GET A LIFE NOW: Lonette McKee original ''Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill,''

February 22, 1987
THEATER
THEATER; LONETTE MCKEE ON BECOMING LADY DAY
By E. R. SHIPP
Correction Appended

When Lonette McKee first picked up the script of ''Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill,'' she ''got scared of it.''

''With 15 songs, and you're out there by yourself for an hour and a half, the physical work and all that, I said no,'' she recalled. ''Then a few minutes later, I went back and picked the script up and said, 'You fool.' I started going through it again and I got all excited. I kept reading and thinking, 'I'm going to do this. Nobody loves Billie like me.' ''

In ''Lady Day'' - a sparse ''drama in the form of a cabaret act,'' as its playwright, Lanie Robertson, describes it - Miss McKee, a willowy, strikingly beautiful woman, plays Billie Holiday, the jazz singer whose tragic life ended in July 1959, when she was 44 years old.

Set in a seedy South Philadelphia bar about four months before Miss Holiday's death, the 90-minute, essentially one-woman show allows the main character to weave stories about her life - from being raped at age 10 to going to work as a maid in a bordello at age 16 to the triumphs and disappointments of her singing career to the men in her life and her heroin addiction - between 15 songs. These range from the sassy and upbeat, like Bessie Smith's ''Gimme a Pigfoot'' to the more haunting Holiday standards, including ''Strange Fruit,'' ''God Bless the Child'' and ''Don't Explain.''

As the Holiday character chats with her audience - represented on stage by mannequins in indifferent poses at two tables - it becomes clear, through her fits of anger and uncertainty induced by her dependence on drugs, that she has sunk pretty low to have ended up here. She says early on: ''I used to say, 'When I die I don't care if I go to heaven or hell, as long as it ain't in Philly' '' -where she had been arrested for possession of narcotics and sentenced to prison.

Miss McKee, who is 31, had admired Miss Holiday's songs for years, and had studied her style during her own voice classes. But after she was cast, she found that idolizing Miss Holiday made it difficult in some ways to prepare for the role, to go beyond ''the suffering, doom and gloom,'' as Mr. Robertson put it.

''For three weeks, every time I sang 'God Bless the Child,' I could not get through the song,'' she said during an interview in her Brooklyn apartment. ''I was thinking about why she wrote it, thinking about her, thinking about her mother, thinking about her life, about those lyrics. Even selfishly you start thinking about your own life, your own suffering.''

Andre Ernotte, the director of ''Lady Day,'' saw that as a necessary first step, a ''grieving process.''

''The emotional had to be dealt with first. Then afterward you get the essence,'' said Mr. Ernotte, who is now directing Colleen Dewhurst in Barbara Gelb's one-woman show, ''My Gene'' at the Public Theater.

''Every day was therapy, and I thank God that Andre was so sensitive and so gentle with me and with her, the whole subject,'' Miss McKee said. ''He handled this project like it was an egg, like a bird's egg that any minute could be broken.''

Miss McKee was cast in ''Lady Day'' shortly after she returned from Paris and the filming of Bertrand Tavernier's '' 'Round Midnight,'' which stars Dexter Gordon, the saxophonist. Miss McKee plays his sometime love interest, Darcy Lee, a character who is patterned on Billie Holiday.

But, she said, the preparation for that role was entirely different.

''I'm a very instinctive actress. In film you have to be ready to go in unprepared. I let the situation and the vibes I got from Dexter, as well as the director, kind of guide me in setting up my mood and tone in the film.''

On the face of it, Lonette McKee -a vegetarian who eschews drugs, a woman who just celebrated five years of marriage, an actress with a promising career - would seem to have little in common with Miss Holiday. But Miss McKee said that she, too, has suffered and that the reliving of her own painful experiences helps her transform herself into Miss Holiday on stage.

The source of that suffering, Miss McKee explained, has been racism -felt first when she was a child in Detroit, the second daughter of a black man and his white wife. Miss McKee still recalls the racial slurs as if they had happened yesterday.

That experience did not deter Miss McKee from herself marrying a white man, however. ''I really do believe that love is colorblind,'' she said. ''As long as I know I'm black and I know who I am, the interracial issue is not important to me or to him.''

In 1976, when she was cast in her first role, in the film ''Sparkle,'' about the rise of a black singing group loosely based on the Supremes, Miss McKee thought of herself as not black, not white, but a mulatto to whom doors would be opened that were normally closed to either whites or blacks.

''I had little knowledge at that time of how difficult it would be to find roles for somebody like me. I came in on a high like 'Sparkle' and then turned around and had years of no work after that.''

''I kept questioning: Why aren't you people letting me work? I can sing. I can dance. I write music. I do all these things. I look O.K. How come I'm not working?''

The answer, she concluded, was the same that Lena Horne and other light-skinned black actresses had been hearing for decades: She was too light to fit Hollywood's image of blacks, but too black to play white roles.

''They've been telling us that for years,'' she said, angrily. ''I thought: 'Didn't I hear this before? Isn't this supposed to be over by now?' Well, it's not. I can testify that it is not.''

She said some doors have opened to women like herself, including the actresses Jennifer Beals and Rae Dawn Chong. But, she added, ''When the doors open now for me and black folks like me, it's a fluke. I don't think my record of steady work is the norm.''

The industry as a whole, she said, is reluctant to take a chance on black actors and actresses.

That brought a chuckle from Miss McKee as she remembered the Houston Grand Opera's 1983 revival of ''Show Boat,'' where, she said, ''I was the first mulatto to play Julie.'' She received a Tony nomination for her portrayal. The character, Julie, is of mixed race, an octoroon, and is married to a white man. When the 1951 film ''Show Boat'' was being made, Lena Horne was first cast as Julie, then removed from the part when the producers thought it would be too controversial. She was replaced by Ava Gardner.

It was while she was on tour with ''Show Boat'' in San Francisco that Miss McKee met Leo Compton, her husband, who was working part-time as the backstage doorman. Mr. Compton, who, like Miss McKee, is from Detroit, works for the New York City Youth Bureau.

Since ''Show Boat,'' Lonette McKee, who dropped out of high school at age 14 and went to seek her fortune in Los Angeles at 15, has rarely been out of work.

She did a nightclub act, which led to her being cast by Francis Coppola in ''Cotton Club'' and his upcoming film ''Gardens of Stone,'' a Vietnam War-era film starring Angelica Huston and James Caan. It is Miss McKee's sixth film role.

It was after the first of two films she did with Richard Pryor -''Which Way Is Up'' in 1977 and ''Brewster's Millions'' in 1985 - that she went through a personal transformation.

She said that David Franklin, Mr. Pryor's manager, told her: '' 'You've got to stop thinking of yourself as a mulatto. Everybody else is looking at you as a black woman, so if you don't look at yourself as that, what have you got? Where are you?' He was right. There's no two ways about it. He was right.'' She said Mr. Franklin was also right to insist that she take voice lessons, her first formal training.

Now she is writing a musical, which she describes as ''a drama with music that's based on a fairy tale.''

There is also talk of a musical with Gregory Hines, and she said, Mr. Ernotte wants to cast her as Ingrid Bergman in a comedy film that he has in mind.

''Well, we as black folks have been complaining that because of the color of our skins, we're not allowed to play roles that we are qualified for,'' she said, laughing. ''This is my chance.''

''Lady Day'' marks Miss McKee's third outing on the New York stage. Her debut came in 1981 in the short-lived musical, ''The First,'' based on the life of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke the color barrier in professional baseball. Though the show flopped, Miss McKee received good notices.

Critics have marveled at her controlled performance in ''Lady Day,'' where she is accompanied only by a jazz trio led by Danny Holgate, the show's musical director, who also plays the role of Jimmy Powers, Miss Holiday's pianist. Jimmy coaxes Miss Holiday to go on with a performance that is ragged and frequently interrupted by drug-induced anxieties.

Mr. Ernotte and Mr. Robertson said Miss McKee has grown ''enormously'' since ''Lady Day'' opened in June at the tiny 65-seat Vineyard Theater on East 26th Street for a four-week run. When the show reopened in September at the 245-seat Westside Arts Theater on West 43d Street, Miss McKee's performance became a fuller one, Mr. Ernotte and Mr. Robertson agree.

Mr. Ernotte said, ''She has more pizazz, more elan and more versatility in her expression.''

And, Mr. Robertson added, she has developed more of the humor in the play.

Miss McKee's contract, which expires March 15, is now being renegotiated. But whether she remains in the show beyond that date or not, she said: ''I think it will be a long time coming before I have another vehicle like this. I don't take it lightly.'