Folks at Actor's Theatre of Charlotte can attest to the old saying: "A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned."

Director Dennis Delamar knows it, because playwright Frank Higgins was still making changes to "Black Pearl Sings" last week - although it opened in 2007 in Houston.

And Terry Henry-Norman knows it, because the artistic career she once put on hold is back in full swing, 22 years after she graduated from Johnson C. Smith University.

Henry-Norman plays the inmate spending 10 years in a 1930s Texas prison for a Lorena Bobbitt-like retaliation. Into her life comes Susannah (Stephanie DiPaolo), a musicologist. Pearl wants to get out and look for a missing daughter; Susannah is looking for field recordings that will gain her academic fame. Their relationship begins as mutual exploitation, then moves toward friendship.

"It's important that this be a 50-50 play," says Delamar, who watched versions in Greensboro (where it was handled that way) and Washington (where it wasn't).

"Frank has seen all the other productions and given me notes on them. I've never had this kind of dialogue with a playwright; he has sent new lines, and he's even given us options in some places: He'll confer about whether something should happen on page 70 or page 74 in the script."

Delamar thought he had a Susannah in old friend Gina Stewart, but she was hired for the current off-Broadway production of "Good Ol' Girls." Up stepped DiPaolo, whom Delamar had directed in "The Full Monty" at Theatre Charlotte - and who learned to play the autoharp in a month. (Stewart lent her 1935 autoharp; Brenda Gambill, Stewart's longtime bandmate, signed on as music adviser.)

But where to find Pearl? A friend of Henry-Norman's suggested she read, and Delamar remembered the dynamo who had blazed through "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Dreamgirls" at Theatre Charlotte back in the 1980s.

"I didn't know if this glamorous, refined woman could be this prisoner," says Delamar. "But she's an actress. We've worked to make Pearl hard and cynical, and it's been a joy to watch her find that."

That's a joy Henry-Norman allowed herself only intermittently over the years, though she's known what she ought to be since second grade:

"My school was doing 'The Sound of Music.' Little me, not knowing I was not exactly a von Trapp child, auditioned. All the people of color got to be announcers, and I introduced scene 2 in a beautiful dress with white ruffles my auntie made. After the cast took bows, I asked my mom, 'How do I do that again?'"

She earned applause in college and beyond. She moved to L.A. and grabbed work as an extra in "A Different World," in regional commercials, in theatrical productions, even as a vocalist hired for the maiden voyage of the Carnival Ecstasy cruise ship.

Marriage 16 years ago changed things. Her husband, who comes from Fayetteville, wanted to set up his Signatures by Norman custom framing business in Charlotte. Her daughter was born, and "mothering took up the majority of anything I did."

She gritted her teeth and tried the 9-to-5 life, studied acting in Charlotte under J.D. Lewis, then went back to L.A. for a stint on the TV soap "Passions," after a phone call by Lewis opened that door. But it wasn't until she came back that many doors opened.

Now she teaches acting at Barbizon, helps the dramatic arts ministry at St. Paul's Baptist Church and dreams of reviving the theater program at JCSU. And she's a leading lady again, since playing in "Cell Phone Blues" for On Q Productions last autumn.

"I'd tried to convince myself that phase of my life was over, but there was always a longing," she says. "I could not put my finger on why I was depressed, and it was because the artist in me was suffocating. Actors aren't whole if we're not finding an outlet."