By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The Midwest Regional Black Theatre Festival continues through the week. The final guest artist performance is at 2 p.m. today with Wendi Joy Franklin completing a weekend run of A Song for You...The Civil Rights Journey of a Negro Woman: Lena Calhoun Horne at Cincinnati Museum Center.

Monday through Wednesday will be evenings of Readers Theatre at the Museum Center's Newsreel Theater. Revivals of community theater productions by Cincinnati Black Theatre Company will complete the schedule Thursday through Saturday.

A Song for You has been a labor of love for Franklin since 1986, when her grandmother died. "I felt I needed something to encourage me and help me strive," she said and then she came across Horne's autobiography.

"As I began to read, I found she was a real person with struggles and dreams, a woman with determination and dignity who fought for herself and others."

Franklin was caught up in the details of Horne's singing and acting career, pre-civil rights. On the road, Horne was often banned from hotels, restaurants and clubs. On film, "she was never given a major role. She always played a beautiful singer or herself and when the movies were shown in the South, her part would usually be cut out," Franklin says.

Horne's story "took me on the journey through my history and awakened a part of myself that I had not known."

It took Franklin about 10 years of research to put the show together. She interviewed Horne's manager, watched her films, spent hours in the Horne archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

"I hope that when I represent her story that I continue to share a part of her truth," she said.

Playwright Phil Paradis' A Bag of Groceries will be the featured work at Monday's staged reading.

Groceries is about a white man carrying a bag of groceries who appears to have found his way into the wrong neighborhood. He faces off with a pair of African-American locals.

Paradis, who lives in Highland Heights, says he was interested in addressing communications breakdown and cultural divide. "What do we do? ... Make false assumptions, pre-judge, hate for no good reason? Or transcend violent impulses?"

Paradis started working on Groceries in 1999. He says he did have some early doubts about his subject - " 'Now, wait a second - I'm a white guy, what am I doing writing about the African-American experience?'... but I realized what I wanted to express and portray I hadn't read yet or seen on the stage, so I forged ahead."

For reservations and information about festival events, call the festival office at 421-1100 or visit www.cincyblacktheatre.com.