By Myra Chanin . . .
During the long-gone days of my youth, I considered the Berkshires a cultural summertime wonderland and loved its endless pastures, dotted with unpretentious barns-cum-theaters where happily exploited future stars displayed their dramatic talents performing immortal classics and timorous tryouts. But that was before Covid kept theatergoers at home watching streamed series about comic book heroes. Well, I have good news. Ticket-buyers are coming back and so is theater and one that impressed me greatly was the sold-out performance of the revitalized Barrington Stage Company’s Blues for An Alabama Sky—on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage through August 5—a worthy and intriguing drama by Pearl Cleage, whose name was unfamiliar to me. Where had she been all my life? Writing! Writing! Writing! Between 1981 and now, she published nine novels, seventeen plays and two volumes of essays (including a New York Times best-seller and an Oprah Book Club selection) while founding Catalyst, a literary journal, that she’s edited since 1987. Blues for an Alabama Sky is one of her five plays commissioned by Kenny Leon’s Alliance Theater in Atlanta. Yes, the same Kenny Leon whose Hamlet is playing at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater as the only official Shakespeare in the Park production this summer. Small world, isn’t it?
Blues for an Alabama Sky is a five-character drama that has a Lorraine Hansberry ambiance in the noble humanity of its characters: a Lillian Hellman plot with goals, a climax, lots of suspense and a resolution. It’s also quite Chekhovian. As in Uncle Vanya, each character is equally essential to its structure, and every surprise is not surprising because the audience has been subtly prepared for each one.
The characters are members of a community Cleage knows inside out, and she’s a first-class storyteller. Their complex feelings for each other give the play its unremitting tension and glorious equilibrium. Each character is believable, compelling, ambitious, and oh, so human; not to mention likable, but not necessarily perfect. The actors’ performances kept the entire audience rapt and responsive to the conflicts and emotions occurring on stage.
The date is 1930, at the end of the Harlem Renaissance. The setting is a Harlem apartment building. Scenic Designer Sydney Lynne, making his debut at Barrington Stage, has created a clever, haimish, warm but simple set—two apartments separated by a hallway, where the harsh realities of the Great Depression are beginning to be felt by five hard-working “negroes,” as they were respectfully called then. Each one is a gainfully employed striver. They care about their lives and possessions and are trying to supply themselves with meaningful futures.
The play opens with a bang. Angel Allen (Tsilala Brock), a 34-year-old singer who once danced in the Cotton Club line, is bewailing her unexpected sad state: she has no man and no job. Angel was being kept by Nick, the Italian mobster owner of the club at which she worked, who dumps her when he gets married to someone more like his mother. After Angel insults Nick in front of his Mafia cohorts he fires her, which is why she gets drunk and is being half-dragged and half-carried into the apartment of her friend Guy Jacobs (Brandon Alvión) a gay costume designer who has also been fired by Nick for defending her. Giving Guy a helping hand carrying Angel is Leland Cunningham (DeLeon Dallas), a 28-year-old Evangelical Christian widower/carpenter, visiting Harlem from Alabama, still mourning for his stillborn son and beloved deceased wife who died during the baby’s delivery. Angel looks very much like her.
Guy intends to let Angel live with him. His side hustle, making costumes for transvestites, will provide him with enough money to provide for Angel until he can convince Josephine Baker to ask him to come to Paris first class and design costumes for her. He intends to bring Angel with him.
Delia Patterson (Jasminn Johnson) a 26-year-old social worker, lives in a smaller apartment across from Guy. She cares about Angel enough to suggest that Angel learn to type so she can better support herself. Delia is working on setting up a Margaret Sanger Family Planning Clinic and hoping for support from Adam Clayton Powell, her minister. Delia and their friend Sam Thomas—an obstetrician at Harlem Hospital who, when he isn’t delivering babies, believes in letting the good times roll—are in the initial stage of a romantic attachment. As are Leland and Angel, the latter a terrible mismatch. One might well ask: does either of these relationships have a sexual aspect? Both of them do.
Do any of these plans work out? Some do and some don’t. Watching their lives play out is fascinating because the writing is as extraordinary as the performances are delicious. Bravo to Candis C. Jones for her flawless direction in her Barrington Stage Company debut. With a BFA in Directing from NYU’s Tisch School of Drama and the work on her CV, she’s hardly a beginner. Bravos also to the entire cast. Wow! Every one of them did Pearl Cleage’s words proud.
The audience was so stunned and moved by this performance on the night I was there, it took them a few minutes to get themselves together enough to give the actors their well-deserved standing ovation. It’s a play very worth seeing.
Blues For An Alabama Sky. Through August 5 at the Barrington Stage Company’s Boyd-Quinson Stage (30 Union Street, Downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts). www.barringtonstageco.org
Photos: Daniel Rader
