With 19 relevant songs Black Pearl Sings! returns to Florida Studio Theater, which helped in its development. The drama concerns a convicted black murderer who needs parole to search for her daughter and a white musicologist who must find ur-African and American songs by black slaves to publish and promulgate. This should get her a long-denied Harvard professorship controlled by white men and, in the past, stolen from her by one. Will the women get together to achieve their ends?
Frank Higgins’s script starts the action in Texas in 1933 (not mentioned in the program) but the conditions of women and prisons look as if they existed before and for a good while after.
Act I, in a sparse—except for bars on windows—prison warden’s darkish office, scholar Susannah is in simply tailored beige dress, whereas Pearl enters with big, dirty striped overshirt and with feet ensconced in warped leather. On one foot is a heavy ball and a not-long chain. (What the two wear continues appropriately designed by Nia Safari Banks throughout.) Nothing stops Pearl from wanting (and trying) to get out, but nothing works unless Susannah will permit it.
Act 2 begins in an artistic neighborhood of New York City in a nicely furnished (including with a room-wide filled book shelf) apartment. Probationed to Susannah, Pearl is going to sing at Carnegie Hall. They’re both concerned with and guarded around each other. Each has her own goal first and foremost in mind.
A mutual, if somewhat stormy, pursuit of goals finally takes the women toward friendship and dramatic resolution. (It may be overlooked, though, that Pearl’s final plan is for a family member’s benefit, not for Susannah’s.) The FST audience gets to respond vocally to much of the activity and Pearl’s music, but no one’s brought onstage or singled out from offstage.
Performances are dramatically impressive. Each character brings convincing attention to certain plights each woman has faced from sexism, adding to the emphasis on racism against Pearl. Rachel Moulton excels as smart Susannah, always abetting Alice M. Gatling’s stunning, raw, lively Pearl enactment.
Gatling’s Pearl also impeccably sings at least bits of the 19 blacks’ songs, from “Down on Me” through to the sought-for earliest one. Perhaps most familiar to FST audiences are “Little Sally Walker,” “This Light of Mine,” “Blackberries,” and “Kum Ba Ya.” Moulton not only plays a rare instrument but sings an Irish song brought to America by a woman fleeing results of the potato famine in Ireland.
Kate Alexander directs confidently, achieving maximum exposition of the play’s themes, characterizations, musicality. She makes the direct address to the audience in song seem integrated naturally into the play.
Author FrankHiggins has drawn his characters especially well. If I have a slight criticism of his script, it’s that the talk about Voodoo and other introductions in the last part seem a bit overdone.
An updating here? Sadly, with racism and some sexism still alive, there’s no need for a dramatic lecture-substitute on them.
