Milwaukee Rep's 'Black Pearl' at its best when singing

On a hot July day in 1933, musicologist John Lomax and his 18-year-old son Alan — traveling throughout the South to gather and preserve American song — arrived at Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary and met 45-year-old Huddie Ledbetter.  We know him as Lead Belly; his bluesy folk music would influence musicians from Woody Guthrie to the Rolling Stones.

Change gender and tweak some facts and that’s the story being told in Frank Higgins’ “Black Pearl Sings!,” a straight play with plenty of music that opened Sunday night in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret.  Directed by Leda Hoffmann, it features Lynette DuPree as Pearl and American Players Theatre’s Colleen Madden as the musicologist who finds her.

This odd couple seemingly have nothing in common.

Unlike Lomax, who grew up poor on a Texas farm, the Radcliffe-educated Susannah (Madden) is a prim and tightly wound bluestocking who has rejected her upbringing to save souls — her way of describing what it means to rescue songs and their singers from obscurity.  She’s experienced and tough, even if her missionary fervor can make her naïve about her acts of appropriation.

Pearl is in the pen for murdering a man she insists deserved what he got.  She’s tough, too — and wary, given  a lifetime of broken promises made by white folks.  As embodied by DuPree, she can sing; DuPree’s voice reminds me of a Lomax note from that 1933 summer, describing “music in that cry, and mystery, and wistful sadness.”

But Pearl isn’t sure she wants to sing for Susannah.

Higgins’ story of how and why she ultimately does is both clunky and incredible, right from that belief-defying opening moment when Susannah somehow interviews Pearl alone, with nary a guard in sight.  Much of Higgins’ script is driven by Pearl’s search for a missing and never seen daughter; as used here, it’s a hoary and manipulatively maudlin plot device.

Higgins fares no better when trying to balance his show by investing Susannah with troubles of her own, including chronic underfunding and the discrimination she’s faced in academia as a woman.  Genuine as such struggles would have been for one in Susannah’s shoes, her quest for Harvard tenure can seem weightless, even when presented by one of Wisconsin’s best actors.

Susannah gets it right when she tells Pearl during one of their periodic arguments that “we get along better when we sing.”

While most of that singing gets done by DuPree, both actors are impressive in giving us a cappella renditions of folk, blues and gospel that range from children’s songs to the soulful “No More Auction Block for Me” while also whisking us to Ireland and to Africa.  Would that Higgins’ script had moved as well or as far as the music it commemorates.    

“Black Pearl Sings!” continues through March 18 at the Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St.  For tickets, visit milwaukeerep.com or call (414) 224-9490.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

Parole: An illustrative example of how ham-handed this plot can be involves the strings Susannah pulls to win Pearl’s release; what transpires isn’t even remotely credible.  Very loosely based on the modest role John Lomax might have played in facilitating Lead Belly’s release, Higgins’ fumbling version involves Pearl being released into Susannah’s custody – on terms suggesting Susannah will even sleep with a governor’s aide to make it happen.  It’s yet another attempt to ennoble Susannah. 

The Savior Complex: To his credit, Higgins’ description of Susannah’s high-handed approach in procuring Pearl’s release is one of many occasions on which he cautiously tiptoes toward what could have been his great theme: The tension between Susannah’s desire to rescue Pearl and her music from oblivion, and a corresponding naiveté about what such rescue entails, for a white woman who stands to benefit most from recording Pearl’s songs.  There was similar tension in the Lomax and Lead Belly relationship; one need not accept a young Richard Wright’s condemnation of what happened as a “cultural swindle” to recognize the fine line between historical preservation and cultural appropriation.  Would that Higgins had handled that theme with more nuance – and didn’t continually defuse the tension with a joke or a distracting diversion (including the whereabouts of Pearl’s daughter, Susannah’s lack of religion, and Susannah’s fraught relationship with her parents).

Who Tells Your Story?  Cue Susannah’s obsession with authenticity  which, for her, itself becomes a construct, packaged for a white audience with its own predetermined ideas of how black people should behave.  Pearl isn’t wrong when she suggests at one point that for all her good intentions, Susannah is creating an upscale minstrel show with Pearl as her star act.  I’m not sure I buy the experienced and often self-conscious Susannah we’ve seen actually being this naïve and insenstive; there’s a paint-by-numbers quality to the way Higgins generates conflict by creating caricatures from his characters.  But while the writing and setup are clumsy, the issue they depict is real. 

Seizing Control of the Story: Whether it involves writing Pearl’s parole letter or staging Pearl’s appearances in New York, Susannah continually insists on what she at one point states expressly: “Let’s stick to the script.” But Pearl continually subverts the story through her music – foreshadowed from the play’s first scene, when an innocent children’s song gets reborn as sultry and sexy.  Susannah can insist all she wants on how the story is supposed to go; once Pearl has the stage, she does things her way, upending expectations to speak her own language in her own voice at the end of both Act I and Act II.  When the lights come down, she owns the stage; it’s she, as embodied by DuPree, who takes the first curtain call. Some of that’s baked into the script; some of it involves Hoffmann’s direction. It all works.

Colleen Madden: I wasn’t exaggerating, above, when describing Madden as one of Wisconsin’s best actors; her seventeen seasons at APT have been one of the great joys of my theatergoing life.  Milwaukeeans still rightly talk about her performance here (subsequently remounted at APT) of “The Syringa Tree” 13 years ago.    

Even though Madden has little to work with in “Black Pearl Sings!,” there were still moments Sunday night when she somehow managed to sound depths one would never dream this script actually has. One comes late in the show, when she sings a song fragment in Gaelic to underscore how easily what’s beautiful can be broken.  It gives texture and truth to Susannah’s heartfelt conviction that “when a person dies, a library is lost."

One hopes that Madden will return to the Rep soon, in a piece that more fully showcases all she can do (her three appearances on Rep stages all took place more than a decade ago).  In the interim, she’ll have three meaty roles during the upcoming APT season (including the star turn as Billie Dawn in “Born Yesterday!”).  And before the APT season begins, she’ll be back in Milwaukee, starring as Sister Aloysius in a Milwaukee Chamber Theatre production of “Doubt.” Opening in April, it also features April Paul, Malkia Stampley and Marcus Truschinski.