater contemporaries her work is uniquely hers. In some ways, we're still trying to keep up with Hurston, as Daphne Brooks, a music and black studies scholar at Yale University, told the outlet.
“Hurston's deft ability to combine humor and melodrama, music and movement, and bold statements about the vibrancy and complexity of black life despite the tyranny of Jim Crow are absolutely distinctive and set her apart. Her work lies outside the usual definitions that critics since the Harlem Renaissance have defined as “black drama.” American theater critics and audiences were mostly not ready for them then, and I’m not sure they are now.” Brooks noted.
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