STAGE REVIEW : ‘Spunk’ Spins Some Terrific Yarns

The name Zora Neale Hurston is not a household word. But anyone who has read Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,� couldn’t forget Walker’s account of her pilgrimage to Hurston’s grave or her placing of a headstone on it as the repayment of a literary debt--and fulfillment of a personal mission.

Hurston was a writer, anthropologist, folklorist, feminist (or, as Walker might prefer it, “womanist�) and an altogether iconoclastic figure in her time (1903-1960).

She was example and inspiration for Walker and novelist Toni Morrison, among others. And now playwright George C. Wolfe (“The Colored Museum�) has done his thing to retrieve Hurston from the relative obscurity in which she has languished. Under the title “Spunk,� Wolfe has put together a staged reading of three of Hurston’s short stories (from a collection of her writings by the apt same name) for the Mark Taper’s Sundays at the Itchey Foot.

Run, don’t walk--but call first.

The Itchey Foot is not large and word of mouth is going to spread like mercury on this one.

The reason is simple: the stories are terrific yarns, the writer knows how to spin them--and the five actors charged with reading them get so carried away they all but fall off their stools, pumping their vivid characters for all the juice that’s in them.

Hurston was a listener. She passionately believed in the inherent poetry of that idiosyncratic mixture of coined words and cajoling speech patterns we call black American. She defiantly secured her point by referring to herself as “Queen of the Niggerati.� And she knew how to write in that language. The stories selected by Wolfe--�Sweat,� “The Gilded Six Bits� and “Story in Harlem Slang�--crackle with the rhythms and effusive imagery of this rich, black speech.

“Sweat� is a story of providence and vindication, wherein the hard-working washerwoman Delia (Loretta Devine) is saved from a life of unmitigated abuse and humiliation by her surly husband Sykes (Hawthorne James) through the backfiring of his own connivance.

Who could wish for more providential or more poetic justice?

“Story in Harlem Slang� is less story than it is jazz riff. As the title spells out, this is a lip-smacking collection of boasts and bravuras, delivered in a fugue of zesty Harlemese by competing hustlers (played to a fare-thee-well by Harry Waters Jr. and Bruce Beatty)--until a woman they both target (Devine) comes sauntering down the street and, with a panache at least equivalent to theirs, proceeds to deflate their egos.

Appropriately, Wolfe saves the most linear and compelling story for the last. In “The Gilded Six-Bits,� we find wisdom, pain, growth and comedy cleverly compressed into the tale of a giddy young married couple whose happiness is momentarily spoiled by a deceitful intruder (James).

How the husband Joe (Waters) sets about recovering his young wife Missy May (Charlaine Wood-ard), while rescuing their dignity and the marriage, is Solomon-like in its forbearance and in its generosity of spirit. This is a universal story, deliciously told.

Aside from the obvious quality of the acting at the Itchey Foot, Wolfe is to be commended for the liveliness of his direction. Clearly, he was able to infect his performers with his own exultation in this material. The stories are presented almost intact (with minor abbreviations here and there), but Hurston has created such living, broad-brush portraits that there is little to do in lifting them off the page but go with the flow.

Some people may find Hurston’s people bordering on caricature and, had they not been written by a savvy black woman, even perilously close to racist. There is arguably an Amos ‘n’ Andy quality to the bully, Sykes, or even those dandified blowhards in “Story in Harlem Slang.� But Hurston was recording sounds and reporting on the human condition as she observed it, at a time when the truth was less concerned with stereotypes and more with archetypes.

To have come through the mire of ethnic sensitivity and emerged on the other side--as Wolfe demonstrably has--with a healthy ability to laugh at one’s ancestral strengths and foibles, is the sweetest maturity of all.

At the Itchey Foot Ristorante, 801 W. Temple St., Sundays at 6 p.m. until May 28 (doors open at 4 p.m.). Tickets: $6 (213) 972-7273.