The sun sets over a meadow. The sky changes colors, exquisite, slow. Lank young trees shape the windless clearing like columns around an ancient amphitheater. And even in Jim Crow’s deep south, a group of black friends and neighbors have found a little slice of heaven.
They’re joking, gossiping, singing, dancing. It’s a party, and the revelry feels fine, in the sublimely pleasing sense of the word that’s so little used anymore. These men and women feel whole, just as they are. Yet when a bold and charismatic stranger appears with a guitar on his back—a man who feels also as if he were birthed fully formed—he’s instantly invited in, as are we strangers who watch from the shadows.
It’s an early scene in Yale Rep’s Spunk, a triumphant premiere of Zora Neale Hurston’s long-lost 1935 musical adaptation of her own 1925 short story, and it expresses, as I see them, the axioms of both the play and director Tamilla Woodard’s approach to it: take your time, savor your place, earn your keep, follow your humanity, love your people, flaws and all.
That this is a special production forged from special attention was clear even before reading the program at intermission, when I learned (among other things) about the extraordinary four-year odyssey to complete and hopefully satisfy Hurston’s musical vision. With her script she included certain song titles and lyrics but not a full score, leaving the creative team, led in this effort by composer Nehemiah Luckett, to fill in a whole lot of blanks.
Hurston’s opinion of the result, which incorporates early 20th-century songs as well as new originals, can never be known, seeing as she died in 1960, but the crowd on the night I attended was spellbound and rapturous. World-class actors and singers who also played their own instruments (guitar, piano, tap shoes, sledge hammers) earned every bit of that rapture, starting with Hamilton-pedigreed J. Quinton Johnson. He stars here as the titular character Spunk, a kind of warrior bard who knows exactly what he wants as soon as he wants it and only has to be himself to get it.
In the role of Mrs. Watson, Broadway veteran Jeannette Bayardelle immediately wowed with her vocal command and bravado. Kimberly Marable moved me as pathos-riddled Ruby, a woman who loses hold of Spunk but also can’t let go of him. Naiqui Macabroad also moved me as Jim Bishop, a man too human to measure up to the epic literary virtues embodied by Spunk. Alaman Diadhiou’s many noteworthy moments as Blue Trout include a scene where he has to pretend not quite to know how to tap dance, a pretense he soon obliterates. Christian Pedersen shines in a brief and delicious comic turn as a man who shouldn’t like Spunk but, dagnabbit, can’t help himself.
I can’t give all cast members the accolades they deserve, but rest assured they do deserve them. And from reading the program, it feels incumbent to mention one of this production’s dramaturgs, Catherine Sheehy, who it sounds like spent more than two decades advocating for and thinking about this play.
It shows. The rendering of all this talent was so elegantly layered that at times it was hard to know where to look or what to bask in. The background players of any given scene were both independent of the action and tuned to it, building the world when not engaging, often humorously, with the main thrust of the moment.
As a result, my memories of the show, which runs through October 25 at Yale’s University Theatre, feel a little fever-dreamish, like I can remember everything that happened but can’t quite be sure this happened there and that happened then. It’s a testament to how enraptured I also was by a simple story richly told, with care, humanity and, as I can only imagine Hurston would agree, a very fine score.
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring Kimber Elayne Sprawl and J. Quinton Johnson (center) with members of the company, photographed by Joan Marcus and provided courtesy of the Yale Repertory Theatre.
