Picasso and politics are a problematic theatrical mix; the great artist's "neutrality" in the face of fascism (followed by his vocal conversion to Communism) isn't the kind of thing that wins an audience's sympathy. Of course there's not much in his biography that could win an audience's sympathy, frankly; I've forgotten who first said that "Like life, Picasso was nasty, brutish and short," but that pretty much sums up the divine Pablo.

Of course by now there's no denying his work was often divine (although personally I'll always prefer Matisse), and if there's one thing you could admire about him, I suppose it would be his devotion to his own gift. Which playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has wisely made the crux of his two-hander A Picasso, now playing at the Merrimack Rep in a thoughtful production directed by artistic director Charles Towers.

Hatcher's conceit is that the great modernist has been dragged off the streets of occupied Paris for an interrogation by the Nazis in some dank subterranean dungeon, complete with Phantom-of-the-Opera arches, echoing footsteps and clanging doors. And his interlocutor has come straight from central casting, too - "Miss Fischer" (Kate Udall), a drily clipped power-fräulein in form-fitting Casablanca chic.

Her aim is to get the nervous artist to authenticate at least one of three sketches the Nazis have recently confiscated - although there's little doubt, actually, that any are anything but genuine Picassos.  So why is Miss Fischer so insistent on the artist's sign-off?  Well, it turns out she's organizing a curious kind of "group show" - one so hot it's going to literally burn, in fact.  (The Nazis did, indeed, execute public immolations of "degenerate" art.)  And once Picasso gives one of these works his blessing, she'll offer it up to the flames.

So far, so good, in what looks to be an elegant cat-and-mouse game over which work, precisely, must meet an untimely end.  And Hatcher's structure does offer a relatively sturdy frame for the playwright to skillfully drape a lot of art history and name-dropping - along with a quick sidebar on the meaning of Guernica; thus to many audiences, the script offers an entertaining tutorial; to the initiated, the recap may be less compelling, but at least it's painless.

The playwright does have one big - and good - twist up his sleeve, which I won't spoil except to hint that sometimes cats can secretly be in cahoots with mice.  Alas, the trouble with Hatcher's play is that its real drama only gets started after this big reveal - and then the playwright doesn't push his new premise nearly far enough before ringing down the curtain.  Indeed, the ironies that ripple out from the re-constituted situation he has conjured might have offered some original insights into the contradictions - and cruelties - that Picasso was famous for, but Hatcher seems happy to keep the artist firmly on the side of the angels, and with a bevy of quips at the ready, to boot.  (When he is told that Hitler is himself something of an artist, for instance, Picasso replies that yes, only he has a problem with borders.)

As it stands, Miss Fischer therefore emerges as the more compelling and complex character - and actress Kate Udall fully rises to the challenge of the role (and then some); after her wildly varied turns in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Four Places, and now A Picasso, in fact, I'd say Miss Udall has long since taken her place among Boston's best actresses (although you only get to see her in Lowell!).  Meanwhile, as the Great Man himself, Mark Zeisler - who bears a passing resemblance to Picasso - colors strictly (if subtly) within the lines of Hatcher's script, so we rarely get any sense of the artist's brilliant but destructive fire, even if the slow burn of the performance never entirely loses its intrigue.  Still, the impression left by both actors - and by their director, Towers - is that they're slightly spinning their wheels; A Picasso is an enjoyable trot through a particular episode of art history, but these thoroughbreds are capable of running a far greater race.

Did you hear the one about the last two Jews in Kabul?

Jeremiah Kissel waits for inspiration in Two Jews Walk into a War . . .

Now I bet you thought stand-up comedy about the strife in Afghanistan was impossible.

Well, you're wrong!

Playwright Seth Rozin actually pulls it off in Two Jews Walk into a War. . ., his amusing two-hander up at the Merrimack Rep through this weekend.  Rozin charts the declining fortunes of the last two Jews in Kabul (it's roughly based on a true story, apparently) in this valiant vaudeville, which features an abundance of jokes spiked not with drum rolls but actual gunshots.  I know, I know - I was skeptical, too.  But the show is, indeed, funny and poignant (if in a slightly formulaic way).  And who better to sell it than local stars Jeremiah Kissel and Will LeBow, two of Boston's best actors, who play off against each other with ace precision under the thoughtful direction of Melia Bensussen, who has helmed a string of successes (The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, Circle Mirror Transformation) that I'd say have won her the title of best female director in Boston.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot (because there isn't too much to give away, anyhow).  Suffice to say that Kissel and LeBow are the aging Zeblyan and Ishaq, the last two Jews in the hostile environs of Kabul.  Their temple was long ago ransacked by the Taliban (its forlorn ruin, evoked in detail by Richard Chambers, fills the Merrimack stage) and its Torah has been stolen; when the play opens, they're still reeling from the recent death of the third Jew in Kabul.  But Zeblyan and Ishaq refuse to say die themselves!  Trouble is, these last two pillars of the community can't stand each other; the street-savvy Zeblyan and the bookish Ishaq are constantly at each other's throats.  Still, they resolve to work together to rebuild their community - the foundation of which, of course, must be a new Torah.

The rest of the play revolves around their attempt to pen their own Pentateuch (from Ishaq's sometimes-addled memory) - with the punchline being that every time they make a mistake, they must start over again from scratch (because there can't be any mistakes in the Torah).  Now before you write in - the play is open about the fact that Zeblya and Ishaq are cutting some serious theological corners here (a true Torah can only be produced under very carefully proscribed conditions).  In fact, that's the source of much of the script's comedy.  (So if the set-up offends you, you've been warned.)  But the determination of these two to make do with what they've got (even if all they've got is butcher paper, for instance) in pursuit of their devotion is Rozin's main theme, and it is, indeed, a touchingly funny one - and one with a poignant historical resonance (for the Jews, of course, have faced down foes far more powerful - and even more evil - than the Taliban).

As I said, the comedy is often formulaic; it's a bit raunchy, but basically sentimental (which is to say it conforms precisely to the new Hollywood "bromance" template).  For instance, Zeblya and Ishaq puzzle over the fact that Jewish men aren't allowed to masturbate - but women, apparently, are; likewise gay men are an "abomination," yet lesbians - well, HaShem seems to be down with a little girl-on-girl action.  The difference between "clean" and "unclean" animals is likewise an enigma - and why didn't Noah save the elephants?

All this makes for several rounds of great punchlines, but Rozin tiptoes around the deeper implications of the Torah's many curious commandments.  It's rather obvious, for instance, that the Pentateuch never bothers proscribing lesbianism because it considers women second-class citizens whose sex lives only rate moral consideration in relation to men.  Needless to say, the sweet Zeblya and Ishaq never ponder things that far - that way Reform Judaism lies!  And Rozin's only really interested in a valentine to the core of his faith, not a critique of it.

But when you've got pros like Kissel (at top) and LeBow (at left) at the wheels of a vehicle like this one, it's hard not to enjoy the ride even when it's calculated and gentle, and even though you know every turn before it comes.  With these two, the jokes all land just where they should, and the "unexpected" ending does still draw a tear.  I left Two Jews Walk into a War . . . bemused if not bewitched, and somehow I think you will, too.



Crystal Finn, Tony Ward and Joey Collins peek into Beasley's Christmas Party.



It's not often something genuinely new - or at least genuinely true - gets added to our local Christmas traditions, so Merrimack Rep's dramatization of Beasley's Christmas Party deserves special attention.  I can't say this literate staging of Booth Tarkington's short story is a great show - it's small, even slight, in size and scope (three actors, about 70 minutes).  And its message is an old one - the old Christmas message, in fact, about love and your neighbor, etc., blah blah blah.  Its virtues are that it seems sincere, and that its old tale is tinged with understated romance and whimsy.  It is, in short, the genuine article.  If you don't care for the genuine article, then you won't care for it; if you do, then you won't want to miss it.

Tarkington (at left) made a wildly successful career out of nostalgic ruminations on the passage of time and the loss of American innocence (once a celebrity who landed on the cover of Time, he's best remembered at one remove, for the hauntingly stylized film of his novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles). I won't spoil the narrative surprises of Beasley's Christmas Party, a short story from 1909, which reveal both Tarkington's virtues and flaws: shot through with conventional sentiment, the story trades in obvious cliches; it's filled with lovely spinsters, lonely bachelors, and inspiring cripples, but it never cloys because it's so delicately, even reticently, rendered. Indeed, what touches us most about Tarkington - his awareness that our lives are haunted by the spectre of lost opportunity - is always in evidence in Beasley, however much it relies on pseudo-Dickensian pathos.

And the production at Merrimack - which began its life at New York's Keen Theatre - seeems to know just how to translate Tarkington's courtly spirit to the stage.  The sugar never congeals into sap in this production because it's so wry and fleet of foot.  The set is spare (Beowulf Boritt has built impromptu Christmas trees of Victorian bric-a-brac), and the adaptation accurate (indeed, perhaps adapter C.W. Munger hangs on to a few too many of Tarkington's genteel circumlocutions).  Best of all, director Carl Forsman is confident enough to never push any of his effects.  But then he has been lucky in his three able actors - Tony Ward, Joey Collins, and Crystal Finn, who do double and triple duty (sometimes within the same scene) to tell Tarkington's winsome story.  Indeed, I longed to see these three sink their teeth into something more substantial - they're all natural Shavians, which means they can also handle Maugham, Barrie and Wilde - and maybe even Ibsen.  What a rare treat it would be, to see any of those authors done straight up on a local professional stage!  It would almost be like Christmas . . .

Life with Mother

Three for the road: Carole Monferdini, John Wojda and Kate Udall in Four Places.  Photos by Meghan Moore.

Joel Drake Johnson's Four Places (at the Merrimack Rep through November 7) has one of those deceptively simple titles that seem all too easily explained. At one level, the play's moniker bluntly refers to the fact that it occurs across four settings (a car interior, then a restaurant's waiting area, dining room, and ladies' room). But when one considers the script also features just four characters, one senses in its sobriquet a deeper, colder statement: the dysfunctional players of this desolate drama are always apart - always in four separate places - even when they're together.

And it's this sense of mutual isolation that Charles Towers' fine production honors, in its delicately grim way - under his direction, the characters, though seemingly all too familiar with each other's every flaw and failing, nevertheless float in a moral twilight zone in which nothing about any of them can ever be precisely pinned down.  The story spine of the script is so simple that it can be encapsulated in a sentence: the unhappy children of an unhappy marriage stage an intervention to prevent their mother from hurting - or possibly even killing - their father.  But the precise circumstances that brought them to this pass remain always slightly vague; the witness to Mom's actions may be unreliable (tellingly, she's called "schizophrenic"), said actions, even as described (half-smothering with a pillow), were aborted anyway, and perhaps the victim has been begging to die.  What Mom did, and what she knew, and when she did it and when she knew it, are all hard to parse precisely.  Not that Brother and Sis are any different - both of them have curiously unstable back stories, and it seems even the waitress who attends them may actually be a half-sibling, although then again, maybe she's not; we never know for sure.

I do want to say at this point, however, that most of the reviewers of Four Places have seemed quite confident about exactly what transpires in this streamlined, yet mysterious, little drama; indeed, Four Places may be the most widely - and blithely - misinterpreted local production I've come across in some time.  Jenna Scherer in the Herald, for instance, declared that its conflicts were "instantly recognizable in that all-American family way." Really? I'm not even exactly sure what said conflicts are.  But in the Globe, Sandy MacDonald likewise confidently intoned that Johnson's Mom "is a monster, of the garden-variety sort." Indeed, even at its Chicago premiere, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones announced that Johnson had forged a world that was "thoroughly credible and recognizable and raw." Yeah, and that's thoroughly wrong.  (For the record, the print critics hardly had a corner on misperception in this case. The "Wicked Local" blog, for instance, insisted that "one chilling truth after another reveals itself in brittle pronouncements." Uh-huh.)

Sigh. Sometimes people ask why I write this blog.  Well, this is one reason why: I have the rare ability to accurately interpret plays! Although at least all these critics liked the show, even if they didn't understand it. (What that means, I think I'll leave intentionally vague, in the spirit of this particular script.)

But back to Four Places, the despairing theme of which, I think, is the impossibility of real connection - given our limited knowledge of each other - and yet the endless need for it, particularly within the (four) emotional walls of the family. It's more than possible that something serious did indeed go down between Mom and Dad; and so something serious must be done. And yet that action - or intervention - implies issues of judgment that not only play hacky-sack with parent-child dynamics, but require a kind of moral authority that no one in the play can legitimately claim.

All in the (extended) family - Kate Udall, Laura Latreille, Carole Monferdini, and John Wojda.

And at the same time, what seems clear from the text is that no, Mom is not a monster, of any variety; if anyone's a monster here, in fact, it's probably Dad; her description of his behavior, and his begging for his own death, are heart-rending, and we also believe her when she says she could never go through with assisted suicide (although she adds, with a hiss, "If this is any of your business!").  Indeed, in what counts as probably the play's core thematic statement, Mother goes further with her children: "Your dad and I actually have a life outside yours. We have a relationship that is not part, any part of who you are. We have our own little universe into which NO one else is invited - a secret life . . ." Yet tellingly, a moment later she's begging her daughter to reveal her own "secret life" and excoriating her son for his "little white lies;" Four Places is not so much a glimpse into American Gothic as Chicago's take on No Exit.

Although in the end, Johnson's play may be more poignant than despairing; for despite the many recriminations exchanged between this mother and her children, something like love still binds them, and something like reconciliation still seems possible between them. "I don't love you anymore!" Mom tells her judges as she retreats into her lonely home, but as she gazes back through the window, her offspring know different. "Jesus, those faces!" her daughter marvels. "Look - she still loves us."

It's a credit to Towers's uniformly excellent cast - John Wojda, Kate Udall, Carole Monferdini, and Laura Latreille - that such internally-contradictory moments are so precisely limned. This is another superb ensemble in a season crowded with them. And Johnson's play is certainly a worthy one - although at times it does seem to be marking time in its action as it works out its carefully balanced themes; it felt to me like a kind of stepping-stone play for a writer who may be testing wider, deeper waters. Or perhaps it's that director Towers has staged the script in almost too considered a manner; I felt that a few of the bombs dropped in the show should have detonated more loudly - or at least loudly enough to make it immediately clear why Mom must retreat to the ladies' room. And Towers seems unsure of precisely how to deploy Barb, the too-attentive waitress who may be Dad's illegitimate daughter; somehow the siren call of her sweetness, its "false" familial aspect, never came clear thematically. Still, this production counts as another feather in Merrimack's cap - a subtly-shaded gray feather, perhaps, but a beauty nonetheless.

Loves of a blonde

There are four more where these came from: Karen MacDonald in The Blonde, The Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead. Photo(s) by Meghan Moore.

Whatever else I may say about the A.R.T., I must admit they made one great artistic contribution to the city's theatre scene.

They fired Karen MacDonald.

And freed from her avant-garde shackles, MacDonald took the town by storm, triumphing at Gloucester Stage, the Huntington, the New Rep, and now the Merrimack Rep. I feel for Ms. McDonald, of course - I'm sure she misses that regular paycheck from Harvard. But we're all so much better off since they let her go. The tragedy is that there's no company in town who can offer her a steady job - or rather will offer her a steady job; both the Huntington and the A.R.T., the two organizations with the financial heft to field a repertory company, refuse to do so for pseudo-intellectual reasons. Which isn't so much a tragedy as a scandal. Another scandal, while I'm on the topic, is the number of great performances we might have had from Ms. MacDonald while her light was hidden beneath the pretentious basket of the A.R.T. In the past year alone we've had at least three terrific turns from her - and prior to that? How many artistic poseurs have obscured her true talent by now? Hmmm . . .

But let's not dwell on the A.R.T. - that way madness lies! Ms. MacDonald is currently lighting up the boards in Robert Hewett's The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, a one-woman show that originated in Australia but has all but taken the global stage by storm. And it's not hard to see why: the script offers a virtuoso actress an opportunity to essay seven utterly different characters (and jump the gender line twice). Better still, it goes somewhere interesting. I don't want to overrate the play - its language is rudely vital but not remarkable, and it has at least one scene (involving a victimized little boy) that pushes the bounds of taste - but it holds you, in the manner that a good story always does. Be warned, however - this is not the broad sex comedy its title seems to promise, although there is some sex (and plenty of comedy). The story revolves around an inadvertent murder, and takes several dark, hair-pin turns; it leads toward what looks like redemption, it's true, and Mr. Hewett's tone is hardly cold; but it's always hard-boiled in something like the manner of an old-fashioned noir.

Some have complained that the author's episodic structure is a mere theatrical gimmick, but they couldn't be more wrong. In fact, Hewett's varying monologues actually put over persuasively his underlying point, that no single perspective can ever serve as an accurate representation of reality. Indeed, the play operates a bit like Kurosawa's famous Rashomon, only in reverse - in that classic movie, we slowly realized, as we listened to its characters, that we would never understand what actually happened at the scene of their crime. In The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, however, we begin to grasp the "truth" of the matter at hand; but we simultaneously realize the people we're listening to - the people who were there - never can understand what actually happened to them. Indeed, as the script develops, we perceive that its "story" is steadily evaporating; almost all its action, it turns out, has been based on misperception. So the play has been about a blonde leading the blind - all the characters' moral decisions, good and bad, have been made in various levels of ignorance. As that eponymous blonde announces near the finale (as she reveals that she's not even a blonde at all): "Nothing is what it seems." Only in the play's last moments, in fact, do its truly good characters recognize each other and begin to grope their way closer in the dark.

For a moral philosopher, of course, this represents a crushing kind of quandary (and who knows how Saint Peter puzzles it out). But for a theatre audience, it's pretty much business as usual - we know that what we're watching onstage isn't what it seems; it's "the lie that tells the truth." Indeed, at the Merrimack, we slowly realize even the scene changes - which at first seem to reveal Ms. MacDonald changing costume from one character to another - are illusions, too. I'm not sure if this meta-theatrical detail was the idea of director Melia Bensussen, but it's in keeping with the general thoughtfulness of the production (for once this director has left her identity politics at the door). And of course Ms. MacDonald is superb throughout - I heard she had some line trouble on opening night, but that was gone by last weekend, and we could simply luxuriate in a long demonstration of the actor's art; as she did in last summer's Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Ms. MacDonald has devised subtly different voices, looks, attitudes, and body languages for every personage she inhabits; she even makes a convincing dude. My favorites among her characterizations were probably the dotty lady down the street, the trashy, double-timing neighbor, and especially the knowing, not-really-a-blonde Tanya. But any student of acting could take any of these seven performances as a master class in how the thing is done. The only question as the curtain fell, in fact, was: where will Karen MacDonald do it next time?

Love on the run

They'll always have Paris; Jack Weatherall and Rae C. Wright count the hours as Mickey and Jean. Photo by Meghan Moore.

When a playwright leans on the laugh lines, and blows his characters up into caricatures, it usually means that he or she is desperate, because there's really no underlying conflict in the script's set-up, or no believable story arc, or its internal structure is a mess.

But what's striking about Richard Dresser's The Last Days of Mickey and Jean, the much-drubbed new comedy wrapping up its run at the Merrimack Rep, is that none of these things are true. The playwright has a bead on the central conflict of his eponymous pair, and has thought up a classic triangle through which to explore it. And his scenes actually track something close to a traditional sense of development, with a long sequence of what should be bruising revelations leading to a climactic dilemma. Indeed, if anything, Mickey and Jean has a better internal structure than the playwright's far-superior View of the Harbor, which premiered at Merrimack last year, and it's certainly more coherent than, say, such recent hits as the Nora's Not Enough Air or the Huntington's Becky Shaw.

Yet Dresser pushes the surface of his script relentlessly toward farce, and forced farce at that. Which is all the stranger because in a haunting coda, he suddenly does a 180 and delivers one of the best, most evocative stretches of new dramatic writing I've heard all year. Too bad it's only a few pages long!

So what went wrong? Why didn't the mature, autumnal mood of those last five minutes pervade, or at least inform, the previous 90?

Sorry, I wish I had an answer to that one, but I don't; my only guess is that Mr. Dresser is rather pressed for time these days - he's also writing the book for the higher-profile Red Sox musical at the A.R.T., and somehow I get the feeling that the Merrimack, which has spent the last few years developing his career, may have suddenly gotten the short end of the stick now that he's in the major leagues, as it were. Certainly Dresser's script gives the impression of having been thoughtfully structured, but finished at high speed, and "punched up" to hide the resulting holes in its dialogue.

The play's premise, in case you haven't heard, is intended to be a wicked riff on the last days of former Southie kingpin Whitey (a.k.a. James J.) Bulger and longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig, who have been eluding the law now for something like fifteen years (at left, a recent photo claimed to be of the pair in Italy). Bulger's career, which encompassed at least 18 murders, multiple robberies, a thriving cocaine business as well as the usual Southie rackets, and a famously close relationship with both the State House (through little brother Billy) and the FBI, has by now spawned an entire genre of crime fiction and film. Add to that his rumored sexual escapades with both men and women, as well as various sightings at drag bars, and you have a truly protean cultural figure.

Maybe too protean - there's simply more crime in Bulger's past than can be neatly tucked into the ninety minutes or so that Dresser alots himself, especially given the blackly comic spins the playwright gives the mobster's current plight and our fascination with it (the feds may not be able to track Whitey/Mickey down, but in one of the play's funnier gambits, the AARP still manages to). Dresser smartly perceives, however, that the dramatic essence of Bulger's story isn't his life of depravity but his talent for betrayal, the way he managed to stay afloat for decades by playing one criminal or governmental faction against another (even in his final escape, Whitey dumped his common-law wife for his mistress at the last minute). Thus the tantalizing question hovering over The Last Days of Mickey and Jean - will Jean betray Mickey? - is precisely the right one. And the script's bleakly satiric tone is likewise just right for the couple's isolated, pathetically paranoid existence, dashing from one safe deposit box to another in locale after locale (the play's set in a nameless hotel room in Paris). Dresser even provides them with the perfect foil - a nondescript, seemingly decent gent at the hotel bar who could offer Jean something like an escape hatch.

But the playwright errs in submerging Mickey's pathology beneath a standard sitcom persona of weary husbandry, even as he inflates Jean into a blowsy, too-needy whiner. And he fumbles the revelations which complicate both her own and her beau's back stories. The result is that Dresser never actually gets to the real comic drama he has set up for himself - we can almost feel it floating just out of reach as he busies himself with failed nods to Whitey's more outré escapades (such as the sudden appearance of a drag queen straight out of Jacques).

And alas, director Charles Towers actually exacerbates Dresser's mistakes by running with them. Thus the usually reliable Jack Weatherall almost makes no impression as Mickey, and the talented Rae C. Wright wears out her welcome as an over-the-top Jean (who comes equipped with an accent that hovers over the Boston area without ever landing in any particular neighborhood). And third wheel Christopher McHale seems to be totally thrown by that drag get-up, and never recovers in his final scenes.

But oddly enough, I hope that we actually haven't seen the last days of Mickey and Jean; the ideas behind it are just too good to be buried with this irritating first iteration. Several reviewers have remarked that the production felt more like a workshop than a finished production; my secret wish is that the script does, indeed, go back into development. Certainly the Boston area (if not Whitey Bulger) deserves better. And who knows, maybe in a year or two, once Dresser has gotten it into shape, we'll see it again at the A.R.T.

Song of the South (and the North, too)

Scenes from Black Pearl Sings! at the Merrimack Rep.

In days of yore, when fading stars of stage and screen needed steady work, they often turned to the theatrical form known as the "vehicle" - the script tailored precisely to the profile of a specific actor or actress. Of course "vehicles" still exist (A Bronx Tale, anyone?), but these days concepts or songs have often take the place of the star in the driver's seat. The 'virtual' vehicle - the show driven by its political stance (Avenue Q) or musical style (Jersey Boys) - has become the most common variant of the species.

Black Pearl Sings!, the new play by Frank Higgins now at the Merrimack Rep, is just this kind of machine - it basically takes African-American spirituals out for a feel-good theatrical spin. And for its first half or so, the script's dramatic mechanics, though obvious, work fairly well. In the second half, alas, the wheels fall off the chassis - but at least this happens for interesting reasons.

Author Higgins has basically taken a page from history - the "discovery" of "Leadbelly" (Huddie William Ledbetter) in a Southern prison by musicologists John and Alan Lomax in 1933 - then tried to turn it into a Hallmark card. He has changed the genders of his protagonists, and made a joke of the crime that sent Leadbelly to jail (Leadbelly had knifed a white man - he'd also earlier killed a relative - while Higgins's "Black Pearl" is doing time for cutting her husband's "pecker" off, which these days counts as a laugh line). The playwright has also modeled his heroine as a singer rather than an original songwriter, which makes her more malleable as a symbol than the flawed, fiery Leadbelly.

There's a method behind all these choices, of course - Higgins is interested in archetypes (or maybe stereotypes) because he has in mind not an individualized drama, but a celebration of the spiritual, and a political critique of the white appreciation of it as well. But while this is certainly an intriguing premise, it's also a challenging one, and Higgins doesn't seem quite up to the dramatic task he has set himself.

The playwright limits himself to just two characters, the imprisoned "Pearl," (Cherene Snow) and her discoverer, "Susannah," (Valerie Leonard), a Library of Congress investigator bent on finding an unknown song that "dates to before slave times." And he duly works up a set of conflicting motives for their uneasy cooperation: Susannah sees in Pearl her ticket to a prominent post at Harvard; Pearl sees in Susannah a ticket out of prison, and even a chance to make contact with her long-lost daughter. These two motivations are of course completely out of balance, ethically and emotionally, but that's part of the playwright's plan, and he uses this discrepancy to keep a serviceable level of tension going throughout his first act.

But once Pearl is freed - yet distracted from finding her daughter by Susannah's machinations - Higgins loses control of his play, largely because he is in no way an ironist (in fact, he all but drips earnestness). Yet he's attempting to limn a deeply ironic scenario; thus the tone of Black Pearl Sings! goes haywire as Pearl begins to sing for white audiences, and receives joyous acclaim, while Higgins forces her through unlikely narrative hoops to keep up a sense of her exploitation (Susannah's insistence on Pearl dressing as a prisoner onstage, for instance, just seems ridiculous). Of course in a way the playwright is hamstrung because the point he's trying to make implicates his audience, too - we, like Susannah, are more interested in Pearl's music than her history. We're exploiting the African-American spiritual as much as she is. And what's more, the playwright is, too.

I'm not sure if there's a way out of that artistic conundrum; but if there is, Higgins doesn't find it, and the tragedy he tacks on to the tail end of the script feels - well, tacked-on. The final irony, however, is that his play is still often affecting because the African-American spiritual is indeed a most powerful thing, and Cherene Snow has the voice to deliver it a cappella with tremendous emotional force (and Valerie Leonard's no slouch vocally, either). What's more, Snow underplays Pearl to poignant perfection - and if Leonard slightly over-indicates Susannah's highstrung nature, she still gets points for sweetly negotiating just about every white-chick cliché on the books (she can't dance, can't get a man, etc., etc.). Over the course of the evening these two talented women do achieve a strong sense of connection on stage. So once again we find our performers redeeming at least their material, if not the terrible history that said material seeks to limn.