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An angel, as active in death as she was in life, is here in town and ready to fuss about justice:
Don’t tell me
I’ll tell you
Me and my people just about due.
The title of the song from which that lyric comes, “Mississippi Goddam,” also provides a less-than-subtle clue:
Nina Simone was a troubled (probably bipolar), often angry, artist, hounded out of a classical music career because of her race. But she was and is (especially as reincarnated through Sunday at the Wells Theatre by supercharged actor/singer/lawyer Yolanda Rabun) quite ready to sing her soul out in an effort to save ours, both as individuals and a nation.
The one-woman show is called “No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone,” by playwright Howard L. Craft, and that title, too, is telling. The scared little girl who became the international singing legend was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, in 1933, the sixth of eight preacher’s kids, about 400 miles from the Wells, down in Tryon, North Carolina. More about the Tar Heel connection later. She mostly got over being scared; she likewise dismissed the blues as “her” genre. She sang all genres, and fiercely.
Eunice was allowed to study piano and proved so talented she was also permitted to study at Juilliard. But the world wasn’t ready for, in her own words, “Black fingers” on a classical keyboard. A young Simone (she rechristened herself after tough, beautiful French acting sensation Simone Signoret) had no choice but to sing for her subsistence and later write and sing all manner of her own and others’ popular and political songs.
In her remarkable career, Simone befriended a bevy of other major Black artists and leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Following the lead of Josephine Baker, Richard Wright and many others, including her friend and fellow artist James Baldwin, she eventually chose exile in Africa and Europe. As with Baldwin, Simone’s politically charged life ended in France, in 2003.
But it’s the North Carolina connection that runs particularly deep in the Wells production. Every principal involved — playwright Craft, actor Rabun and director Kathryn Hunter-Williams — sports a dab of tar on his or her feet for some reason, with this particular version of the show also having been developed at PlayMakers Repertory, Chapel Hill.
The show, as seen in dress rehearsal, was still understandably rough with delayed lighting cues, one case of forgotten lyrics (deftly handled and soon recalled). Rabun, as full of vim and vigor as Simone must have been, powers through all discrepancies to seize the stage and audience by the scruff of our necks. There are only 10 songs, with at least one other, Simone’s version of “I Put a Spell on You” (by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1959) noticeably absent and missed.
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There’s also a good bit of actor/audience banter and a somewhat methodical account of biographical highlights. Rabun switches costumes onstage, going from one gown to another, from a tank suit with cowboy boots (quite the look!) to a lovely dashiki. She occasionally rests on a divan or chair center stage, her three-piece band sitting always stage right. The gentlemen acquit themselves well, but sometimes their limited number seems a false economy. A trio can create only so big and varied a sound.
Simone shares anecdotes about her two husbands and countless affairs, one with an unidentified “prime minister.” She says of one husband: “He never lied to me … (perfect beat) … until he did.” Husband Andy physically abused her and tried without success to rein in her political activities. There were sometimes violent altercations with record executives, who, she felt, cheated her all her life. When (self-)accused of shooting a record executive, she clarifies for the audience, “I shot at a record executive.” We sense her deep anguish at the deaths of King and Medgar Evers, but especially at the killing of the four little girls in Birmingham (Sept. 15, 1963). She has the audience repeat each child victim’s name out loud.
The premise of Simone’s visiting us from the afterlife allows for witty commentary on developments since her death. She’s proud of the protest tactics of Colin Kaepernick, but she’s equally eager to return to heaven to party with folks like Langston Hughes and Tupac (who strikes her as fine-looking).
She touches briefly on the time, when she was still on Earth, that she swallowed 35 pills … and lived. Her two psychiatrists never helped but so much.
Since she’s now appearing from the afterlife, she’s quite comfortable with computers and takes some (fictitious) questions from the online public. She grapples briefly with her invisible-to-us, long-disapproving mother and her own, much-loved daughter Lisa Simone, herself a singer and a documentarian of her mother’s life. The film her daughter worked on, “What Happened, Miss Simone?” (2015), is part of a still-breaking wave of plays (including last year’s “Bessie, Billie and Nina: Pioneering Women in Jazz” at the Attucks), films, books, song remixes, etc., that keep the Simone legacy alive.
Most recently and of possible interest to those in Hampton Roads is the restoration of Simone’s home in Tryon, thanks to the support of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In fact, on May 20, there will be a gala at New York’s Pace Gallery and, into May 22, an online auction by Sotheby’s devoted to raising additional restoration funds. (See pacegallery.com/nina-simone or savingplaces.org/supportnina.)
Were Simone actually still among us, she would doubtless have supported Black Lives Matter and all other efforts to fight racial injustice and, the bane of her life, racial hypocrisy. In the Wells offering — rough as it was when I saw it — Simone quotes an odd but telling observation she attributes to Malcolm X: “You can put kittens in the oven, but that doesn’t make them biscuits.” You can deny the validity of Black history, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
To chase the kittens/biscuits image from your mind, here’s another line from the show’s “Mississippi Goddam,” perhaps just as telling and rightfully disturbing:
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time.
Weekend Scoop
Tell it, Nina, from wherever you are.
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu
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If you go
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday; 7:30 p.m. Friday; 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; and 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: The Wells Theatre, 108 E. Tazewell St., Norfolk
Tickets: Start at $35
Details: 757-627-1234, vastage.org