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PRODUCTION HISTORY

First presented on October 15, 1982 at the Hawkeyes Studio with additional material by David Schein, directed by Schein and Goldberg, and performed by Goldberg. The show opened in 1983 at New York's Dance Theatre Workshop, which led to a Broadway production under the direction of Mike Nichols the following year.

CHARACTERS AND ORIGINAL CAST MEMBERS

The Junkie, Surfer Chick, Little Girl with Blonde Hair, and Hospital Lady - Whoopi Goldberg

SETTING

The play takes place on a bare stage.

PLAY STRUCTURE

Five monologues

PRODUCTION NOTES

The scripted version of The Spook Show printed here documents a rare form of comic inventiveness, an imaginative amalgam of stand-up comedy, social satire, and folksy surrealism. The show's title (abandoned, incidently, for the Broadway run) suggests its creator's metaphorical intentions: "Spook" is a derogatory slang term for blacks which connotes danger, mystery, otherness. The word is also a synonym for ghost--an invisible presence, just as many of the underclass characters Goldberg portrays remain invisible within mass culture." -- from "Whoopi in Wonderland" by Misha Berson in West Coast Plays v.21/22

EXCERPT FROM THE PLAY

This section was taken from the monologue "Little Girl with Blonde Hair". In it, a young African American girl contemplates wanting to be white and the problems of having black hair.

LITTLE GIRL: I told my mother I didn't want to be black no more. ... Man, she say even if you sitting in a vat of Clorox till hell freezes over, you ain't gonna be nothing but black. And she was right too, because I sat in the clorox and I got burned. And she say I just got to be happy with what I got, but look. See? It don't do nothing. It don't blow in the wind. And it don't casca--cascadadade down my back. It don't. And I put that bouncing stuff in it and it didn't even lift. And I want some other kind of hair to do something else. I do.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

in the following anthology:

West Coast Plays v.21/22