‘Leading with Intelligence’ ‘Four Women’ challenges racial stereotypes BY BRIDGETTE M. REDMAN When challenged, American singer-songwriter and civil rights activist Nina Simone said she didn’t lead with anger, she led with intelligence. It is part of what has attracted Tiffany Nichole Greene to direct the show “Nina Simone: Four Women” at the Arizona Theatre Company. The Christina Ham play with music will run in Tucson through March 19 and pick up in Phoenix from March 24 to April 10. The show casts a light on the musician’s life and work. It draws its name from a song Simone wrote after the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four little girls. “Four Women” was a tribute to those children. She sang about herself and three other Black women from various backgrounds with various looks. The play imagines a conversation between them and addresses their fight to overcome second-class status, racism and the stereotypes that seek to define them. It is told with Simone’s songs and covers along with traditional hymns. Greene, who earned an MFA in acting from Brown University, is the resident director of “Hamilton” and directs shows across the nation. She is a two-time Drama League finalist and an alumna of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. She specializes in developing new works. Greene worked with Arizona Theatre Company’s artistic director, Sean Daniels, before he returned to the state in that role. They collaborated with the same playwright when Daniels was out East. He reached out to her and asked if she was interested in directing “Nina Simone: Four Women,” which was slated to be staged last year; the pandemic delayed it. Greene says she is attracted to the possibilities inherent in this show and to the way the story is told. “I’m drawn to the poetry of this piece — and I don’t mean polite poetry,” Greene says. “When we think of poetry, we sometimes think flowery and polite and still. In this, there is an attack that lives inside of this piece if you let it. There is something poetic in that it is able to live in the past, present and future. www.LovinLife.com
“It is able to live in realism and then bubble into something that feels like we are not where we think we are.” She says that while Simone has her flaws, she is a thinker, someone who is extremely intelligent and open minded. “The things I want to celebrate about her are her courage and freedom,” Greene says. “The ways in which she frees herself — freedom is something she offers herself. It’s not something she asks the world to give her. I’m very inspired by that mentality.” Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 in North Carolina, the sixth of eight children in a poor family. She wanted to be a concert pianist and, with help from supporters, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York for a summer. She changed her name so her family wouldn’t discover she was playing in nightclubs in Atlantic City to make a living. It was then that she began singing professionally. She recorded more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974. She used her Juilliard education to combine classical music with gospel and pop. In 1964, she began focusing on protest songs, starting with “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evans. She advocated violent revolution and a separate Black state. She became friends with many Black leftists and activists who would influence her, none more so than playwright Lorraine Hansberry (“A Raisin in the Sun”). She also engaged with such luminaries as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes. She left the country, relocating to Barbados and then to Liberia. In the 1980s and beyond, she moved between Liberia, Barbados, Switzerland, France, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. She died of breast cancer in 2003 in France. Greene said Simone was once asked during an interview if she was leading with anger because so much of her work was meshed with violence and revolt against injustices. “She said, ‘No, I’m leading with intelligence,’” Greene quoted Simone as saying. “Anger has its place. I want to show the
audience that I know who they really are.” Greene plans to reflect this in direction of “Nina Simone: Four Women” and in her vision of the four women who make up this narrative. “I’m showing these four women and leading with intellect — I don’t mean in terms of who is the smartest, but in terms of strategy, the ways in which these four women maneuver through life in America as Black women,” Greene says. “I am interested in exploring not the stereotypes of four Black women but four different paths carved out for Black women and the ways in which they must maneuver in pursuit of survival or peace or prosperity or any sort of advancement, and the sacrifices that we learn these women must make.” While the song “Four Women” centers on events in 1963, Greene said the themes are relevant. “I think it is commentary on the struggle that something put out in 1963 is in any way, shape or form relevant today, is not shocking, but it is alarming,” Greene says. “Hopefully this play will reignite a fire in all of us to keep fighting for and pushing for those things we say we believe in.” Greene says she is pleased with the four actors. “These four women are very complementary to one another,” Greene says. “I wanted to make sure that we are representing different skin tones and different body types, representing different African backgrounds. Then, for me, I wanted regional diversity as well. All four actors are from different areas. They currently live in and are from different states.” Candace Thomas is Simone, while the other women are played by Deidra Grace, Katya Collazo and Kia Dawn Fulton. The lone male character, Sam Waymon, is played by music director Dante Harrell. In technical terms, “Nina Simone: Four Women” will differentiate between what is real and not real through lighting by Philip S. Rosenberg. When patrons see the show in either Tucson or Phoenix, she hopes they will be mindful of the message and music. “It is truly a play,” Greene says. “It is driven by relationship and dialogue between these women, and it is truly a play with
Candace Thomas plays Nina Simone in “Nina Simone: Four Women.” (Photo by Tim Fuller)
music. We are not leading with song. We are leading with thought. Songs grow out of the pressure being put on a moment.”
Arizona Theatre Company’s “Nina Simone: Four Women” WHEN: Various times Saturday, March 19 WHERE: Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Avenue, Tucson WHEN: Various times Thursday, March 24, to Sunday, April 10 WHERE: Herberger Theatre, 222 E. Monroe Street, Phoenix COST: Tickets start at $25 INFO: arizonatheatre.org; all audience must be masked and provide proof of vaccine, or a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours. “Nina Simone: Four Women” can be viewed at home with ATC Shows on Demand. MARCH 2022
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