Nina Simone: Four Women

The Arena Stage's play "Nina Simone: Four Women," takes the famed jazz singer and civil rights activist and imagines her conversation with the four characters described in her song "Four Women," setting their dialogue in the 16th Street Baptist Church after the 1963 bombing.

The play deals with not only the struggle for civil rights that continued to grow out of the murder of the four young girls in Birmingham, Alabama but also the struggles within the movement for identity and respect. One of the women mocks Simone (Harriett D. Foy) for singing cover songs and popular music, while another one judges her for taking the Lord's name in vain in her song "Mississippi, God Damn," in the aftermath of the death of Medgar Evers.

Within their arguments lies the difficult conflicts that continued to percolate throughout the civil rights movement and are still evident today. As Sephronia (Toni L. Martin) is mocked for her light skin, she also criticizes Sarah (Theresa Cunningham) for being known as "Auntie" and working in the homes of white families. Meanwhile, Sweet Thing (Felicia Curry), a prostitute and child friend of Sephronia's, threatens to cut her with a switchblade and taunts her that her college-educated fiance has fathered a child with her.

The complex one-act play, written by Christina Ham and directed by Timothy Douglas, imagines the contentious interplay between various alter egos of Simone, as articulated in her song of the same title. In the midst of singing Gershwin songs from "Porgy and Bess," Simone is transported into the surreal setting of the 16th Street Baptist Church, evocatively arranged, by set designer Timothy Mackabee with pews pushed up in the air from the explosion, and the shattered and faceless stained glass of Jesus featured in the center.

The songs are masterfully performed with the help of musical direction by Darius Smith (who plays Sam, the onstage piano player). These include Simone originals, like "Sinnerman," "Four Women" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," with classic spirituals, and various jazz songs, to show the multiple identities that Simone inhabited, as a young woman raised in the church, forced to sing cover songs in Atlantic City for money, until she was eventually able to claim her own voice as a civil rights advocate.

All four characters are well-drawn, other than "Sweet Thing," who veers too quickly into ugly stereotypes. Dressed in platform shoes, a short skirt, and fur coat, she sings, "Whose little girl am I? Anyone who has money to buy." She has come to the 16th Street Baptist Church to steal one of the little girls' shoes to sell as a souvenir.

As Aunt Sarah, Cunningham embodies the elderly, hard-working Birmingham resident, who wants little more than to raise a family in a less violent world. Church-going and law-abiding, she often reminds the Simone narrator of her own Baptist-revival mother.

Meanwhile, as Sephronia, Martin plays a forthright young school teacher who has become active in the movement, working with Martin Luther King, though Simone points out that as a woman, she is kept from the frontlines and the headlines, made to walk on parallel side streets, while the men of the movement are photographed marching down Constitution Avenue.

With her light skin and straight hair, she is maligned by the other three women, until she tells them that her features are the result of the rape of her mother by a white man. In Simone's lyrics, she sings, "Between two worlds/I do belong/ My father was rich and white/ He forced my mother late one night."

The story showcases not only Simone's transition from artist to activist, but bears the brutality and disrespect faced by these four women as a microcosm of the world.

"Nina Simone: Four Women" runs through December 24 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth Street, S.W. For tickets or information, call 202-488-3300 or visit arenastage.org