After so many years of missing Alberta Hunter it's such a joy for me to see her brought to life on stage with the work of the marvelous actress Rosalind Brown. Being a Black, female creative person is a conundrum to many people. The view of who African American women are is often kept in quite narrow boxes-sultry Beyonce or Aunt Jemima or Bitch famous in hiphop songs are the usual.
Hunter was a complex, talented, self-sufficient, vulnerable, sensitive, tough woman. Writing songs for herself and many others including Bessie Smith, keeping the rights to her work, standing on a tiny stage when she was 80 years old was not common for Black women of her generation. But Hunter broke the mold. My favourite thing about Alberta I learned doing research was that she regularly donated to charities from the NAACP to the Y to the Indian schools that always solicited by mail.
In trying to reveal a full Alberta I decided to give her foil to help bring out her extraordinary qualities as well as mirror some of the difficult parts of a personality that develop when the world is not ready for you. It's not a simple matter to be tough and one can't just be tough in one aspect of one's life. It often carries over into other aspects. If you're walling off a part of yourself for protection how do you know when it's safe to break that wall down?
In order to explore that secret, sensitive place I created the character of Will, the ghost of a vaudevillian who is the uncle of Alberta's lover. It does parallel the real Bert Williams but he's a fictional creation. Top hatted and poetic he challenges Alberta to look at her life, her love for his niece(even though he originally tells her to 'not throw kerosene on the fire' of racism) as well as relive her accomplishments.
The two characters give us an insight into what it meant to be African American artists at a time when lynching was still a local sport and they needed a 'Green Book' to tell them where they were allowed to sleep at night when they were on the road. I think the cast has captured the energy and excitement of those days as well as caution it took to survive them!
Here's the first review!
http://www.curvemag.com/Culture/New-Lesbian-Play-Leaving-The-Blues/#.XiZLV6fzeOE.facebook
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