Giving Voice to a Reluctant Icon

It is not unusual for theatrical works to revisit the turbulent lives of talented and controversial musicians.

Paul Robeson was the subject of “Robeson,” a one-actor play in the late 1970s. Maria Callas received her diva’s due in Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” August Wilson probed the blues in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and Mozart had his turn on the boards in “Amadeus.”

Marian Anderson, one of the great singers of the 20th Century, would seem a less likely candidate for dramatization.

Though racism roiled around her and threw obstacles in her way, Anderson, the granddaughter of former slaves, never sought to be a political lightning rod. Nevertheless, the most celebrated incident of her life was a landmark 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, during which she struck a blow against racial segregation. She needed no political activist’s soapbox, only her magnificently tuned voice.

Anderson was formal, dignified, and restrained. When she died in 1993, at age 96, her legacy was devoid of the flamboyance, tumult and confrontation of a life that might lend itself to high theater. She had raised her rich contralto to sing (spirituals and German lieder made up most of her repertoire), not to weave a saga or project an image.

But Ruby Hinds thinks Anderson’s life is one to celebrate on the stage, even if it is not packed with the stuff of celebrity. The veteran mezzo-soprano plays and sings the part of Anderson in a one-woman show, “See There in the Distance,” that has its Orange County premiere Saturday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

At the outset of her career, Hinds was touched by Anderson figuratively and literally. Anderson, who lived in Danbury, Conn., for most of the second half of her life, was being honored at the Hartt School in West Hartford. Hinds, an undergraduate at the performing-arts college, was chosen to sing a spiritual in her honor.

Later, they shook hands and Anderson complimented Hinds on her rendition of “The Blind Man Stood on the Road and Cried.”

“I see that moment as if it was yesterday,” Hinds, 48, said recently from her Pasadena home.

Hinds went on to an international career giving recitals and singing in operas; she records and performs solo and in the Hinds Sisters Trio with siblings Esther and Grace Hinds, each operatic sopranos.

She began developing her Marian Anderson tribute several years ago out of a concern that Anderson’s legacy was fading.

“When I talked to people, a lot did not know who she was, or they faintly remembered the whole thing with the Daughters of the American Revolution.”

The DAR owned the capital’s leading large concert venue, Constitution Hall; Anderson, a huge star, wanted to sing there but was refused because she was black. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt promptly resigned from the DAR in protest, and the U.S. Department of the Interior offered the Lincoln Memorial as an alternate venue for an Easter Sunday concert. About 75,000 people witnessed the performance, and millions more heard live on radio.

“See There in the Distance” recounts that incident and also fills out the rest of Anderson’s rise. The DAR’s musical redlining was not the first or the last racial barrier she had to overcome.

Capturing the Dignity of Marian Anderson

The setting for Hinds’ play is Anderson’s dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera as she awaits her debut--at age 57--as the first black singer to perform there.

Hinds captures the dignity of her bearing--something that struck her immediately in her collegiate encounter--but does not try to copy her speech or her singing voice in a 45-minute show that includes “The Whole World in His Hands” and other songs, mainly spirituals, from Anderson’s catalog.

Along the way, in a script written by older sister Esther, we learn how Anderson, who had an early passion for singing, was rejected by a whites-only music academy in Philadelphia but found an instructor who helped bring her along.

Another painful rite of passage in the play is Anderson’s failure in an early, premature New York recital debut. Hinds’ narrative shows Anderson hitting her artistic stride in Europe, where she is accepted but subjected to unseemly comments such as one Scandinavian reviewer’s observation that “The singer, dressed in blue satin, looked very much like a chocolate bar.”

Hinds said she chose to relate those stories with Anderson’s characteristic restraint.

“The intimacy conveys the pain without it being in your face,” she said. “As the listener, you realize what she must have felt in trying to get into that school and being relegated to nothing more than a skin color.”

Anderson is credited with having blazed a trail that other great black divas have followed, including Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle.

Still, Hinds said, “I don’t think racism is ever expunged.”

Blatant racial bias has not surfaced in Hinds’ career, but she doubts that black classical musicians are gaining jobs and recognition in proportion to their numbers in the pool of conservatory graduates.

The DAR Appeals for ‘Discretion’

After performing “See There in the Distance” in Redlands in 1997, Hinds said she received a letter from a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It congratulated her on her performance, but begged more “discretion” in the portrayal of the DAR’s ban against Anderson. Hinds said that facts are facts. “It is historically documented.”

She has performed the piece only four times since it premiered in Torrance in 1997; after Orange County, she will present it in her native West Indies (the family moved to Brooklyn when she was an infant). She has talked with a director about developing the play further; she regards it as a work in progress. Her goal is to take it on tour, playing for students and general audiences.

The title of this musical drama comes from its opening lines, in which we hear Anderson recalling her father, who died when she was a girl: “See there in the distance, that tall, dark and handsome man . . .”

“To me,” Hinds said, “that is what she was seeing her entire career--her success off in the distance, and she ultimately gained that.”

She remembers Anderson gently driving home the need for persistence in her address to the Hartt College assembly in 1974.

“She was encouraging us to always look toward excellence, and don’t let things be barriers. What touched me was that she exemplified what she said.”

* “See There in the Distance,” Founders Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Saturday, 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. $8. (714) 556-2787.