Andrina Smith Explores The Billie Holiday Story

Andrina Smith once insisted, to anyone who would listen, that she would someday be a doctor.It was a short-lived phase for the 9-year-old Shinnecock girl. By the time she turned 10, she had already changed her mind. Or, rather, she had gotten back on track.

She was an actor at heart. And she was meant to perform.

Ms. Smith, now 28, vividly remembers the shift. It was a Wednesday afternoon. She was waiting for play rehearsal to begin at Our Lady of the Hamptons Regional Catholic School in Southampton when she struck up a conversation with a friend next to her.

And then got punished for it.

“I talk a lot, so I was always getting in trouble. I still get in trouble,” Ms. Smith said last week over coffee at her great-grandfather’s house in Southampton. “Well, Sister Kathy has ninja nun ears and heard me. She’s like, ‘Andrina, you know what? Get into the center of this room and you sing, “Swanee.”’”

Her peers gasped. For anyone else, it was a mortifying, humiliating command. But not for young Andrina. She ran to the middle of the gymnasium and belted out the classic American song by George Gershwin—made famous by singer Al Jolson—in front of the entire school.

It was the first moment Ms. Smith truly understood the power behind her voice. The girl realized she would always have something to say. And that no one would ever shut her up.

Age 10 was actually a big year for Ms. Smith. It was then that she discovered jazz singer Billie Holiday and her world-renowned voice. Later, she would learn about the icon’s infamous drug use and untold journey. And on Wednesday, April 16, Ms. Smith will finally tell Ms. Holiday’s story through her lens—drawing parallels between the musician’s life and her own—during the world premiere of her solo show, “The Dark Nights of Lady Day,” one of 16 plays, selected from 125 entries, to stage during the 12th annual Downtown Urban Theater Festival at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan.

Eighteen months in the making, the 45-minute play revolving around history, music, love and hardship is concise, straightforward and evocative, Ms. Smith said with a happy demeanor and a wide smile, heavily supported by countless hours of research on Ms. Holiday, whose 99th birthday would have been last Monday, April 7. She died on July 17, 1959, from pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver. Less than two months earlier, as she lay dying in her bed at Metropolitan Hospital Center in Manhattan, she had been arrested for drug possession.

“Her story is often painted as one of tragedy, but I always see it as one of triumph,” Ms. Smith said. “Because for what her situation was, she was able to accomplish a tremendous amount.”

In 1915, Ms. Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia to Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan. Her father, like Ms. Smith’s, was absent her entire life.

“As a woman, if you don’t have that strong, male figure who loves you early on, you feel that ache,” she said. “That ache stays with you until you’re able to turn around and confront it. For me, this is something I’ve confronted through this play. For Billie Holiday, she didn’t have that ability to reflect because life dealt her such a poor hand early on that she just didn’t care. So, once you get to that point, you have no interest in coming back.”

Ms. Holiday’s struggles truly began at age 11, when the young girl was raped by a neighbor. As a teenager, she could be found working the streets of Harlem as a prostitute—when she wasn’t imprisoned or, eventually, breaking into her singing career. In late 1937, Ms. Holiday had a brief stint as a big band vocalist with Count Basie, a few years before she landed with singles “Easy Living,” “Good Morning Heartache” and the protest song “Strange Fruit,” which Ms. Smith will cover during her play, though she divulged the scene reluctantly.

It’s set at a nightclub in Ohio during the late 1930s. There, the manager tells Ms. Holiday that her skin is too light. Under the stage lights, the audience might think she’s white. The only way she will perform is in blackface, or not at all.

“The band was like, ‘No, we’re not doing that,’ and Billie said, ‘Guys, we are broke. We need to go back to New York. We have no money. We’re doing it,’” said Ms. Smith, paraphrasing Ms. Holiday. “So, in the show, after listing the ingredients to blackface, I put it on and sing ‘Strange Fruit.’”

Ms. Smith pursed her red-stained lips and shook her head.

“There’s sometimes this tone in the country like, ‘Has enough time passed where blackface is okay to joke about?’ And it’s like, ‘No!’ I really wanted to show the audience what that experience was like. If we don’t show it, and if we don’t talk about it, then it’s bound to repeat itself.”

In November 2012, Ms. Smith sat down at her Mac laptop—its apple logo covered by a dreamcatcher sticker, the symbol one of her favorite bands, A Tribe Called Red—and started writing. And singing, too, much to her discomfort—despite her impromptu, albeit forced, performance at age 10.

“I can get in front of a room of 2,000 people and talk about not knowing my daddy. No problem,” she said. “But being able to honestly expose myself in song is one of the most challenging things for me. One thing about Billie Holiday is when she sings, you hear every word. You feel what she’s feeling because singing was her expression. In order to do this process justice, I have to have some vulnerability present. That raw truthfulness.”

From her full-time home in Brooklyn—where Ms. Smith recently learned that her show was accepted into the United Solo Theatre Festival in Manhattan this fall—the playwright is coming to terms with her responsibility as a performer: to present and expose her humanity, giving her audience permission to express theirs, as well.

“A part of me is like, ‘Who do you think you are? Really? This isn’t your job. Why does this matter?’” she said. “And then I think about all the things that no one’s talking about. And I’m like, ‘Well, if no one else is talking about them, then damn it, someone needs to. And why can’t that someone be you?’ I do it not because I want to. I do it because I have to.”

She has the presence, the 5-foot-11-inch-tall writer said. She has the capability. Most important, she has the words. And she plans to never silence them.

“The Dark Nights of Lady Day” by Andrina Smith will stage on Wednesday, April 16, at 8:30 p.m. at the HERE Arts Center in Manhattan. Tickets are $18. For more information, visit here.org/shows/detail/1421.