A Classic with Spunk

Spunk is a bit of a departure for California Shakespeare Theater. It was just a decade ago that then-new artistic director Jonathan Moscone started adding modern classics to the company’s steady diet of Shakespeare—plays by Wilder, Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett and Coward. And then the adaptations of classics: David Edgar’s Dickens; Amy Freed’s Restoration comedies; Octavio Solis’s Steinbeck stories; Amanda Dehnert’s Shakespeare rock musical. Now Cal Shakes looks beyond dead white men for its latest presentation of an adapted classic: Spunk, George C. Wolfe’s acclaimed 1989 adaptation of a trio of short stories by seminal Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, three very different portraits of struggling African-Americans in rural Florida and big-city Harlem.

Aldo Billingslea, Omoze Idehenre, and Tyee Tilghma in Spunk. Photo by Kevin Berne.

So how does Cal Shakes do with this bluesy play with music and an all-black cast, nestled in the season between productions of The Tempest, Blithe Spirit and Hamlet? Superbly, thanks to director Patricia McGregor’s dynamic staging and a dynamite cast. It’s also a mere 90 minutes without intermission, practically unheard of in the company’s outdoor amphitheater.

The show starts and ends on a invitingly casual participatory note. Before the play begins, guitarist Anthony Michael Peterson, a.k.a. “Tru,” leads the audience in a sing-along of a rail song he says he originally learned from a Hurston recording. Immediately after the show on Fridays (and on last Saturday’s opening night) Traci Bartlow invites the audience onto the stage to learn Harlem Renaissance-era dances.

The tales are narrated sometimes by the actors playing the roles, and more frequently by Dawn L. Troupe as Blues Speak Woman, who sings sultry blues and jazz numbers, and even a bit of very early rock ’n’ roll, with a commanding presence, keeping up a teasing flirtation with Tru’s coming-on-strong Guitar Man. The original music is by Chic Street Man, with additional music by Tru, bringing in some classic pop songs from “Unforgettable” to “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Blues Speak Woman sings the stories as often as she speaks them, adding soulful resonance to the lush poetry of Hurston’s adapted prose.

Despite the aching sadness in some of the stories, the whole production has an enticing air of jubilation from the outset, as the cast (or “the folk,” as they’re introduced) strut down the aisles and dance onto the stage singing the upbeat opening number, “Get to the Get.” But the party comes to a screeching halt when L. Peter Callender starts beating Margo Hall brutally, and her joyfully sashaying character folds into herself, putting on a drab house dress over her elegant sparkly purple nightlife getup.

The first story, “Sweat,” is about a much-abused laundress whose husband lives off her, beats her, and openly cheats on her. He’s starved her and now hates her for being skinny.

Callender’s Sykes isn’t just sinister; he’s positively bestial, crouching and sputtering and working his tongue between his teeth. He leers and giggles as he dangles his whip over Hall’s Delia, knowing she’s terrified of snakes. Hall gives a marvelous portrait of a much-wronged woman who’s taken a lot of abuse but is now being pushed too far, her fierce reserve of strength and dignity shining through her browbeatenness and habitual passivity.

The violence is handled in a removed way that’s terribly effective. There’s at least two or three feet between them as he strikes and she recoils, or as he chokes the air and she clutches her throat, but somehow it has even more of an impact than it might if it were staged with stark realism.

Inventive theatrical touches abound throughout the show—some of them indicated in the script, but realized beautifully in McGregor’s highly stylized staging. Standing with his back to the audience, Aldo Billingslea becomes Delia’s bed, his arms behind his back wrapping her sheet around her. Three gossiping men sit on a porch and one of them—the wise one who seldom speaks but whom everyone listens to—is a life-size puppet manipulated by the other two, with Troupe providing the voice. Incidental characters wear masks, such as Troupe as Sykes’s pampered new girlfriend, Bertha. A rattlesnake is shown as a huge slithering puppet.

Michael Locher’s curious set is like a large chalkboard with the names of various towns and communities written on one side—Harlem, Jacksonville, Baltimore, et al.—and titles of notable Hurston works on the other. High and low wall shelves display old LPs, bottles, banjos and other knickknacks, and some painted panels show a background of swamp trees. One of those old-fashioned non-electronic flipping scoreboards displays the title of each tale as it begins.

The second tale, “Story in Harlem Slang,” could be a trifle but turns out to be an absolute delight. The whole thing is two Harlem pimps circling each other, boasting and trash-talking in florid jive, while Callender eggs them on as a smooth-talking narrator and elder pimp. I should clarify, as they do in an aside, that a Harlem pimp is really more like a gigolo, a flashily-dressed fancy man looking for a woman to pay for his next meal or pair of shoes. And costumer Callie Floor has a field day with the gents, whipping up some brightly-colored zoot suits that are a sight to see.  Tyee Tilghman and Billingslea are marvelous as the competing pimps, bragging about how much money they’ve got and how fine their women are, desperately hoping the other will buy their bravado, while they keep an eye peeled for a woman to help fill their empty bellies. Callender elaborates and celebrates the game with considerable zest and a Cab Calloway strut, and Omozé Idehenre is formidable as the tough-as-nails woman they try hopelessly to pick up.

The dialogue is deliciously ornate and often hilarious, rife with colorful turns of phrase like “She don’t look like a thing but a hunk of liver with hair on it.” That’s especially evident in this second tale, which is largely made up of verbal one-upsmanship. As funny as this second story is, it’s also bittersweet, because for all that everyone’s posing as if they’re flush, they have no idea where their next meal is coming from, or when, or what they’ll have to do to get it.

The last bit is “The Gilded Six-Bits,” in which Billingslea’s earnest, playful Joe and Idehenre’s joyful Missie May seem to be the happiest young couple alive. After a week of hard labor, Joe comes home and tosses the coins of his pay through the open doorway, setting off a gleeful play-fight with Missie May in which she wrestles to go through his pockets and find all the little gifts he’s planted for her. But their domestic bliss is troubled when a showy if unattractive stranger comes to town brandishing gold coins on his watch chain, and they start musing about what it would be like to have such things. Billingslea and Idehenre give achingly sensitive performances both in celebration and in lament, and Tilghman is aptly hissworthy as the oily interloper.

Each story is as affecting as it is entertaining, and the musical interludes between them bring the whole thing together beautifully—and add a welcome palate cleanser to shake off the lingering melancholy of one piece to make way for the next, like courses at a sumptuous feast. And ultimately, that’s exactly what this show is.

Spunk
California Shakespeare Theater
Through July 29
Bruns Amphitheater
100 California Shakespeare Theater Way
Orinda, CA
www.calshakes.org

Show #64 of 2012, attended July 7.