Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PATRICIA MCGREGOR (PHOTO BY ERIK CARTER), ALICE WALKER (PHOTO COURTESY MDCARCHIVES), AND GEORGE C. WOLFE. 14 california shakespeare theater www.calshakes.org Click calshakes.org/articles for more historical and contextual pieces on Spunk.
THREE ENCOUNTERS WITH WHEN Zora Neale Hurston started writing in the 1920s, she wanted to represent how rural societies lived, how they felt and loved and sought revenge. She set her short story, “Spunk”—a tale of lust, killing, and supernatural vengeance—in the Deep South. The basic premise of the story is that a man desires the wife of another man, and kills him so as to marry her. Published in 1925, Spunk was awarded second place in an event staged by Opportunity magazine, a publication founded three years earlier to support the work of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists who gave visibility to black culture, exposing its complications rather than seeking to eradicate them. Hurston was 34 at the time, and she would, over a 30-year career, publish four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles, and plays. “Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear,” was the call to action from Hurston, herself a striking presence in any room, being assertive, funny, and verbally dexterous. She did grab the broom, and the dust it stirred up fl ew right out into the faces not just of white people who discounted black voices, but also of those who wanted to depict blackness as victimhood. The picture she painted of black rural society, some felt, was inappropriately discourteous about social ethics and behavior, and disdainful in its use of colloquial dialect. This woman—who’d gone back to school at the age of 26, claiming to be, and passing for, a 16 year-old(!), and had earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree—was, they BY RESIDENT DRAMATURG PHILIPPA KELLY felt, condescending to her less fortunate rural brothers and sisters. But Hurston weathered this criticism and thrived on the controversy, establishing an academy for black performance, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, working with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and writing extensively on voodoo through what she called “the spy-glass of anthropology.” She researched songs, dances, tales, and sayings, and much of her focus was on slavery and the time period immediately following it. Despite, or perhaps because of, Hurston’s success, in the 1940s she had to face the horror of a false accusation (of molesting three young boys) made by a supposed friend. Although she was cleared, Hurston never fully recovered from the effects of this betrayal and scandal. In 1950, at the age of 60, she took a job as a maid until she could afford to begin writing seriously again. But she suffered two strokes, and in 1959 she died of congestive heart failure at age 69. One of the reasons that Hurston didn’t “live on” during the decades after her death was that she didn’t write in explicitly political terms in the “protest tradition,” as did Ralph Ellison, for example, or Richard Wright; and because her controversial views—such as her belief that segregation is positive because it sustains black values in a way that integrated classrooms do not—refused “progressive” models of race and equality. ALICE WALKER REDISCOVERS ZORA It wasn’t until 1975, 15 years after her death, that she reemerged on the public stage, thanks to Alice Walker’s encoreartsprograms.com 15
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Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

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