I saw Pearl Cleage’s American drama in America at the Oregon Festival and looked forward to seeing it again when it came to the UK. I have had to wait 25 years. I am amazed it hasn’t been staged here sooner. It’s a fine play for black actors.
Blues for an Alabama Sky is set in a tenement building in Harlem in New York in 1930 just when the Great Depression had put an end to the Harlem Renaissance.
Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, said ‘The Blues is all about hope and dreams and the search of love. The Blues is also about the soulful yearning for that thing which has been stolen or seems unattainable.’
The National Theatre cast, headed by the American actress Samira Wiley making her UK stage debut, is excellent. Lynette Linton is the director and the production is excellent. Frankie Bradshaw is the designer and his tenement tower block towers.
There are just five characters. Angel (Wiley), a streetwalker, has been dumped by her gangster boyfriend and fired by the nightclub where she sings. She lives with an openly gay costume designer (Giles Terera) who dreams of going to Paris and working for Josephine Baker.
A social worker (Ronke Adekoluejo), who works in a birth control clinic, is courted by a hard-working, much-respected doctor (Sule Rimi), who is prepared to perform abortions (and as we all know abortions in the US are a major issue at the moment, making the plays revival even more timely).
Into this group comes a stranger (Osy Ikhile), a good-looking, God-fearing, homophobic Christian, who has recently been widowed. He sees Angel as a substitute for his late wife. Angel does not love him but she is short of cash and pregnant.
Lynette Linton’s excellent production and the actors’ excellent performances confirm that Blues for an Alabama Sky, which premiered in 1995, is a major 20th century American play and is strongly recommended.
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