For a while it looked as if we might not get a chance to enjoy the energetic spirit of “Spunk,” the bluesy play with music based on three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston. All is well, however, and the show is up and running at the Atlas Performing Arts Center where it should provide plenty of pleasure to residents and visitors until two days before Christmas.

“Spunk” is a three-story, two-act, blues-tinged play based on stories by the Harlem Renaissance writer adapted in 1988 by Broadway’s George C. Wolfe, writer and director of “Jelly’s Last Jam” and director of “Caroline, or Change.” It was slated for the African Continuum Theatre Company’s fall schedule, but the company hit some financial difficulties and was forced to cancel their fall shows.

Enter Tribute Productions! Tribute is the production arm of the Sprenger Lang Foundation, the organization that was behind the rescue and renovation of the Atlas, creating the Atlas Performing Arts Center with its Lang Theatre, a proscenium stage house, and its Sprenger Theatre, a black-box facility in which “Spunk” is now playing six times a week.

“Spunk” isn’t really a musical; it doesn’t use songs to tell its story. Instead, it uses the blues to set the scene, establish the atmosphere and fill in a few details here and there, while most of the plot and character information for these stories is delivered in scenes played out by an ensemble of four – a woman and three men.

Most of the music comes from the other two members of the cast who are introduced as “Blues Speak Woman” and “Guitar Man.” The woman, Pam Ward, fills the hall with her wailing blues delivery while guitar-toting Michel Baytop accompanies her and most of the spoken scenes with his blues guitar and an occasional swish on the mouth organ.

The ensemble joins in from time to time on a spirited blues number. They are a multi-talented troupe and no one needs a microphone to be heard. The one woman, the focus of all three stories, is Jessica Frances Dukes who has been seen in productions of over half a dozen companies in the Washington theater community including “The Story” at the Atlas and “The Bluest Eye” just down the block at the H Street Playhouse.

She’s joined by Shane Taylor who was so very impressive at the Round House Theatre as the condemned man in “A Lesson Before Dying” and newcomers Andrew Honeycutt who is beginning to make inroads here after graduating from the North Carolina School for the Arts and Donovan Hagins who has a long list of credits in Philadelphia.

Taylor’s experience at Round House may have had something to do with his casting here, for he played most of his scenes there opposite KenYatta Rogers, a multi-talented man who includes acting and directing in his resume. He directed this production of “Spunk,” giving full recognition to the different styles that the three different stories require and giving each its own feel.

There’s “Sweat,” the tale of a woman stuck in an abusive marriage and the economic hardship of Americans of African descent, the children of former slaves who tried to eke out a living in the south in the early part of the twentieth century. She’s had “fifteen years of sweat, sweat, sweat” and suffered beatings at the hands of her husband ever since the second month of their marriage. His abuse has become more than just physical, however, and the final blow is a psychological one when he brings a snake home to terrorize her. This is the least joyful of the three stories and benefits from the spirited blues number that introduces it and the touch of whimsy provided by having one character portrayed by a man-sized puppet designed by Marie Schneggenberger.

The transition from the rural south to the urban north, specifically Harlem in the jumping 1920s, is instantly signaled by the stringing up of four clotheslines festooned with colorful suits and dresses of a flamboyant style preceding the later zoot suits of the 1940s. This “Story Set in Harlem Slang” is all about posturing, strutting and generally demonstrating a style of attitude. Rogers manages to imbue this, the shortest of the three stories, with a sense of “cool” reminiscent of the jazzy rhythmic swagger and patter of the musical revue “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” but without the jazz band.

After a brief intermission, the troupe mounts the most fable-like of the three stories. “The Gilded Six-Bits” is a story of an idyllic love nearly destroyed by temptation. It is Hurston’s take on the old “I don’t need anything but love” story where temptation comes in the form of a fascinating stranger offering a taste of wealth, elegance and excitement in contrast to an apparently dull every-day existence. In this case, the every-day is a strong, romantic love of a young married couple and the temptation is presented by a stranger claiming wealth represented by a gold piece that is, in reality, a gilded half-dollar coin.

Told with simple language and touches of folk tales, the story features such flowery lines as “I’d rather all the other women in the world would be dead than for you to have a toothache” and poetic ones like “the great belt on the wheel of time slipped.” In order to work, the story needs to be told with a highly theatrical sense and Rogers makes it work by staging it as a vaudeville act with key moments presented as silhouettes on a roll-down screen painted as a homey quilt.

All three stories benefit from the choreography of Michael J. Bobbitt who devises movements for the entire cast that effectively underline the mood of the moment. Musically, the show includes both existing blues numbers such as “Tell Me Mama” and “I’ve Been Livin’ with the Blues” and original music written by Chic Street Man. The result is a frequently rollicking evening that nonetheless gets at the heart of the hardships and difficulties of life as seen by Hurston.

Tribute is a unique production company in Washington. It doesn’t produce a season of shows. Indeed, it can go a full season without producing even one show. But it is there to handle special challenges and mount productions of particularly intriguing shows. In 2000 it produced “Leaving the Summer Land” which earned a Helen Hayes Award for its set designer, the same Tony Cisek who designed the flexible stage on which all three of “Spunk’s” stories play out. Then in 2004 it produced Stephen Lang’s one-man show about seven Medal of Honor winners, “Beyond Glory” and Lang walked away with a Helen Hayes Award as well. Just this fall, Tribute brought the international touring company of the South African play “Truth in Translation” with its score by Hugh Masakela into the Atlas. Now, with “Spunk” the company continues its record of memorable productions.

“Spunk” plays Wednesday – Saturday evenings with matinees on Saturday and Sunday through December 23 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street, NE. Tickets are $20 - $35. Call 202-399-7993 or log on to www.atlasarts.org

Brad Hathaway is the theater columnist for The Hill Rag/DC North. He is also the editor/reviewer for Potomac Stages, a website and email service covering theater in Washington, Maryland and Virginia (www.PotomacStages.com. He and his wife live on Capitol Hill. He can be reached by email at Brad@PotomacStages.com.