Project Description
The Fund for Women Artists is in the process of raising funds to bring four exceptionally talented women theatre artists together to create the first draft of a new play based on the life of the African-American blues singer Big Mama Thornton. In May 1999, The Fund for Women Artists will sponsor a four-week collaboration between writer/performer Diane Beckett (who initiated the project), playwright/author Pearl Cleage, dramaturg/director Andrea Hairston, and peformer/movement coach Joy Voeth. During the four weeks the collaborators will do research and participate in group exercises in creative writing, improvisation, and movement/subtle body awareness. At the end of the four weeks, they will present the draft of the script in a series of four staged readings - two at Thornes Marketplace in Northampton and two at the Springfield Drama Studio in Springfield, Massachusetts. The Fund for Women Artists will produce and publicize the readings.

The four week collaboration and preliminary staged readings will be the first phase of a three-year effort by The Fund for Women Artists to develop and produce this script. Diane Beckett will revise the script based on the audience responses to the initial readings. During summer and fall 1999, The Fund for Women Artists will help Beckett raise funds, find venues, and negotiate contracts for additional readings and workshop performances. We will concentrate first on the cities where we have the strongest personal contacts - Boston (Boston Center for the Arts), New York (Woodie King's New Federal Theatre), the San Francisco Bay Area (Oakland Ensemble Theatre), and Atlanta (Pearl Cleage's home-base). Starting in fall 2000, The Fund for Women Artists will work with Beckett to find theatres to produce or co-produce the final version of the play.

In 1952 Thornton recorded Hound Dog which went to number one on the rhythm and blues charts, and later became a hit for Elvis Presley. Despite Big Mama's frequent claims to authorship of this song, she was unable to prove it in court. She received $500 for her recording and never collected any subsequent royalties from later cover versions. Big Mama continued touring and recording for thirty years and enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity in the sixties when Janis Joplin recorded Thornton's blues classic Ball 'n' Chain, but none of her later work ever matched the success of Hound Dog.

Outspokenly bitter about what she perceived as the injustices done to her by the music business, Big Mama cultivated her image as a tough, outspoken eccentric, often dressing as a man on-stage toward the end of her career. She valiantly tried to recreate her past glory, but was often too drunk or too ill to perform. On July 25, 1984, paramedics responding to an anonymous call found Big Mama dead on the floor of her Los Angeles boarding house room, penniless and alone at age 57.

In her most recent book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis explains how the tradition of black women blues singers represented by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday "embodies not only an artistic triumph and aesthetic dominance over a hostile popular music industry but an unacknowledged proto-feminist consciousness within working-class black communities." Davis uncovers "the unmistakable assertion and uncompromising celebration of non-middle class, non-heterosexual social, moral and sexual values." Unfortunately Davis does not include the contributions of Big Mama Thornton in her analysis. Big Mama is among the last, if not the last, in the great tradition of black women blues singers. In her voice we hear echoes of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. One goal of the proposed project is to show how Big Mama not only maintained the female blues tradition of resistance, but how she extended the boundaries of this legacy by challenging gender roles and classifications.

Another goal is to explore Big Mama's story as a cautionary tale for contemporary women artists of color. Her career began at the very end of the era of great female blues singers, and by the time she hit middle age, public interest had shifted away from her particular style of singing. In 1998, many women artists of color still struggle with some of the same issues that Big Mama faced. The opportunities for large, middle-aged women artists of color are still very limited. At some point, Big Mama gave in to bitterness and alcoholism, and the artists want to explore that transition in her life to see if there were other options for her then and for themselves now.

Although it is too early to predict the specific shape of the piece, the artists are currently thinking that it will juxtapose Big Mama Thornton's life story with fictionalized stories of contemporary women artists of color at different stages in their careers. They want to capture Big Mama's energy and enthusiasm at the beginning of her career, so that audiences will be sympathetic to her and will feel the full poignance of her decline. Since Joy Voeth is in her twenties, Diane Beckett is in her thirties, Andrea Hairston is in her forties, and Pearl Cleage is starting her fifties, each artist will bring the particular perspective of her age group to the exploration of Big Mama's life.

• Diane Beckett (AEA/AFTRA) has worked extensively as an actress, singer, director, and arts educator for over fifteen years. She has a BFA from Brandeis University and has trained at Shakespeare and Company, New Federal Theatre, the National Center for Afro-American Artists, and HB Studio. Her acting credits include supporting and principal roles on National Public Radio, Fox Network, WGBH and WCVB Television. She was featured in the Huntington Theatre's production of George Wolfe's Spunk, and she starred in Woodie King Jr.'s production of Jar The Floor at the New Repertory Theatre. She is a member of the Company of Women, a Shakespeare company led by master voice teacher Kristen Linklater, and Beckett performed in Linklater's all-female productions of Henry V and King Lear. She appeared in a reading of Pearl Cleage's Chain at the Long Wharf Theatre. On film, Beckett can be seen in the critically acclaimed Miramax features, Squeeze and Next Stop Wonderland.

  As an arts educator, Beckett is the former Artistic Director of Boston's Arts In Progress Teen Arts Center and was the founding director of Act It Out, an award-winning conflict resolution and social issue theatre program for youth. Based on the success of Act It Out, Beckett was invited to write, host and direct Talk it Out, a back-to-school special for Fox 25 television. As a videographer, she has documented the New Kids on the Block Summer Magic Tour, and the anti drug program Drop-A-Dime. Her work as an actress and cultural leader has been recognized by former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Boston's Mayor Menino, and President Bush's Thousand Points of Light program. She has served as a funding panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has also served as vice president of the board of the Strand Theatre in Boston.

• Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer whose recent works include Bourbon at the Border and Blues for an Alabama Sky, full-length dramas which were commissioned by The Alliance Theater and premiered there 1997 and 1995 respectively. Blues was performed as part of the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta in conjunction with the 1996 Olympic Games and also at Hartford Stage, where it played to sold-out houses and was held over for several weeks. Bourbon at the Border was produced at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in February 1998. Pearl Cleage is also the author of Flyin' West, a full-length play about Black pioneer women. Since opening at The Alliance Theatre under the direction of Kenny Leon, Flyin' West has had more than a dozen productions across the country, including The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Indiana Repertory Company, Crossroads Theatre Company, The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, The Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Washington, The St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre, and The Long Wharf Theatre, making it one of the most produced new plays in the country for 1994. Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, a book of Cleage's essays was published by Ballantine Books in l993. Her first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, , (Avon Books) was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the September 1998 Book-of-the-Month. Pearl Cleage was Playwright-in-Residence at Smith College in January 1994. She is a regular columnist for The Atlanta Tribune, a contributing editor of Ms. Magazine, and a regular contributor to Essence Magazine. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Double Stitch, Black Drama in America, and New Plays from the Women's Project. Pearl is an artistic associate of Just Us Theater Company in Atlanta and founding editor of CATALYST, a magazine of heart and mind. She is Playwright-in-Residence at Spellman College.

• Andrea Hairston is a Northampton-based writer, director, and performer, who has been the recipient of many grants and awards. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre, and she has received playwriting grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shubert Foundation, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and production grants from the Ford Foundation, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her plays have been featured at the Seattle Women's Playwright Festival (1980) and at the Boston Women's Theatre Festival (1986). She is currently serving as Chair of the Smith College Theatre Department, where she is a tenured professor. Hairston received her M.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University and her B.A. Cum Laude from Smith College. She served as the Associate Director for Playwriting at Rites & Reason, a multi-cultural theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1988-1992. She has also taught at Trinity College, Holyoke Community College, Brown University and Universität Hamburg.

• Joy Voeth has over twelve years of training in dance and other movement techniques. Raised in Barbados, she is especially skilled in traditional West African and Caribbean dance. She has also studied ballet, jazz, hip-hop, tap, and modern dance, and she participated in the Urban Bush Women Summer Dance Institute in 1997. In 1997 she wrote and performed a one-woman play called Before Your Demons Get You, which was based on interviews she had conducted with women in Barbados. She has originated roles in three Chrysalis Theatre productions which were written and directed by Andrea Hairston - Dancing With Chaos, Strange Attractors, and Lonely Stardust. Voeth performs regularly with Enchanted Circle Theater, a touring educational theatre company based in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

  She has a B.A. cum laude in theatre from Smith College and received additional training at New York Stage and Film: Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.