When the audience meets nightclub singer Angel Allen (Virgilia Griffith), she’s draped in a champagne-coloured evening gown. Griffith is a force of nature in the role.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
Title: Blues for an Alabama Sky
Written by: Pearl Cleage
Performed by: Mary Antonini, JJ Gerber, Virgilia Griffith, Allan Louis, Stewart Adam McKensy
Directed by: Kimberley Rampersad
Company: Shaw Festival
Venue: Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
Year: Runs to Oct. 4
Critic’s Pick
One hundred years ago, New York was in the throes of a revolution. Jazz flowed through the streets of the city like bootleg gin; spoken-word poetry peppered the air. Something big was happening: the Harlem Renaissance, the kaboom of dance, art, fashion, music, literature and politics in the 1920s and 30s that fundamentally changed Black culture in the United States and beyond.
In Blues for an Alabama Sky, playwright Pearl Cleage combines the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance with the pressure-cooker pacing and framing of Long Day’s Journey into Night, resulting in an electric play that touches on a number of topical social issues – birth control, abortion, homophobia.
But under Kimberley Rampersad’s superb direction, and with Virgilia Griffith in the starring role, Blues for an Alabama Sky morphs into something more than a play. It feels like watching a fire in real time, unforgiving in its power and scope as it blazes. Smartly staged inside the cozy Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, the work is the indisputable highlight of this year’s Shaw Festival (and a fascinating vessel for Shavian discourse around social justice).
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When we meet nightclub singer Angel (Griffith), she’s draped in a champagne-coloured evening gown, on the mend from a night out that may or may not have jeopardized her employment. Indeed, Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s costumes add rich texture and stylistic context to Cleage’s play – clothes are characters of their own in this world.
Soon enough, we meet Angel’s chosen family: Guy, her roommate and best friend, is a gay fashion designer who daydreams of a better life in Paris (Stewart Adam McKensy). Then there’s Delia, the idealistic neighbour, a typist who hopes to open a birth-control clinic in Harlem (Mary Antonini), and Sam, the doctor who can help make that vision a reality (Allan Louis).
When the chronically single Angel meets Leland (JJ Gerber), a smooth-talking Southerner with a heart full of scripture and a pistol for protection, all hell breaks loose. For a while, it seems Angel might have found her ticket out of poverty – no secretarial school needed.
Stewart Adam McKensy, left, plays Guy Jacobs, a gay fashion designer and Angel’s roommate and best friend. Mary Antonini plays Delia Patterson, a typist who hopes to open a birth-control clinic in Harlem.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
For a play that first premiered 30 years ago, Blues for an Alabama Sky is strikingly contemporary (and in the case of its explorations of abortion and contraception, even depressingly so). Cleage’s dialogue clips by like a coyote, ruthless and quick as the play hurtles toward its shocking conclusion.
When Leland flashes his gun in the hallway of Angel’s apartment building, what becomes certain is that there will be a tragedy (hello, Chekhov). All of a sudden, Blues for an Alabama Sky isn’t about whether someone will die, but who that person will be. How many more martyrs can Harlem endure?
Rampersad’s no-nonsense production, tight and sleek, leans into the bite of Cleage’s play, sparing no one in its portrait of a woman doomed to rely on others for her basic needs. Griffith is a force of nature in the role, which might as well have been written for her. In her care, Angel is both dead and alive, an artist caught between worlds of opulent glitz and scorching heat. Griffith’s Angel is bruised, fiery, sad. All those layers get a chance to evolve and shine as Griffith digs into Angel’s inner psyche.
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The rest of Rampersad’s cast is similarly solid, particularly Gerber as Leland and McKensy as Guy. As written, Guy could feel like Stanley Tucci’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, fashionable yet impenetrably aloof – but McKensy underscores Guy’s love for his friends, his naive belief in a utopia across the ocean. The result is devastating: a gay Black designer in the 1930s, forced to elbow and shove his way out of persecution in New York.
The set, also designed by Urquhart, similarly adds shades of specificity and nuance to Cleage’s story of cracked dreams. Period-appropriate props – a vintage sewing machine, a set of faded matchbooks – suggest an apartment as vibrant as the tenants who sleep there, cluttered and chaotic, yet colourful and luxe. (White-hot coils inside the floors are also a delicious red herring for the play’s final twist.)
All in, Blues for an Alabama Sky is a triumph for the Shaw Festival, a tender ode to the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and an absolute must-see as the fest’s summer season comes to a close. Let’s hold the good thought for a Toronto transfer that ensures as many audiences as possible get to see Griffith soar in this meaty, melancholy gem of a production.
