From one perspective, you can view Frank Higgins' two-hander drama Black Pearl Sings! as yet another work that trades in the "White Savior" racist ideal where a white character is necessary to aid or empower a minority character or group.

Or you can regard Black Pearl Sings! as a drama where two people from different backgrounds ultimately learn to help and respect each other (albeit after some conflict and misunderstandings) to overcome some of the many limitations placed upon both of them.

Black Pearl Sings! makes a stronger case for the latter view in Northlight Theatre's Chicago-area premiere. It also helps to have two amazingly musical leading ladies like E. Faye Butler and Susie McMonagle to illuminate Higgins' fictional Depression-era drama.

The premise is based upon the real-life 1930s ethnomusicologist John Avery Lomax, who helped get incarcerated blues guitarist Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter paroled so that his personal trove of folk songs could be preserved and performed. Higgins has kept this historical premise for his play, but switched the genders around so that sexism can also explored in his play's mix of geographic, economic and racial differences.

Hence we have a McMonagle as Susannah, a determined Library of Congress folk song researcher from New York reaching out to the Texas prisoner Alberta (nicknamed Pearl and richly played by Butler) because the music she sings appears to stretch back to slavery times. It's an uneasy partnership, and especially unsettling when Butler first appears in prison shackles.

As the drama unfolds, you can see where Higgins sometimes checks off the issues he needs to deal with, ranging from the appropriation and packaging of Black culture for white audiences to the notion of Alberta becoming a prisoner again even after she is freed.

How Higgins works these issues into the play can sometimes feel clunky and obvious, but you're apt to overlook them since director Steve Scott and his strong cast makes the drama flow organically. The amazing musical talents of the leading ladies is something great to behold, so you feel culturally enriched just by taking part (yes, you are asked to sing along later in the show).

Now it would be easy for cynics to write off Black Pearl Sings! as a politically correct tract conveniently programmed to partially overlap with Black History Month. But to do so would deny the rich cultural exchange of folk artists who might have been forgotten if racial and cultural barriers weren't crossed by musical historians back in the 1930s. Black Pearl Sings! is a nice reminder of this fact, and it ultimately works at combining its entertainment and educational goals into a fine and thoughtful drama.