Hurston play brought to stage for first time
Yale Repertory Theatre opened its 2025–26 season with the first-ever production of Zora Neale Hurston’s Spunk, 90 years after it was written. Perhaps best known as a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Hurston was also a prolific playwright. Spunk, adapted in 1935 from her own earlier short story, was filed for copyright that same year with the Library of Congress.
In 2001, a Congressional librarian uncovered the script amidst a tranche of Hurston’s unpublished papers and shared it with Catherine Sheehy ’99DFA, chair of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at David Geffen School of Drama and resident dramaturg at Yale Rep, who championed Hurston’s play with music for more than two decades. The Yale Rep production began to take shape four years ago when Sheehy shared the script with Tamilla Woodard ’02MFA, then newly appointed as chair of acting at the Geffen School and a resident director at Yale Rep.
James Bundy ’95MFA, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean of the Geffen School and artistic director of Yale Rep, commented, “Tamilla; Catherine, production dramaturg alongside Eric M. Glover (faculty); composer, arranger, and music supervisor Nehemiah Luckett; and choreographer nicHi douglas have endeavored to bring Hurston’s wondrous, life-affirming fable about the triumph of love to life with care and infectious enthusiasm.”
The production was made possible in part through the generosity of the Roy Cockrum Foundation. The Foundation—which previously supported the Yale Rep’s 2022 production of Between Two Knees by The 1491s—spontaneously reached out and offered the theater a grant in the amount of $30,000 to replace the monies that were rescinded by the National Endowment for the Arts earlier this year.
loading
Print
Email