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The dynamic, plain-spoken Fannie Lou Hamer was a force to be reckoned with regarding voting rights in 1960s America. Starring as the activist in Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, onstage through July 10 at Southwest Arts Center, actress Robin McGee holds the audience in her grasp with compelling power.
The production from Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company is a one-woman play written by Cheryl L. West. The tone of the show is primarily uplifting and educational, and it’s full of music and audience interaction. It shines a light upon Hamer, who is not very well known despite her extraordinary story.
Hamer was born in Mississippi in 1917 and grew up in the Delta, working from age 6 with her family of sharecroppers. She left school at age 12. She married in 1944 and worked on a plantation until 1962. In that year, she attempted to register to vote after attending a meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. She was turned away multiple times after failing literacy tests and other Jim Crow obstacles.
Because of her efforts to register, she lost her job, her home and received continual death threats. Yet she began working as an activist, and was imprisoned and severely beaten by police, receiving permanent damage to her eye, legs and kidneys. Then, she founded a Mississippi political party and spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where her speech was interrupted by a televised address from President Lyndon B. Johnson, who thought her frank message would alienate White voters.
Before her death from breast cancer in 1977, Hamer toured the country with speaking engagements to encourage African Americans to register to vote. The conceit of the play uses one of these speaking engagements to allow the activist to speak directly to the audience about key moments from her tumultuous life. It also allows McGee, an incredibly talented performer, to feel her way through the emotional weight of these moments.
In Tacoma and Seattle, Washington, McGee’s theater credits included roles in A Doll’s House and Once on This Island. Though McGee moved to Atlanta in 2021 and was scheduled to appear in a True Colors production of the musical Raisin and appeared in a staged reading by the troupe earlier this spring, she is essentially making her local stage debut with Fannie, and it is a feat.
A lush, beautiful alto voice, McGee performs 12 songs over the course of the play, most of them well-known gospel tunes such as “This Little Light of Mine” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” with the audience encouraged to sing along. In between those, she narrates, emotes and re-enacts her way through some of the more tragic struggles that Hamer faced. Yet the overall message of empowerment, hope and faith keeps the show from ever becoming bleak or overly traumatizing.
The script doesn’t risk alienating the audience when it wants to invite and inform them, so some aspects of Hamer’s life, such as her forced hysterectomy in 1961, are not addressed. Other moments, including the death of her adopted daughter or her severe beating in jail, do carry emotional weight, but the narrator doesn’t linger in unbearable sorrow, anger and pain. Instead, every obstacle that doesn’t kill her motivates her to keep working.
Director Joy Vandervort-Cobb keeps Fannie moving by keeping McGee in motion. Over the course of the show, there is one major costume change and blocking involving several props that allow McGee to own the entire stage, which she shares with a band led by music director Morgan Stevenson. Occasionally, sound and lighting cues place the character of Fannie back into moments when her home is under attack or she’s on a lengthy bus journey. These time jumps feel organic, rather than jarring.
Using Hamer’s voice as its guide, the show’s charm is folksy and familiar, and it often feels like a church sermon. But it’s a very good message, and McGee is an engaging performer who makes the challenging task of holding an audience’s attention for 90 minutes, using her skills as a storyteller, look easy.
Along the way, issues including voting rights, racial equality, food insecurity and the wealth gap are addressed. The issues of Hamer’s time are still being fought over today, which makes this show timely and important. And Hamer’s straightforward solutions and advocacy that we all become involved in the fight for freedom rings loud.
The script includes many of Hamer’s best-known quotes, including “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” and “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” But they are woven into a story that urges the audience to action, and it’s full of joy and hope.
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Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His novel Impacted was published by The Story Plant in 2021.
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