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article in Ms. magazine entitled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Several years before, Walker had published a short story in a volume where she sat just pages from Hurston; but she didn’t encounter her work until a neighbor loaned her the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. This sparked a deep fascination with the life and work of the woman who, like Walker, came from the South, and whose gritty, complex writings had fallen into obscurity. Posing as Hurston’s niece, Walker went in search of her grave. Finding it unmarked in a segregated cemetery, she bought a headstone for it, and began a mission to bring Hurston back to public view. Walker was deeply infl uenced by Hurston’s work on voodoo, particularly by her tale, “Of Mules and Men,” which fuelled Walker’s own story, “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.” According to Walker, white anthropological views of blacks were “inferior, peculiar, comic… [which] undermined, no, destroyed, the relevance of their books.” From Hurston’s work she found what she called “cultural nourishment” and “spiritual food.” “Without a foundation in our own reality… people don’t know what to do,” Walker said. Hurston’s expression of the reality of life as she knew and experienced it deeply stirred Walker, and, seven years later, she created the iconic The Color Purple. Portraying domestic violence, incest, and homosexuality in the rural black community, The Color Purple depicts a black woman struggling to fi nd an inner self that can survive abuses by both her white and black masters. GEORGE C. WOLFE GIVES ZORA THEATRICAL LIFE After Walker brought Hurston back “from the dead,” there emerged a steady stream of her books and stories, as well as essays, plays, and television programs about her life and art. In 1989, African-American actor, playwright, and director George C. Wolfe adapted three of Hurston’s stories into an off-Broadway, blues-inspired musical play. At the time of making Spunk (a play which does not actually contain Hurston’s short story of the same name), Wolfe was 35 years old—about the same age that Hurston had been when she fi rst published Spunk more than 60 years before—and he earned an Obie for his production. 16 california shakespeare theater www.calshakes.org Hurston had often been accused of creating “minstreltype” black fi gures, but Wolfe’s adaptation revealed to New York audiences the dignity and complexity with which her characters actually spoke in the predominantly oral culture she had been trying to evoke and honor. The fi rst part of Wolfe’s Spunk triptych, “Sweat,” is about a drained washerwoman (excuse my pun here, but Hurston would have liked it), abused and betrayed by her husband. The second is “Story in Harlem Slang,” in which two poor but fl ashy city men hustle a meal from a domestic worker on her day off. The third, “The Gilded Six-Bits,” is about an adoring husband who is betrayed by his wife. Spunk, as dramatically realized by Wolfe, isn’t just a story—it is a musical, a play mixing visual and auditory treats just as he mixes poignancy and satire. PATRICIA MCGREGOR BRINGS ZORA TO CAL SHAKES ZORA NEALE HURSTON, BEATING THE HOUNTAR, OR MAMA DRUM; PHOTO COURTESY U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. And where does the brilliant young director Patricia McGregor take this play for Cal Shakes in 2012? One of the reasons McGregor says she was attracted to Hurston was that “she listened to people I care about.” The emergence CONTINUED ON PAGE 20.
Spunk takes us from the rural South to the streets of Harlem, and fi nally to a more suburbanized small-town life, tracing, in part, the real-life Great Migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the industrialized North in the early 20th century. This journey is often portrayed as a modern-day Exodus, a journey from the cradle of American slavery to the free North. When the unfulfi lled promise of Reconstruction was replaced by the specter of Jim Crow laws and the indentured servitude of sharecropping, blacks left the South in record numbers by train, boat, car, and even by foot. It is estimated that during the Great Migration of the 1910s, anywhere from a few hundred thousand to more than one million blacks abandoned the South for the “free” North. Racial violence—whether the social mores requiring them to observe a lifelong deference of white people, the existential fear of unsympathetic law enforcement, the Ku Klux Klan (which surged in popularity after its heroic portrayal in D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 fi lm The Birth of a Nation), or lynching—was a decisive factor for many black migrants. But there were other reasons as well. Pittsburgh’s steel mills and Detroit’s automotive factories offered higher wages than the South’s cotton fi elds, especially when the boll weevil insect began devastating crops. Northern factory workers could make as much as $3 or $4 a day, while Southern sharecroppers and domestics made cents on the dollar. Less quantifi ably, there was the prospect of adventure, of seeing the country and traveling to a new, exciting place—the same wanderlust that affects all Americans. The Great Migration was as much a cultural phenomenon as a genuine historical movement. One of its chief exponents was the Chicago Defender. A newspaper founded by publisher Robert Abbott in 1905, it built a national edition during this period with a circulation of more than 280,000, becoming the most popular black newspaper in the country. It printed poems, letters, and editorials from migrants who had successfully made the trip and carved out a new life. It used Biblical terms for the journey, calling it the “fl ight out of Egypt,” and published job ads by companies. Traveling fees could be expensive, especially for a poor sharecropper, The African-American Journey in the Early 20th Century BY MOSI REEVES encoreartsprograms.com 17
Page 1 and 2: Three Tales by ZOrA NEALE HUrStON a
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Page 5 and 6: PHOTO BY KEVIN BERNE FROM THE ARTIS
Page 7 and 8: Triangle Lab Activities at the Brun
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Page 11 and 12: hear their own voices, and about br
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Page 25 and 26: ACtiNG COMPANY ALDO BiLLiNGSLEA* (S
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Page 35 and 36: WHO’S WHO continued from page 29

Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

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