STAGE REVIEW : ‘Spunk’: Uptown, Upscale

“Spunk” at the Mark Taper Forum is an astorperious performance. That’s Zora Neale Hurstonese for haughty and biggity.

“Spunk” struts its stuff. It preens. It swaggers. It bull-skates (more Hurstonese), exulting in inflating and deflating black stereotypes like breathing in and breathing out.

That’s nothing new for George C. Wolfe, who has amply demonstrated his talent for exploding African-American mythology in “The Colored Museum” and in “Jelly’s Last Jam.” This adaptation by him of three Hurston short stories is an upscale, uptown expansion of his own earlier bare-bones version of this show that was part of the Taper’s 1989 Literary Cabaret season at the Itchey Foot.

“Spunk” is now mounted in a stronger musical framework and Wolfe, who again directs, has tossed in every theatrical conceit of the past 20 and 2,000 years (including masks and Story Theatre techniques). This is both good and bad. Much of the charm of the Itchey Foot version was its simplicity. This grander edition often goes over the top, but not as far over as when it made its first appearance last year at Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theatre.

Perhaps it’s a matter of cultural environment. “Spunk” at the Public looked not only flashy but vulgarly overdone, pushed to the very edge of overproduction. At the Taper (where it is co-presented with Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and curiously billed as a West Coast premiere), it is flashy but chic. Go figure.

If there have been changes in the show since New York (it’s been to London in the interim) they are in degree, not in kind. Perhaps “Spunk’s” gaudiness is simply better suited to California laissez-faire. And perhaps it’s just the phases of the moon. Whatever the reasons for it, there is greater pleasure to be found in this new improved “Spunk” than one had feared.

One reason is the cheeky, bluesy music, composed and performed with subtle humor by Chic Street Man. It sets the show’s tone and beat, and takes its pulse.

Another is Hope Clarke’s self-spoofing movement and choreography (reminiscent of her fine work “Jelly’s Last Jam”). A third is the sureness and economy of the ensemble, especially the women, from warbling Ann Duquesnay’s sideline narrative as the Blues Speak Woman, to the many splendid faces of Danitra Vance.

Vance plays all the women, from the proud, put-upon washerwoman in “Sweat,” helped by providence to see that her shiftless and nasty husband (Reggie Montgomery) gets his comeuppance, to the loving but erring young bride in “The Gilded Six-Bits,” who must work hard to mend the heart she broke in her young bridegroom (Kevin Jackson). It’s the sweetest of the tales.

In between, Vance, Jackson, Montgomery, Duquesnay and Stanley Wayne Mathis (alternating with Bruce Beatty) indulge in “Story in Harlem Slang,” the showiest of the three stories, in which the upending of stereotypes is at its most blatant.

Jelly (Mathis) and Sweet Back (Montgomery) are fundless, perorating sports, huffing and puffing for each other’s benefit, while in search of easy female prey--the kind with coins in her purse who might buy them dinner and a good time in exchange for a bit of lovin’.

It’s an extravagant cartoon in which Hurston’s broad strokes are made even broader by Wolfe and Clarke. The Zoot-suited bragging and posturing is seriously overextended, compared to the simple directness with which it was approached in Wolfe’s earlier version. But the day is again saved by Vance, who not only outwits the guys, but whose own smart shimmy and shake knocks the wind out of the discomfitted males--and us.

The tendency to overexploit is a Wolfe characteristic, but in spite of a few lunging overexultations, the self-parody is mostly controled.

It is unified by the music, the vigorous use Wolfe makes of the encircling ensemble (everyone is on stage pretty much all the time) and the efficient Story Theatre mix of narrative address and dialogue.

Matching this subjective combination of raffish basics and mocking vividness is Loy Arcenas’ set design: a few boards, a few banners, a few props and sliding panels, enhanced by Donald Holder’s multicolored lights and Toni-Leslie James’ colorful, sometimes satirical costuming.

This smooth coalescing of talent is “Spunk’s” main achievement, making it easier to overlook Wolfe’s more problematic overindulgences. But with as sharp a linguistic partner as Hurston, queen of the Harlem Renaissance literati and an anthropologist besides, even the worst of those can’t be too bad.

“Spunk,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Music Center. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 27. $26-$32; (213) 972-7373, 972-7337, 365-3500. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

‘Spunk’

A Center Theatre Group-Mark Taper Forum/New York Shakespeare Festival presentation of three tales by Zora Neale Hurston. Adaptor/Director George C. Wolfe. Sets Loy Arcenas. Lights Donald Holder. Costumes Toni-Leslie James. Masks and puppets Barbara Pollitt. Vocal improvisations Ann Duquesnay. Composer Chic Street Man. Choreographer Hope Clarke. Production stage manager Mary K. Klinger. Stage manager James T. McDermott. With Bruce Beatty, Ann Duquesnay, Kevin Jackson, Chic Street Man, Stanley Wayne Mathis, Reggie Montgomery, Danitra Vance.