Cliched storyline derails ‘Black Pearl Sings’

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E. Faye Butler (left) and Susie McMonagle star in "Black Pearl Sings!" at Northlight Theatre. | STARBELLY STUDIOS

Updated: January 25, 2012 2:28PM

If you wish to see what is meant by the phrase “working the material,” just take a look at E. Faye Butler and Susie McMonagle — two of this city’s most musically and dramatically gifted performers — as they try to breathe life into “Black Pearl Sings,” the Frank Higgins play-with-music now at Northlight Theatre.

Higgins’ play might most generously be described as a paint-by-numbers exercise in political correctness. Yes, it spins a potentially intriguing story — about a white female ethnomusicologist working under the auspices of the WPA’s Federal Music Project who visits prisons in search of women who still sing authentic slave songs, work songs and more. But beyond the music, which is by far the best aspect of the show, it homes in on a long list of familiar racial (as well as feminist) gaffes of the period in which it unfolds (the heart of the Great Depression), and it then does clumsy somersaults to correct itself, creating classic “Kumbaya” moments that have little to do with then (the 1930s), and everything to do with much later.

Butler and McMonagle put all their heart and soul and obvious camaraderie into the production, which has been directed by Steve Scott. But there is hardly a scene here that does not come accompanied with a cringe factor. And while this play that might be the catalyst for a Teacher’s Guide for junior and senior high school students studying American history and related racial and gender issues, it is pablum for a sophisticated theater crowd.

Pearl (Butler) has already served 10 years in a women’s prison in southeast Texas for cutting off the genitals of a man who, it is subtly suggested, may have molested her then 12-year-old daughter. When Susannah (McMonagle), the unmarried, independent-mined, white academic from a patrician family — who was cheated out of a Harvard teaching position by a white man — arrives at the prison where Pearl is confined, she hears her powerful voice from afar. And she senses the woman might still know the sort of previously unrecorded slave-era songs she is hungry to discover.

Enter Pearl, dressed in striped prison garb, with a heavy ball and chain latched to her ankles. Pearl is more than skeptical about Susannah’s motives, but she has a goal: To reconnect with her now 22-year-old daughter who she believes might be in Houston. And she needs Susannah’s help. So the two fiercely determined women find common ground and join forces, as Susannah manages to get Pearl out on parole, shares a rich bohemian’s apartment with her in Greenwich Village, and attempts to move her into the larger concert world.

Along the way the cliches pile up, as Pearl prods the prim Susannah to swing her pelvis to the music, and as Susannah coaches Pearl about how to present herself to the “liberal” public. Each actress strives valiantly (if not always successfully) to avoid sounding like a mouthpiece for the author.

Butler saves the day as she uses her extraordinary vocal and stylistic gifts to sing everything from children’s songs, field songs, sexy blues and spirituals to a blackberry vendor’s calls and a rousing African chant. The always intelligent McMonagle — autoharp in hand — accompanies herself on lovely renditions of Irish ballads and other “mountain music.”

Since most stories about these sorts of “recording sessions” deal with men (Leadbelly, for example, as recorded by Alan Lomax), the focus on a female singer and archivist is a welcome angle, and this perspective also is well-documented in the show’s program notes. But Higgins’ characters are wooden. And too often they strike the wrong chord for their time. Rather than living in the 1930s they seem to be time-traveling in the 1960s and beyond.