The opening gesture of Nina Simone: Four Women is almost worth the price of admission. Beneath a mosaic glass portrait of Nina Simone, Shontina Vernon, playing the legend herself, sings the Gershwins' "I Loves You, Porgy," pointedly dropping the "s" in "loves." For Simone, the "s" is a parody of black vernacular, a way of increasing sympathy at the expense of black Americans as a whole, and she refuses to participate in the stereotype.
The sound of breaking glass shatters the melancholy piano, and a video of police spraying black marchers with fire hoses flashes across a screen. The curtain opens, and Jennifer Zeyl's incredible set is revealed. She's re-created the bombed-out 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963.
Simone sits at an upright piano. She's tasked herself to condense the devastation and power and paradox of the fight for black freedom into a single protest song. When a character named Sarah (played by Shaunyce Omar, who absolutely killed it the whole time) runs into the church to escape the hectic scene outside, the play's premise becomes clear.
As the title suggests, playwright Christina Ham has created a contemporary dramatization of "Four Women," one Simone's most popular protest songs. Like the song, the play features four women: Sarah, a dark-skinned black woman with a back "strong enough to take the pain"; Sephronia, a mixed-race woman who belongs "between two worlds"; Sweet Thing, a tan-black sex worker with a "mouth like wine"; and Peaches, a brown-black woman with a "tough manner," a double for Simone herself.
After the powerful and evocative opener, the play becomes a discussion of the way class, gender, and skin tone created tension within the civil rights movement. Peaches/Simone uses these conflicts as inspiration for the song she's trying to write, which ends up being the indisputably amazing and defiant "Mississippi Goddam."
Eventually, the characters come to learn that the shared pain and pleasure of black cultural experience unites them despite their differences. The conversation around the civil rights movement and art's role as a unifier is fascinating and rare to see onstage, but the amount of exposition at times makes the play feel like the musical version of Nina Simone's Wikipedia page.
The glut of pithy, polished one-liners might do it for some, but to me they contribute to the didactic nature of the piece. "Grief is a solo act," says Sarah at one point. "Where words falter, music doesn't," says Peaches/Simone, just laying it all right out there.
But I almost forgot about all of that in the show's penultimate number, when the four characters pick up brooms and start singing and dancing in a circle (with choreography by Dani Tirrell) to a gospel song written by the playwright called "Shout Oh, Mary." The moment metaphorically rebuilds the bombed-out church, lifts the fallen cross off the floor, and gives the audience a sense of hope.
But Ham and director Valerie Curtis- Newton know that the hope lies not only in foregrounding the stories of freedom fighters from the past, but also calling attention to the ongoing struggle for black liberation. To that end, the four women close on a song celebrating the work of contemporary and under-sung black activists.
