No Apologies, No Excuses : Theater: In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk,” coming to the Rep, victims take responsibility for their own fates.

Thomas W. Jones II, the son of a physician, is a theater director who sees his medium as a source of psychic and emotional healing.

“Art is where ideas can bounce out, where you can ask the powerful questions. If you ask a question powerfully enough, you can inspire someone to go out and answer it,” Jones said in an interview last week at the Lyceum Theatre, where he is directing “Spunk” as the season opener for the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

“Theater can’t change the world, but it can create a climate where change can happen,” Jones said.

The show’s San Diego premiere opens Wednesday on the Lyceum Stage. Jones believes that “Spunk,” based on three stories by Zora Neale Hurston, is healthy in the way that it shows ostensible victims taking responsibility for their own fates.

That is something he sees as needed in a world where people increasingly perceive themselves as helpless.

“People are really unhealthy now,” Jones said. “People are clinging to dogma as an excuse for their lives. Everyone is a victim. They’re saying, ‘I’m black, I’m a victim,’ ‘I’m a woman, I’m a victim,’ ‘I’m gay, I’m a victim.’ ”

Jones, who is black, claims many blacks use their victimization by racists as an excuse for not taking action.

“At one point I gave up racism as a reason for living,” he said. “Racism is a fact of life. You can be victimized by it or you can move forward. They are the only two choices you really have.”

As adapted by George C. Wolfe, who directed the show at New York’s Public Theatre in 1990 (and in Los Angeles in 1989 and 1991), “Spunk” tells the story of a laundress abused by her husband in “Sweat,” two boasters trying to hit on a woman to buy them dinner in “Harlem Slang” and a loving but erring wife who tries to mend her marriage in “The Gilded Six-Bits.”

But nobody is a victim in playwright Hurston’s world, Jones believes.

“They live their lives. They make their choices. Their lives are their own--good or bad. That’s empowerment.”

These tales of poor, black, mostly Southern folk also seem a long way from his experience. Jones, 36, grew up in what he describes as a happy, middle-class family in Queens, N.Y. His father, who died of cancer in 1977 when Jones was in college, was a physician. His mother was a social worker who always wanted to be an actress. “Somebody always sacrificed so somebody else could do something,” Jones recalled.

Through economic sacrifices, Jones went to Trinity, a private school in New York. He grew up going to Broadway regularly. He received his B.A. with honors from Amherst College in Massachusetts.

And yet, he said, these characters in “Spunk” are very familiar to him.

“I knew who they were when I was growing up. My mother and father were first-generation college (graduates),” Jones said. “My grandparents were raised on the farm. The invention of the black middle class is a fairly new phenomenon.”

Jones describes Hurston’s writing as “unapologetically colored,” an expression Wolfe also has used in interviews.

“She wants to show people who lived their lives as they lived them, without apologizing for it,” Jones said.

It has taken Jones a long time to adopt that same attitude.

“I always wanted to be a militant,” he said, a feeling that was exacerbated by being one of the few blacks in white establishments.

When he graduated from college, he moved to Atlanta (where his family had relocated) and co-founded Jomandi Productions in 1978. The name is an acronym of family names: Jo stands for Jones; Ma stands for his mother; An is for his sister Andrea; Di is his sister Diana.

A year later, he was surprised and pleased to learn that Jomandi, the word he had made up, was Senegalese for “people gathered in celebration.”

From the beginning, his vision was to gather black artists and do theater for black audiences. At Jomandi, he has done a black version of Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child,” adapted the work of Maya Angelou for the stage, produced “From the Mississippi Delta” and “Spunk.” He did not, however, direct “Spunk” at his theater because it conflicted with an assignment he took to direct “Spunk” at the Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis.

“What was astounding was that we took very different points of view, but both worked,” he said. Jones’ version, like the “Spunk” he is directing now, stresses movement. His guest director made very spare, bare-bones choices, emphasizing the language.

Eventually, after 11 years of operating without financial problems, Jomandi got caught up in the kind of budget-deficit problems plaguing many San Diego theaters today.

Last year the theater was $250,000 in debt. He remembers lying in his house with the lights out because he couldn’t afford to pay his utility bill. He looked out the window and saw someone repossess his car (he was behind on the payments). He was fearful of losing his house because he hadn’t made a mortgage payment in three months.

“I cried and I prayed. I felt like the whole world was crumbling,” Jones said.

The crisis forced him to examine the mission of his company. He rejected the idea that the arts are around to pump money into the economy. He slashed his $1.2-million annual budget to $600,000, in part by cutting 18 administrative jobs down to four.

In less than a year, he turned his company around, ending with a surplus.

But during the fiscal crisis, he also did some hard thinking about why he is in the business in the first place.

“As an artistic director, I am the same as my audience,” he said. “It is my job to find things that are interesting to talk about. Most people don’t have the time to set up those discussions. That is why they hire me.”

His theater is not around to be “great for business,” he said. “It is to be great for humanity.”

When he chooses shows for his theater company, he asks these questions: “What story do we want to tell? What do we want to talk about this year?”

If he has a personal agenda, it is to “break down walls, to get people to confront who they are and see the possibility of their own lives and to heal themselves. When you do that you don’t have time for racism.”

As he sees it, “Spunk” fits into that vision.

When he first read the play, he said, “I was blown away by the language, the dialect and the narrative style. The people come to life in front of our eyes. And their lives include others.

“I have watched women (in the audience) weep because they have been battered physically or emotionally. They may be white or rich, but they identify with this rural, illiterate, Southern black woman and they want her to triumph.”

Performances of “Spunk” begin Wednesday and continue at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and at 7 p.m. Sundays with Sunday matinees at 2 through Oct. 31. Tickets are $18-$24 depending on day and time of performance. At the Lyceum Stage, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego, 235-8025.