Spunk!

400px-Zora
Description Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston
Date
Source Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG-van-5a52142.

One of the best things about living in the Twin Cities is our Theatre Scene.  Rumor has it that we have more theatre seats per capita than any other city in the country save New York City.

Tomorrow Night, Richard and I along with three of our friends are off to the Penumbra Theatre to see Spunk!   A play based on three stories by Zora Neale Hurston.

Penumbra is a fantastic community resource:Penumbra Theatre creates professional productions that are artistically excellent, thought provoking, relevant, and illuminate the human condition through the prism of the African American experience. 

Penumbra’s goals are: 

  • To increase public awareness of the significant contributions of African Americans in creating a diversified American theatrical tradition.

  • To encourage and facilitate a culturally diverse and all-inclusive America by using theatre to teach, criticize, comment and model.

  • To use theatre to create an American mythology that includes African Americans and other peoples of color in every thread of the fabric of our society.

  • To continue to maintain and stabilize a black performing arts community. 

I’ll post a review after we see the show, but I love this quote from Zora – “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”

One of the things Chris Stewart spoke about at the Students for Education Reform event this week was that those who organize for Education Justice must allow the people they are organizing for and with to tell their own story in the first person.  This, he said is where true power and change will come from.

Photo Credit Kathleen Ryan