Spinning Tree’s Black Pearl Sings features two lyrical performances

Two women, two backgrounds, two cultures. The two characters of Black Pearl Sings exist in separate worlds, their orbits sometimes in sync, sometimes colliding. But it’s two actresses’ performances — distinct and together — that stand out in the Spinning Tree Theatre production of local playwright and University of Missouri–Kansas City instructor Frank Higgins’ uneven play.

Nedra Dixon and Vanessa Severo are Pearl Johnson and Susannah Mullally, a prison inmate and a musicologist researching the origins of African-American songs. The former wants freedom, the latter academic recognition. Each figures that the other may be useful to her goal.

Higgins’ play, directed here by Walter Coppage, is a take on the real musicologist and folklorist John Lomax, who traveled the country to record and preserve folk songs, and who discovered musician Huddie Ledbetter, famously known as Leadbelly, in a Louisiana prison in the early 1930s. Here, it’s 1933 in Texas, and Susannah has been collecting old songs throughout the South. She’s sure that finding authentic pre–Civil War songs of slaves, especially one that originated in Africa, could be her ticket to an academic position in a male-dominated field.

It’s a fascinating idea, sidetracked in the telling. Pearl is desperate to get out of prison to find her missing daughter. Susannah is 35 and in a rush, and her plan is to get Pearl paroled, but only if she’ll share the songs she learned in childhood. Despite the chance to leave behind her chains, Pearl may not have the most to gain. Both women are restrained — by the biases of sexism and racism, particularly — and each holds a key for the other. Higgins emphasizes this power dynamic repeatedly — single-mindedly in Act 1, then with more confusion in Act 2.

Susannah coaxes from Pearl — or forces, really, through bribery — songs that she says are “stronger than slavery’s chains.” At the start, “Little Sally Walker” attempts to expose the effect of culture on song through these women’s opposing natures. It’s a gag that gets overplayed, but it’s an early showcase for Severo and Dixon, who entertain with playful performances.

Severo’s Susannah is an uptight and rigid white woman, and her impatience with the academic world’s restrictive status quo erupts often. But the actress is most effective when subtly exposing her character’s inner workings. A quiet scene on the telephone is one of the play’s most telling as she negotiates with the man on the other end, holding herself back as she defers to him and dodges his come-ons.

While Severo’s role is an often controlling one, it’s Dixon who dominates with her commanding stage presence and riveting a cappella performances. Her singing throughout Act 1 sparks applause, a fourth-wall-breaking but understandable response to her powerful renditions. The characters themselves aren’t particularly likable at first, but these two accomplished actresses find a way into their roles and, in so doing, to us.

Audience engagement is actually scripted in Act 2, when Pearl performs in front of an academic gathering in New York City and reaches out to the crowd from her newfound platform, where she discovers her inner diva. But the New York Pearl of the second half has made a vivid if unlikely transformation. It’s not just the new hairdo or the beautiful clothes provided for her appearance (costume design, including Susannah’s stunning ’30s-era slacks and blouses, by Shannon Smith-Regnier). The former violence-prone, stripes-wearing inmate, so obsessed with her daughter, now expounds on class and labor struggles, and sings Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs.

Perhaps it’s a nod to Leadbelly’s connection to those singer-songwriters, but the additional threads loosen the story line and blur its focus. The second act’s lengthy, often-expository dialogue covers yet more ground and plays like a game of character catch-up. Frequent quips, sprinkled throughout and delivered like punch lines, get laughs but are dialogue detours and character diversions. Through Pearl, Higgins even references the decades-later development of Hilton Head, South Carolina — where former slaves (and Pearl’s relatives) live — into golf courses for the rich.

Though the play’s trajectory — and message — goes off-course, the performances are what hold us and remain in mind. They are reasons enough to see this Spinning Tree show. In a role defined by its limitations and prescribed behavior, Severo still radiates charisma. And via her songs and heartfelt portrayal, Dixon rouses and moves us, and keeps us bound.