“Ella The Ungovernable”—currently running at Theater For The New City (155 First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets) through July 7—is, according the website: “…a play based on the true story of 15 year-old Ella Fitzgerald’s incarceration and eventual escape from The New York Training School For Girls in 1933.” I approached this work with considerable trepidation, as I could foresee several problems inherent in the work; built-in pitfalls, the seriousness of which could make or break the production.
First, there is the problem of credibly reconstructing an actual historical event involving real people. What are the limits of literary license? (Some critics who have opined on this question argue that since both history and fiction are narratives constructed by the author, they should be given equal weight. However, as a former history professor, I disagree.) The question of historical authenticity was candidly addressed in the Playbill: “This is a work of speculative fiction about what might have happened over the course of Ella’s incarceration.”
The fact that the author of this play is a white male presents yet another set of problems: being able to get into the mindset of characters who are Black and female, which requires a double leap of the imagination. Hence I continued to view this play with a jaundiced eye. However, as the play unfolded, my doubts began to gradually dry up like a raisin in the sun; the playwright David McDonald proved well up to the task.
With a sparsely designed set reflecting the economics of the off-off Broadway theater in New York, this work required an exercise of the imagination on the part of the audience similar to the demands of the novel. It also placed heavy demands upon the actors to make the illusion believable, which required a sorority of conjure women with mad skills: Tyra Hughes, Ebony Nixon, Gabrielle Farley, Colleen Hayden, Autumn McCree, et al. With tight ensemble acting, studded with individual arias in words and song, and effective performances from the male supporting cast, they pulled it off in fine fashion.
Virtually all of the action takes place in the dormitory of the New York “Training School For Girls,” which was actually a teenage prison masquerading as an educational institution, located upstate from the city in Hudson. The play opens with the girls marching in formation into the induction room where they will receive their introduction to the institution by the stern, prim, white superintendent. But Ella receives her real orientation about what’s up in the joint from her new cellmate, who has been locked up for a while.
The place is infested with treacherous inmates and corrupt sadistic white guards, both of whom are prone to sudden acts of violence at the slightest infraction of the written rules of the administration and the unwritten rules imposed by the inmates. She describes it as a hell hole where “nobody is to be trusted,” which left Ella, convincingly played by Christian Neal, bewildered and somewhat paranoid. Especially as she is warned to “never back down from a fight,” and to always try and make herself invisible to the guards by doing nothing to call attention to herself.
L: Christian Neal playing Ella Fitzgerald, R: Tyra Hughes playing Alice, Ella’s best friend at New York State Training School for Girls at Hudson, N.Y. Photo by Jonathan Slaff. 
Shadenia Davis as Prostitute. Photo by Jonathan Slaff. 
Choirmaster rehearses singers at New York State Training School for Girls at Hudson, N.Y. Left: Huston Pigford. Right: Ebony Nixon, Tezha Davis, Gabrielle Farley, Christian Neal, Autumn McCree, Kiara Joseph. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.
As her new cellmate gives her the skinny on the realities of life at the “Training School,” the spotlight shifts to the other side of the stage, where there are two chairs and a little table. Two older Black women are sitting and discussing how they were forced to leave the South because they could not make a decent living from the backbreaking labor of sharecropping. Apparently, one of the women is Ella’s mom, who is shown going to and fro offering her expert domestic services, speaking directly to the audience to great dramatic effect. This is the first of several flashbacks through which the series of events that landed Ella in the Training School unfolds.
Employing this technique, we are provided cameos of scenes from Ella’s past. We see her come up from Virginia to live in Harlem with her mom; We see her mom seduced by a handsome Latin Lothario of Portuguese extraction; we see her mother suddenly killed by a hit-and-run driver. Not knowing where her father is, she is left to live with her mother’s Portuguese lover, who tries to sexually molest her but is unsuccessful because she smashes him in the head with an iron. We see her abused by a drunken aunt with whom she is placed after reporting her situation to the Child Welfare agency.
Her Aunt Edna takes her in only to collect the stipend from the state. The aunt drinks up all the money, and works her like a slave around the house because the aunt is a drunken slob. (Simone Black invests the character with such villainous evil that the audience, including this writer, forgot she was play-acting at moments and got pissed at her!) When the aunt does not feed her regularly, Ella is reduced to scavenging in garbage cans for food. When she is discovered by a happy hooker, ebulliently played by Shadenia Davis, who has a soft spot for girls in trouble because “I have been there,” Ella is offered a job as a lookout for the whores on the stroll.
Her job was to warn them whenever the cops approached so they could flee. The saucy happy hooker delivers her lines in rhythm and rhyme that evokes both Moliere and Hip Hop, during a stunning cameo that is a highlight of the show. But Ella is a good student and does her schoolwork while on lookout duty. One night, thoroughly engrossed in her studies she does not notice the encroaching cops and is arrested along with the hookers. That’s how she ends up in the New York Training School for girls.
However, she is befriended by a kindly white psychiatrist who provides services for the school. He discovers that Ella can sing and arranges an audition for her with the school choir, which has a Black director, and all the girls he has selected are also Black. Ella sings a hymn that is popular in the black church, a Gospel song which is wrongly labeled a “Negro Spiritual,” and blows the choirmaster away. She is given a spot as soloist in the choir. Here is the first time we are shown what a talented singer Christian Neal is.
When the choir performs in a concert, attended by a Harlem-based physician and NAACP official investigating racism and sexual exploitation of the girls at the “Training School,” the Black doctor and his wife are so moved they offer to take Ella into their home and provide for her. After helping Ella and her cellmate “escape” from the institution with the help of the white psychiatrist, the wife, still mesmerized by Ella’s gift of song, pushes her to enter the Amateur Night contest at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, which was then the thriving cultural capital of Black America and the most famous community in the US, renowned around the world for its outstanding performing artists.
The play ends on a triumphant note, as Ella gives a bravura performance at the Apollo. Elegantly attired, she sang and danced marvelously on her performance of “A Tisket A Tasket,” and won first prize. It was a wonderful conclusion to a very grim tale. The audience roared its approval. Under the imaginative direction of Michele Baldwin, who performed a compelling cameo in the role of Ella’s mother, the play was a hit, and all my anxieties proved to be for naught! Bravissimo!
For more info, visit www.theaterforthenewcity.net.