October 12, 2025
Hurston wrote a short story, titled “Spunk,” in 1925 and a decade later she turned it into a play.
In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a short story titled “Spunk,” and a decade she turned it into a play. However, because the play went unproduced, it was sent to the U.S. Copyright Office, where it languished for decades until it was sent to the Library of Congress’s drama collection, where it sat until it was unearthed in 1997.
Now, the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT, is bringing “Spunk” to the stage through Oct. 25. The production, which opened on Oct. 3, features new songs and arrangements. Music supervision is by Nehemiah Luckett, with choreography by OBIE Award–winner nicHi douglas. The play is directed by Tamilla Woodard, who is the chair of the Acting program at David Geffen School of Drama and a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre.
According to The New York Times, “Spunk,” exists in a similar vein as Hurston’s masterpiece, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and features Black Southern wit as well as a Black female protagonist that is free to be herself despite the social restrictions and taboos of the day. Indeed, similarly to Janie Crawford, this protagonist is engaged in a love affair that others look at with derision, and like Crawford, this protagonist, Evalina, doesn’t concern herself with their opinions either.
Hurston, an anthropologist by both trade and training, turned her eye toward comedy when 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 rendition 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 can feel Zora trying to get at what it means to have agency and liberty in your life, and mean not to be bound by what people tell you you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it.”
Woodard was actually a second-year MFA student at Yale when Catherine Sheehy, a dramaturg and professor at Yale, heard about Hurston’s unpublished works in 2001 through an NPR story, and after requesting a copy, she read it and begun telling everyone in her orbit about it, typically by passing her copy to them.
According to Sheehy, Hurston wrote 10 plays which had been rediscovered after the Library of Congress went through their files in the late ‘90s to see exactly what they had in their collection. Before Hurston became a novelist, she was a dramatist, however while she was alive, only one play made it to Broadway, 1931’s production of “Fast and Furious.”
Hurston was ahead of her time, celebrating the common Black folks of the South, and even among her theater contemporaries, her work stands apart as unique to her. In some ways, as Daphne Brooks, a scholar of music and Black Studies at Yale University, told the outlet, we’re still trying to catch up to Hurston.
“Hurston’s deft ability to weave together humor and melodrama, music and movement, and bold statements about the vibrancy and complexities of Black life despite Jim Crow tyranny are utterly distinctive and set her apart. Her work exists outside the standard ways in which critics have defined ‘Black drama’ since the Harlem Renaissance. American theater critics and audiences largely weren’t ready for her then, and I’m not sure if they are now,” Brooks noted.
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