Civil rights crusader’s life recalled in new Palo Alto musical

Fannie Lou Hamer was a force to be reckoned with. A tireless crusader for civil rights, she was harassed, threatened, jailed and beaten for trying to exercise her legal right to vote in Mississippi in the early ’60s. She even ran for Senate in 1964 in a party she co-founded.

Now TheatreWorks Silicon Valley celebrates Hamer’s remarkable life and work in playwright Cheryl L. West’s one-woman show “Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer.”

“She came from being a sharecropper in Mississippi, was extremely poor and only educated up to the sixth grade, but she was so wise and so articulate and smart and courageous,” says TheatreWorks artistic director Tim Bond, who’s directing the show. “She went through one of the worst jail situations I’ve heard of, took terrible beatings. They darned near killed her. And she came out stronger on the other side and even more committed and focused on getting rights for voting.”

“She’s just made out of stuff that I don’t think I as Greta have,” says Greta Oglesby, who stars as Hamer. “I think I’d have given up. But she never gave up. She’s like, ‘I’m fighting for civil rights and human rights and voting rights, and I will do that until the day I die.’ Her tenacity and the fearlessness that she just woke up with every day is extraordinary to me. I just hope that I can do her justice.”

TheatreWorks audiences know Oglesby from her memorable performance last year as Aunt Ester in Bond’s acclaimed production of August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.” It’s a role she originated at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2003.

Bond had previously directed Oglesby in “Gem” in 2007 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was associate artistic director at the time.

“He’s one of my favorite people to work with because he’s so good at what he does,” Oglesby says. “So Tim calls, I come running.”

The two first worked together at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre in 2003 on “Crowns,” Regina Taylor’s musical about Black women wearing fabulous hats to church that TheatreWorks also produced a couple years later.

“This is maybe our fifth or sixth production over those 20 years,” Bond says. “When she sings, the molecules in the air just change and your heart starts beating in a different way, and you suddenly feel yourself transported. And when I read this play, I thought Greta’s got to do this play. And as it turned out, then I heard she was actually going to be taking over the role at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And I said, well, of course!”

E. Faye Baker originally played Fannie in the OSF production that first reopened the company from COVID closure in the summer of 2021. Oglesby took over when Baker left to take “Fannie” to Chicago.

“I think I had maybe three rehearsals and a couple of techs, and then I was on stage,” Oglesby recalls. “Now I’m loving getting a chance to peel back some of the layers of who this extraordinary woman was.”

She’s accompanied by a band onstage, and the play is filled with song.

“It’s all these wonderful songs from the period, from the civil rights movement,” Oglesby says. “Many of them will sound familiar to probably everybody in the audience if you’re from that era.”

The play comes at a time when the fight for voting rights has been revived with a vengeance.