IRT's 'Fannie' is a rousing memorial tribute to a civil-rights heroine

There's not a chance anyone attending "Fannie" at Indiana Repertory Theatre will have to question: "Do I

Collette Pollard's evocative set frames the action.

really like this person?" 

Relatability tends to be a major quality in the reception of any one-actor show, and Fannie Lou Hamer, as played by Maiesha McQueen, is a hugely appealing figure. Even a closet racist would be unlikely to object, like this, for instance: "Well, there's a lot to be said for segregation, especially if whites are in charge of it." (Okay, maybe such resistance is implacable, but mostly uttered from the closet, where it should stay.) 

 Theater fans who prefer a little more distance from a character, at least to allow time to forge a rapport with the sole person portrayed onstage, might be a tad uncomfortable with this kind of presentation. McQueen engages with the audience from the get-go. Whether in her kitchen or preaching at church, on the stump as a political candidate or suffering in jail, Fannie insists on sharing her story and her bedrock values. She is righteous, as her favorite music demonstrates, but avoids self-righteousness. She's counting upon community uplift.

 She mandates sing-alongs, once setting two sides of Friday's opening-night audience in competition with each other. You will regret your stubbornness unless you join in. You will join her in singing "I Love Everybody," even if tears threaten to flow as Fannie sings it while being painfully abused in her campaign for black voter registration, spread from her home base in Mississippi. If she could love everybody while subject to assaults on her basic humanity, why can't comfortable folks feel the love, too? 

Fannie Lou Hamer, spirit and body, is portrayed by Maiesha McQueen.

 Hamer first came to my attention through reading about and watching the 1964 Democratic Party Convention. I must have caught up with her televised testimony later, because "Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer" reminds us that President Lyndon Johnson pre-empted live coverage of her speech demanding that her splinter party of inclusion be seated over the official delegation of Mississippi Dixiecrats. 

It would be presumptuous of me to claim allyship as a major facet of my life story,  but I was close to that in spirit as a college student. I saw no reason why the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party should not be approved by the convention, given the demonstrated suppression of black voting rights that Hamer testified to. Johnson, a complex person all around, later became a champion of legislation that even today is under threat, though the Voting Rights Act guaranteed progress for several decades before the Supreme Court suspended monitoring of its enforcement. But as November loomed, Dixiecrat loyalty had to be maintained.

In 1964, I was naive: Where was Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota liberal who had a track record on civil rights and could be expected to boost Democratic election turnout on a ticket headed by a Southerner? It was a matter of simple justice; I had yet to learn that justice is often an also-ran when the political stakes are high. 

Playwright Cheryl L. West sets "Fannie" in 1975, two years before Hamer's death at 59. Placement in that year allows for short-term retrospective speeches to be plausibly put in the heroine's mouth. But West wisely avoids too broad a look backward, such as any assessment of the assassinations and urban upheaval of the latter 1960s. It's appropriate in an intense portrait of one woman's struggles, all contained within an uninterrupted 80-minute act, that the audience focuses on Fannie in context, with the production directed by Henry D. Godinez. 

 It turns out Fannie Lou Hamer had plenty to accomplish as an inspiring figure for progress in the short time left to her after 1964. The savage response to the civil-rights movement in the South holds the stage, with apt projections design by Mike Tutaj and ominous outbursts of sound designed by Victoria Deiorio.

Triumphing over all is the resilience and enduring faith of the heroine, linked indelibly to the music of the black church. That's represented instrumentally by an upstage ensemble directed by pianist Morgan E. Stevenson, with guitarist Spencer Bean and percussionist Dorian Phelps. All three lend their voices to punctuate McQueen's robust singing. Crucially, the audience also functions as a congregation. You may want to raise your hands and shout "Amen!" (and that's pronounced "Ay-men!")

  [Photos by Zach Rosing]