'Pearl's' Melody Falls Flat

If "Black Pearl Sings!" is more purely educational than theatrical, it at least can offer a lesson in the resonant gifts of Tonya Pinkins, whose a capella delivery of an evening's worth of spirituals fills Ford's Theatre with achingly mournful melody.

The actress earned rapturous notices on Broadway for her performance a few years back as the sullen housekeeper in the Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical, "Caroline, or Change." Here at Ford's, she is playing another poor Southern woman of thwarted aims: Alberta Johnson, also known as Pearl, who is serving a long term in a Texas penitentiary for maiming an abusive man.

The fictional title character in Frank Higgins's play -- about the efforts of a Depression-era Library of Congress researcher to record Pearl's singing -- is more prosaically drawn than the woman of more scalding bitterness Pinkins portrayed in "Caroline." By virtue of the stoic dignity the actress manages to convey, however, she creates in Pearl a figure not only to be reckoned with, but also one whose suffering we want to comprehend.

Higgins doesn't make a depth of communion especially easy. The dramatic terrain of "Black Pearl Sings!" is as flat as the Plains, consisting of a series of scenes in which Erika Rolfsrud's Susannah, the researcher from Washington, first attempts to coax music out of Pearl and, later, after she gets her sprung from prison, to launch Pearl on a concert tour out of New York that can advance both their careers.

The effort to construct parallel stakes for the two characters doesn't achieve the desired impact. Plucky Susannah has been betrayed by a male supervisor on a previous mission to collect indigenous folk music by falsely claiming credit for her work. So Pearl is Susannah's ticket to academic revenge and, she hopes, a job as the first female professor at Harvard. (There's a lot of conversation about the servile role of women in serious fields of scholarship.)

But Pearl's far more acute pain -- her young-adult daughter has disappeared while Pearl has been in prison, where she's forced to work on a chain gang, clearing a leech-filled Texas swamp -- makes Susannah and her troubles seem trivial, in ways that diminish one's investment in whatever bond the women might share. It may be Higgins's point that the well-intentioned Susannah cannot see completely beyond her own goals and that the chasm between white and black women of the time is not entirely bridgeable. It's just that in director Jennifer L. Nelson's workmanlike production, the dynamism of this notion never fully takes root.

The more galvanizing part of the evening originates in Pinkins's lungs. The device of a researcher tracing vocal artifacts back to slavery and the Middle Passage gives "Black Pearl Sings!" the opportunity to have Pinkins sing, and often. (Rolfsrud accompanies Pinkins on an autoharp and sings occasionally, too.) In songs like "Hard Times in Old Virginia" and "Do Lord Remember Me," she conjures something akin to an exquisite agony, the sense of a trapped people, finding ways to transform unfathomable pain into beauty.

Rolfsrud has the unenviable task of trying to balance the sour and sweeter aspects of Susannah's nature; it remains a fairly cold performance. But Dan Covey's lighting and Tony Cisek's set -- especially of the Greenwich Village apartment Pearl and Susannah inhabit for Pearl's Cooper Union debut -- infuse the evening with some needed visual warmth.

Ford's audiences, and particularly school groups, may treat the time spent with Pearl and her music as a useful primer on an important aspect of American history and culture. As Susannah says, Pearl is a doorway to the past. And Pinkins asserts herself with stirring vocal authority at the threshold.

Black Pearl Sings!, by Frank Higgins. Directed by Jennifer L. Nelson. Sets, Tony Cisek; costumes, Toni-Leslie James; lighting, Dan Covey; sound, Veronika Vorel; music direction, William Hubbard; wigs and makeup, Wendy Parson. About 2 hours 10 minutes. Through Oct. 18 at Ford's Theatre, 511 10th St. NW. 202-347-4833 or visit www.fords.org.