Playwright Frank Higgins on "Black Pearl Sings!" at FST

Alice M. Gatling as Pearl (Image by John Jones)

I was already looking forward to seeing "Black Pearl Sings!" at Florida Studio Theatre when I was invited to a conversation with playwright Frank Higgins. What a treat it was to hear from Higgins about how the play came to be. But first, a bit of background.  

Set in Texas circa 1935, "Black Pearl Sings!" is the story of two very different women. Susannah is a White musicologist working for the Library of Congress. Her goal is to find and record undocumented slave songs so they can be preserved for history. Pearl is a Black woman serving time for killing an abusive man. She is a repository of exactly the type of music Susannah is seeking.Time to get out that recorder! But it's not that easy. Pearl is suspicious of Susannah and her motives. And giving up these songs feels like giving up a piece of her history. Can these women bridge the gap between them and work together?  

If you're a folk music guru, this plot line might be ringing some bells in the back of your head. It bears a striking resemblance to the true story of the relationship between Huddie Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly), an imprisoned Black folk singer, and John Lomax, a song collector working for the Library of Congress. It's a story Higgins knows well and considered using as the basis for a play. But Higgins explained that having such a record is both good and bad for a playwright. Good because you have those facts available to flush out the story. Bad because you are bound by those facts. 

Higgins noted that Lead Belly did not show an interest in the history of the songs he sang. It was this fact that settled the matter once and for all. Higgins is passionate about the history of folk music -- where the songs came from, which portions are authentic, and how they were preserved. To him, the story would be incomplete without this element. And so while there are similarities between the relationships of Lead Belly/Lomax and Pearl/Susannah, creating fictional characters gave Higgins the freedom to tell the story he envisioned. He decided to create female characters both to further differentiate them from Lead Belly and Lomax and because many folk songs were passed down by women who sang while they worked. 

Playwright Frank Higgins

Before Higgins put pen to paper, he knew the song with which the "Black Pearl Sings!" would end. It's an African song featured in the 1998 documentary "The Language You Cry In." The documentary traces the cultural link between a song sung by the Gullah people living in Georgia today and their Sierra Leone ancestors. When Higgins got to the end of the film, he said to himself, "This is it." Sometimes that's how the creative muse works. 

Higgins wrote the initial draft of the play under challenging circumstances. He was the caregiver for his mother who was suffering from Alzheimers. When they were in the same room, she wanted to talk. Obviously this made writing difficult. But when he went to another room, she would forget where he was and call out for him after a few minutes. As a result, Higgins wrote the first draft in five minute bursts. He thinks working in this manner actually served the play, particularly its pacing. It would be interesting to see how much of that draft remains in place after the years of work he put in before the show was first produced. 

Speaking of the work that has gone into the play, although "Black Pearl Sings!" has had multiple productions, it still hasn't been published. This is because Higgins continues to tinker with the words. Nothing major -- a word added here or deleted there. But once it's published, the text is set in stone, and he's not ready for that to happen. He didn't share whether any tweaks would be made after having seen the FST production.  

One participant raised the thorny issue of cultural appropriation. The question was whether Higgins, a White man, has the right to tell the story of saving these slave songs. It's clearly an issue he's considered. To him, the play is the story of the women's relationship as much as a story about the music. One women is White; the other is Black. If he isn't qualified to tell the tale, who would be? And he was quick to point out that Susannah is not a White savior here. Susannah and Pearl have to work together in order to achieve their goals. Their relationship is symbiotic. For these reasons, he doesn't believe that cultural appropriation is at play.

Thanks to Higgins for his openness in sharing the backstory of "Black Pearl Sings!" and to the Florida Studio Theatre folks for including me in the session. I am even more eager than before to see the show. (The raving reviews don't hurt either.) 

"Black Pearl Sings!" continues at Florida Studio Theatre through July 30. Click here to get tickets.