Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
In 1933 folklorist John Lomax, collecting songs in the rural South on behalf of the Library of Congress, decamped at Angola Prison in Louisiana, where he recorded a remarkable singer called Lead Belly. Lomax returned a year later, petitioning the governor for a pardon. Having secured his release, Lomax brought Lead Belly to New York where he marketed the singer as a touchstone of black Southern authenticity to Manhattan’s radical chic.
In Black Pearl Sings! playwright Frank Higgins flips the genders of the real-life protagonists, telling a fiction both more and less complicated than the true story. Directed by Leda Hoffman, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s production is a moving and thoughtful two-woman musical play with a pair of remarkable actors playing women poles apart but brought together by music.
A familiar face in Wisconsin theater, Colleen Madden plays Library of Congress songcatcher, Susannah Mullally. It’s an actorly role performed with pinpoint detail as the occasionally imperious, slightly stiff Ivy Leaguer learns to loosen up and see beyond her preconceptions and professional aspirations. The imprisoned African-American singer she encounters, Alberta “Pearl” Johnson, is given a force of nature performance by a veteran thespian but first-timer on Milwaukee stages, Lynette DuPree. DuPree isn’t merely an actor singing the blues but a first-rate blues and spiritual singer who is also an actor with tremendous emotional range, moving easily from astonishment to unbridled joy and despair.
Pearl studies the strange woman from up North who wants her to sing with narrow, suspicious eyes. “What you get out of this?” she demands. Susannah explains that she’s on a mission to show that history is made by common folk and inscribed in their songs; a mission to save the old black ballads before they disappear. Pearl doesn’t care about none of that. She wants Susannah to help find her missing daughter—or she won’t sing.
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Relations between Pearl and Susannah are often testy, fraught with misunderstandings across the wide chasm of bad history, but warmed by moments of mutual recognition and a growing sense of trust despite opposing worldviews. Pearl places her trust in God. Susannah pins her hope on academic advancement. And after arriving in Greenwich Village, pardon in hand, they continue to grapple with their roles as Susannah tries to prune Pearl to the expectations of the New York intelligentsia.
There are many parallels between Lead Belly-Lomax and Pearl-Susannah. Like Lomax, Susannah wants to dress her singer in degrading prison stripes for visual impact. However, Susannah is more socially conscious, less given to unreflective prejudice, than her real-life predecessor, and faces a challenge he never met: being a woman in a male society that—unlike today—didn’t bother to conceal its patronizing attitude toward professional women.
Through March 18 at Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets visit milwaukeerep.com or call (414) 224-9490.
