One of the rock world’s great unknowns is the huge influence that Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an African-American gospel singer and guitarist, had on Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix among many others. The audience discovers this in an unusual plot twist toward the end of “Marie and Rosetta,” the new play by George Brant by the Atlantic Theatre Company at the Linda Gross Theater. Without giving anything away, it was the playwright’s discovery of this telling biographical detail in the relationship between Sister Rosetta Tharp and her protégée Marie Knight that inspired Brant to spend nearly four years resurrecting these two musicians from relative obscurity.The play opens on the very first encounter of a duo that would blaze a path through the United States in the 1940s, and the setting is typical of the challenges they faced. They are spending the day rehearsing amid caskets in a funeral parlor where they will spend the night because lodging for black musicians in the South depends on the kindness of the local community. In this case, it is a funeral director who has come to the rescue.In the course of the 90-minute play directed by Neil Pepe, the two women, played to wide acclaim by Kecia Lewis and Rebecca Naomi Jones, nearly raise the dead with numbers both secular and sacred. While Jones’s Marie is ethereal, Lewis’s Tharpe is electrifying, especially once she snaps on her Gibson SG and gives a scandalous “swing to the hips.” Rosetta’s shimmy and primal chords are points of contention since Marie notes that their church audiences find the devil residing in those gyrations. But Rosetta, who plays nightclubs as well as houses of God, is unrepentant. As she tells Marie, “I’m going to find more sinners in a nightclub than I would find in a church.”Blouin ARTINFO recently spoke with Brant whose last New York production was “Grounded,” the drama starring Anne Hathaway which he is currently adapting for the screen. “Marie and Rosetta” would seem primed for the same treatment, given the dramatic trajectories which both women experienced and which found them together again at the end of their most eventful lives.What intrigued you about Sister Rosetta Tharpe? I heard a song called “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” [by Alison Krause and Robert Plant] and I became obsessed. It’s an eerie song and I discovered it was about a real person. I started looking at these videos on the Internet and they leapt out at me. Black-and-white footage of a bold African-American woman in a ball gown with an electric guitar around her neck, playing in a way that was modern and masculine. It was confusing to me that she was unknown. I knew I wanted to write something about her, but I didn’t know what it was going to end up being.What was the eureka moment? What really hooked me was the story of Rosetta and Marie on the road together. I could hang my hat on that, these two women touring together through the South and the whole country in the 1940s. The courage and bravery and fortitude kind of blew my mind.Any trepidation as a white man writing about the African-American experience? That is correct. [laughs] It took me a while for me to write this. Four years all told. I kept putting it away but I kept coming back to it. It seemed wrong that nobody knew who Rosetta was and I wanted to bring her back into the public consciousness in what little way I could. We had a reading and the actors were very encouraging.Did Kecia Lewis and Rebecca Naomi Jones help inform the piece? They certainly did at every stop along the way. I always checked with them if they felt anything was a little wonky, anything difficult to say or even memorize. Kecia in particular had a lot of parallels with Rosetta’s life. She’d gone into the gospel world herself and that experience was invaluable to me.Was the line between the sacred and secular that strict among African-American audiences? Yes, particularly at the time. Ray Charles went through the same thing 20 years later when he brought the gospel sound into popular music. There’s a part of the audience that you’re going to lose unless you become so big, like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, that everybody then wants to claim you. But if you’re middle ground, it doesn’t seem to be true.How did Rosetta manage to straddle that line? She would say that she was forced by her record company to sing the secular songs at the Cotton Club and with Glenn Miller’s big band. Her audience must have been a little startled to hear her sing naughty songs like “Tall Skinny Papa.” But her mother was always by her side, giving her the stamp of approval. Rosetta wanted to hold onto that church audience but she couldn’t resist giving it a poke. They were called “race records” and she was making real money and she didn’t think she’d be punished for making a living.Did you learn anything about Marie and Rosetta personal religious beliefs? Yeah. They had very strong faith and a lot of the play is about Marie trying to suss out where Rosetta stands from a religious point of view. She’s worried about hooking into a woman who’s not deeply religious. But Rosetta is just coming at it from a different way.One detects an undercurrent of lesbianism in their relationship. Certainly some people thought so. They always denied that there was anything more than a friendship between them but there are some things that’d raise an eyebrow. Rosetta did buy a house where they both could live together. I tried to walk the line in the play. It takes place on the first day they met so they’re not running into each other’s arms at this point. It was the beginning of a great love affair, whether it was consummated romantically or not. The audience can take from it what they want.Why was Rosetta’s decline so precipitous? There were 25,000 people at her third wedding and then suddenly declining crowds and she ended up an unmarked grave. It’s heartbreaking and I’m not quite sure if it’s a strictly American thing but it seems to me that we discard our heroes, musical or otherwise. Maybe we’ll like one song and then we might later think it’s corny. Part of that is at work here. Also, Rosetta never changed her look, her hairstyle remained the same. It’s a dumb thing but the music world works that way, changing your appearance.Was she self-destructive? In her choice of men, certainly. Her first husband beat her and her last husband took her money. She did a lot of things on the spur of the moment and husbands was one of the things. Marie would say that Rosetta would go out shopping and come back with a husband. The third and last wedding was a publicity stunt. They planned the wedding before they found a husband. The preacher did more of a stand-up routine than a service.Did she enjoy any kind of a comeback? She had one in the 1960s in England. They loved her more there and she became a kind of European fixture. Back here it was really tragic. She played church basements just touring by herself with a guitar, the way she started out. There was mismanagement. Her third husband was her manager and, by all accounts, a bad one. It’s a pretty hard fall from grace, to be sure.Was there anything redemptive about her last years? I’m sure it was a disappointment to be playing to small crowds, but she worked them as much as the biggest ones. She just enjoyed playing and that was never taken away from her. Both of these women are survivors. Marie lost her mother and children in a fire and had to keep soldiering on. She had to become a telephone operator at one point and then, later, a preacher. Both of them never gave up in the face of great tragedy. Even after Rosetta lost her leg, she’d continue to perform. She’d start out seated on a stool and before too long she’d be up and hopping around on one leg. She was irrepressible.
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