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THEATER REVIEW

Rights activist comes to life in solo show

Through storytelling and spirituals, an actor-playwright resurrects a courageous warrior in the fight for civil rights.

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

Those without a deep knowledge of the civil rights movement might not recognize the name Fannie Lou Hamer. The granddaughter of slaves, Hamer was both a leader and a soldier in the push for voting rights, a woman who inspired her fellow 1960s activists through both word and song.

At Miami's M Ensemble, an actor-playwright who goes by the single name mZuri is performing her solo show, The Fannie Lou Hamer Story. As Hamer did, mZuri aims to move and educate through a mixture of dialogue and music. And though the script is too often more meandering than dramatically compelling, its cumulative effect is powerful.

Roaming over a set painted to evoke both the United States' stars and stripes and the Confederate stars and bars, mZuri's Hamer appears as a woman summoned from the grave to share her story. Right away, she utters Hamer's famous line, the one that became her epitaph: ``I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.''

The tall, slender actress, padded to simulate Hamer's girth, explains that the activist grew up as the 20th child in a family of Mississippi share croppers. She picked cotton instead of going to school. As an adult in 1962, she responded to an appeal by an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), traveling by bus to Indianola to register to vote, buoying the group's spirits by singing hymns.

For her efforts, Hamer lost her job, got death threats, was arrested and beaten almost to death. She registered voters, traveled to the 1964 Democratic National Convention as a representative of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, ran for Congress and became a delegate to the 1968 convention.

All of these facts are woven into The Fannie Lou Hamer Story, but mZuri is most successful at drawing observers into Hamer's world when she's sharing the activist's plain-spoken philosophy. The fight for civil rights, she says, is a fight for human rights, one that should matter to everyone. Those who have things -- homes, jobs, money, food -- should share with those who don't. When mZuri speaks of Hamer's strapping husband ''Pap,'' she glows with love and desire. Always, she conveys Hamer's bedrock resoluteness.

Accompanied by pianist Ben Collier and drummer Howard Moss, mZuri interweaves the songs that were as important to Hamer as the speeches she made. With her rich alto, she delivers stirring versions of Go Tell It on the Mountain, We Shall Not Be Moved, We Shall Overcome and more.

But the single most powerful juxtaposition of drama and music happens when mZuri describes a crowd gathering -- with children and food in tow -- at a lynching. Then, with agonized feeling, she sings a song made famous by Billie Holiday: Strange Fruit. Had mZuri crafted other such moments, The Fannie Lou Hamer Story might have been a better play. That one, though, is indelible.