Black Is The Color of My Voice, a compelling 70-minute one-act play, was written by Apphia Campbell in 2013, who brought it vividly to life onstage herself in the intervening years to huge accolades. The current tour is being whisked round the land by Nicholle Cherrie, whose turn it is to carry audiences along on this journey through the highs and lows in the life of fictional woman, Mena Bordeaux. Inspired by the eventful life and powerful music of iconic singer, composer, would-be concert pianist and Civil Rights’ activist, Nina Simone, Mena’s story closely shadows Nina’s and is put before us via passionate monologue, vibrantly enacted scenes and Nina Simone songs, sung live to pre-recorded backing or sung a capella.
Mena sits in a simple room, furnished with wooden chair, desk, old phone (unplugged), basic bed and skinny mat, locations that enable action, focus and lighting to move nicely about the stage. On a detox retreat she spends her time reflecting deeply on her life as she relives and re-enacts various episodes, triggered by items from the past, pulled from a battered suitcase – concert gowns, her daddy’s jacket, her old hat, a love letter and a letter of rejection. Taken out first is a picture of her father which she sets in pride of place and frequently, passionately addresses, expressing all she thinks and feels as if he actually were there. There was great love between them and she’s grief-stricken, devastated that her father’s sudden death occurred during a period of estrangement, which has robbed her of the chance to ask forgiveness.
Displaying the joy, excitement, naivety, anger, aggression, despair, total distress, hope, resolution and optimism that kick in at different points in her life, Cherrie plays Mena’s younger self, or briefly, her father or her proud, God-fearing, Gospel-singing mother, her loving boyfriend or her abusive husband/manager. Warm, heartfelt performances take us admirably from laughter to tears as we travel back through scenes and snippets of childhood and family life, earlier adult life and relationships, and witness her growing awareness of racial injustice, which, even early on, enraged and emboldened her so much more than it did her parents.
At the age of three, like Nina Simone, Mena was a pianistic prodigy, head-over-heels in love with Bach and well on her way to becoming a concert pianist until a letter of rejection, based on racial prejudice, stopped her in her tracks. To earn money, she took to playing musak in clubs or singing what her mother called “the Devil’s music”, which broadened her range of styles from classical and gospel to folk, jazz, blues and pop and brought her huge success both as a singer and as a leading voice and activist in the Civil Rights Movement, passionately demanding racial justice.
These were the momentous 1950s and 60s, a time when apartheid segregation of blacks and whites, race riots, extreme violence and KKK activities and hostilities were a strong, ongoing part of daily life in states like North Carolina. Onstage, these events are brought home as TV broadcast recordings play and we witness the violence of Mena’s uncontrollable, inconsolable wrath and indignation as she learns of the brutal, mindless murder of a group of little black girls in a church and hears of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, events that also spur her into composing songs like Mississippi Goddam.
We don’t follow Nina/Mena’s life to its end. (Nina Simone died in France, aged 70). Instead, we land full circle back in the little room we started in, having heard along the way songs like I Put A Spell On You, Young, Gifted and Black, I Wish That I knew How it Would Feel to be Free and Black is the Colour of my True Love’s Hair, all of which Cherrie sings in her own voice without attempting imitation, which is great. If she injected the extra little dose of meaningful, weightier passion into the words of every song that she pours into the last few bars of the evening, it could be greater still. It’s a new day, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new life for me and I’m feeling good. A note of optimism to take away and treasure.
Eileen Caiger Gray
