Half an hour before taking the stage in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, actress and lawyer Yolanda Rabun sits in her dressing room listening to Bach.
The room is filled with the music Nina Simone’s grandfather played for her as a young girl, which later inspired the compositions on Rabun’s desk.
Even though she’s preparing to be the only person on stage at the Culbreth Theatre, Rabun is surrounded by her idol.
“I don’t think I feel tremendously the pressure of being by myself, because I’m not really by myself,” she says. “I have her with me. I have her memory. I have her energy. I have her spirit. I have all of my rehearsal. I have all of my learnings—what went wrong, what went right. I have all that with me, so I never feel alone on stage.”
Rabun portrays Simone in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, an interactive one-woman production exploring the life of one of the most prolific artists and civil rights activists in American history.
The show is part of the Virginia Theatre Festival, formerly the Heritage Theatre Festival, which is returning to the University of Virginia for the first time since 2019.
No Fear is the culmination of Rabun’s lifelong connection with Simone, an activist who wanted freedom—which she defined as “no fear, I mean really, no fear”—for Black people and women in America.
Rabun first heard Simone’s voice at 8 years old, when her mother played a recording of “Four Women.”
To an inexorable beat, Simone used her powerful voice to paint a vivid portrait of four Black women suffering from the lingering impact of slavery and segregation: “My skin is black / My arms are long / My hair is woolly / My back is strong / Strong enough to take the pain / Inflicted again and again.”
When the song ended, the child was left stunned.
“It freaked me out, because she started talking about these four women, and I could see them,” Rabun says. “And I was like, ‘Who is that? Who can sing like that? … We can sing that low?’ And so I started building my contralto. The bottom of my voice is from that, listening to Nina Simone.”
In 2008, Rabun used her contralto to bring to life a vignette crafted by writer Howard Craft and director Kathryn Hunter- Williams for a Nina Simone exhibit at UNC Chapel Hill.
Craft used his script to connect real events in Simone’s life—from her relationship with New York neighbor Malcolm X to her mournful tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.—with how she might have reacted to current events like the election of President Barack Obama.
“A lot of it, arguably, is speculation of what she would say,” Rabun says. “But I don’t think he got it wrong.”
Since 2008, the world has changed, and so has the play. Based on extensive study of Simone’s writing, career, and life, Craft expanded No Fear to connect Simone’s timeless songs with issues relevant to 2022 audiences.
“It’s a reflection on her experience, where she’s also giving us some tools on how to carry on,” Hunter-Williams says. “Howard has given us an imagining of what she might say to encourage us and strengthen our spines to fight the fights we are fighting.”
Simone’s music emboldens this message, just as it did during her lifetime. “Mississippi Goddam” was written in 1964 in response to the brutal murders of Black children like Emmett Till, but Rabun’s performance draws a visceral response from listeners today.
After performances, audience members share with Hunter-Williams how Simone’s fiery lyrics (“You told me to wash and clean my ears / and talk real fine just like a lady / and you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie / oh but this whole country is full of lies”) resonated with them.
“It’s the only reason we do this crazy art,” says Hunter-Williams. “Every play, every moment, everything I do, is finding a way to connect with the audience, to let them know how powerful theater is, and how it really can be a vehicle for change, and for reflection, and for inspiration. It is why we do what we do.”
Performing these politically powerful songs, which Simone later said damaged her career, is when Rabun feels closest to the artist she is embodying.
“That’s when I think Nina Simone started becoming more of the artist she wanted to be,” Rabun says. “She went into civil rights music because that’s a part of who she was. That was a part of her entire struggle, of facing the fact that her color was the barrier to the success that she wanted to achieve and was denied.”