Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

PHOTO BY KEVIN BERNE
FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
The fi rst time I experienced Spunk was in 1989 at the Public Theater in New
York. I had been working for Joe Papp for almost three years, and had watched
George C. Wolfe’s previous piece, the brilliant Colored Museum, nearly 20 times.
Brazenly irreverent, blazingly theatrical, fi ercely funny, and sharp like a knife, The
Colored Museum remains one of the highlights of my theatergoing history. Spunk
is all that without the irreverence. George C. Wolfe is a big personality, but even
he knew that Zora Neale Hurston was due for her time in the contemporary cultural spotlight.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned how Hurston rose to divine prominence during the Harlem
Renaissance and beyond, only to have her creative legacy nearly obliterated over the years by many who
found her work to be, at the very least, reactionary. But when scholars and writers—Alice Walker among
them—brought her back into our cultural consciousness in the mid-to-late-1970s, it was just a matter
of time before Wolfe, one of our greatest living and most daring theatrical artists, would “team up” with
Hurston, one of America’s most thrilling, trailblazing artists of the 20th century—or any century, for that
matter. And so, in 1989, we got Spunk.
What a play, I thought. Poetry in motion. Blending folklore with sass, heartbreak with celebration,
literature with theater, George C. Wolfe created something indelible and rare—a piece that felt like a
classic while at the same time forging new and adventurous terrain in the theatrical landscape. I’m so
glad I thought of Spunk to bring to Cal Shakes. It thrilled me like Nicholas Nickleby did when the Royal
Shakespeare Company brought the sprawling brilliance of their Dickensian adaptation to the stage in
the 1980s. This is storytelling at its jazziest, its sexiest, its most shrewdly-observed humanness. There
is hurt in this play; there is love; and there is laughter. But most of all, there is music. And not just the
music that is sung, but the music that is spoken, the music of Zora Neale Hurston, who heard, with
the most delicate and unforgiving ear, the way the world spoke to her about loving and hurting and
laughing—that is, about being alive.
We are celebrating a lot with this production. It’s a fi rst for us in many ways, not the least of which is
that we are bringing a lot of voices into this house that have not been included before. And there’s going
to be a lot more of that, because Cal Shakes should, and will, belong to as many people as we can invite,
engage, and participate with—on our stage, in our classrooms, and in our communities.
If you rode the shuttle from BART you heard some contemporary blues music. Along the entrance path,
in the plaza, on the hill, at listening stations, and, of course, onstage, we have fi lled the joint with art.
Our Theater is vast in scope—literally and creatively. So there will never be enough art to fi ll our space.
This production is part of an experiment to increase participation among more artists, more students,
and more community members. I look to places like the Oakland Museum of California, where everything
and everyone lives in dynamic conversation with one another, and I hope for the same at Cal Shakes. All
these experiments might result in something truly beautiful and truly necessary: a culture in which art
and communities are inseparable, and where the joint is truly and undeniably alive.
Welcome to Spunk.
Jonathan Moscone
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