Nina Simone: Four Women at Seattle Rep

Nina Simone: Four Women calls itself a play with music and does, in fact, have two complimentary sides.  There is a line early in the play that sums it up, in part.  I don't remember it exactly but it's to the effect that when the scars heal over, they turn out blacker.  Playwright Christina Ham is saying the harder you try to erase identity, the stronger it comes back.  It's an anthem to perseverance.  And it applies to the four characters both as black women and as their individual selves.  They claim and hold their power.

At the same time, the characters are at their strongest when they are singing together.  Once early in the show, this theme became apparent and then later, in the number Sing: Oh Mary it really paid off.  Throughout the show, each of the characters had been advocating for their own point of view.  There was a kind of dissonance.  But when they came together in song, again, there was power. The song seemed to rise out of each of them spontaneously from their shared identity and struggle.  It left me feeling that Nina Simone's desire to change the world through her art, through music can happen -- if we listen.

 "Photo by Wikipedia of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  The church was bombed in 1963 in an act of white supremacist terrorism, leaving four girls, Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11) dead.  This is said to have marked a turning point in the movement for civil rights and was also a turning point in the life of Nina Simone, leading her into activism." 

 Note: On 05/13/19 I fixed some typos and punctuation.  Also, I had intended to write "complementary" in the first paragraph but having thought about it, I will let "complimentary" stand. 

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