Star power Ida B. Wells x 5 at Merrimack BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Constant Star Written and directed by Tazewell Thompson. Set by Donald Eastman. Costumes by Merrily Murray-Walsh. Lighting by Robert Wierzel. Sound by Fabian Obispo. Musical direction by Dianne Adams McDowell. With Crystal Fox, Carly Hughes, Tracey Conyer Lee, Laiona Michelle, and Gayle Turner. At Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, through April 24.

"I was put on this earth to agitate!" declares the Ida B. Wells of Tazewell Thompson’s Constant Star. And at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, where the biographical play with music is in its area premiere, Wells might add that she’s been put on this stage to divide herself into a poker hand’s worth of personae and give soaring voice to negro spirituals sung in a cappella five-part harmony. Given the adamantine personality of the play’s journalist/suffragette/civil-rights-crusader subject, the juxtaposition of speechifying and song makes for a brimstone-and-sweet-butter experience that rises above the general standard of one-character biographical drama. Imagine how The Belle of Amherst (at least in lesser hands than Julie Harris’s) might be bolstered by gospel settings of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

Constant Star has been making the rounds of regional theaters for the past several years — it had its New England debut at Hartford Stage in 2002 — in Thompson’s own carefully choreographed staging, which is as full of life as education. In fact, though the play was inspired by a PBS documentary and borrows from source material that includes the subject’s speeches and writings (including Crusader for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells), Thompson admits embellishment. His Wells, for example, is an unapologetic "race woman" whose favorite dead white guy would appear to be Shakespeare. Quotes from the Bard pepper her conversation, beginning with the description of herself borrowed from Julius Caesar that supplies the play’s title: "But I am constant as the northern star/Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality/There is no fellow in the firmament." This walking-Bartlett’s quality can grow annoying, and it’s less spicy than Wells’s addressing President McKinley as an "impostor village-sideshow marionette fool." But when she appropriates a line from The Tempest — "O brave new world,/That has such people in’t" — to house her revolt at celebratory lynching, the scathing twist works.

Thompson wrote the play partly to increase awareness of Wells, who campaigned against lynching in visceral print and speeches both here and abroad, and in that he succeeds. It would be hard to exit the theater without a profound if tickled admiration for this precursor to Rosa Parks, who in 1884 bought a first-class railway ticket and, when ordered by the conductor to move because she was black, allowed her seat to be unscrewed and pushed from the train rather than relinquish it.

Born to freed slaves in 1862, Wells, the eldest of eight, kept her family together after the deaths of her parents, becoming a teacher at 14 and later a fiercely editorializing journalist with the Free Speech and Headlight. When three friends, Memphis businessmen who had had the audacity to compete with a white grocery, were lynched in 1892, Wells relocated to Chicago, where she continued her relentless efforts to call attention to the awful practice, at one point compiling a list of ostensible justifications for lynching that included quarreling over livestock and beating a white person at checkers. No mincer of words, she had an adversarial relationship with Susan B. Anthony and considered Booker T. Washington a wimp. Eventually marrying and raising four children, she cleaved all her life to a deep religious faith that’s expressed here in rousing spirituals from "Do Lord" to "Deep River" to "There Is a Balm in Gilead."

Moreover, she supplies enough personality to fuel five by-no-means-retiring singer-actors, all of whom play Wells at various times, at others serving as family members, employees and colleagues, and sister aspects of the same proud, enraged, but never-flagging self. Dressed in black, white, and gray ensembles that span the period from ante-bellum to early 20th century, they bustle about or fall into dignified, dancelike formation on Donald Eastman’s high-windowed warehouse-workplace set complete with old-time printing press. Crystal Fox supplies the crystalline high notes and Carly Hughes the understated low ones, with Tracey Conyer Lee, Laiona Michelle, and Gayle Turner filling in the intricate sonority. Michelle is the liveliest performer, though at times she over-emotes. The diminutive Turner, who’s closest in stature to Wells, is served by a bellows-like delivery. And the willowy Conyer Lee proves a particularly graceful thespian.

When at the end of the play Wells, who died in 1931, comes to face to face with a female God, she’s admonished not only for "giving sass to poor ol’ Susan B. Anthony" but for insisting on being "a marquee-star soloist" rather than a member of the choir. In Thompson’s artful arrangement, and in these vibrant performances, she gets to be both.