“You can feel Zora trying to get at what it means to have agency and liberty in your life,” says Spunk’s director, Tamilla Woodard, “not to be bound by what people tell you you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it.” Written in 1934 by Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk sat untouched in the Library of Congress’s drama collections for decades. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1997, and not brought to life until 2021, when the Roundabout Theater Company opted for a virtual reading over a full staging, due to the complex annotations and production notes left by Hurston. The play is now premiering for the first time, combining the comic and tragic, musical and narrative elements she envisioned. Set in the rural, segregated South, Spunk follows an outsider who falls in love with a married woman named Evalina. The two face judgment from the people around them, and from supernatural forces, too. “American theater critics and audiences largely weren’t ready for her then,” says Daphne Brooks, a scholar of music and Black Studies at Yale University, “and I’m not sure if they are now.” —Jeanne Malle