Although Langston Hughes doesn’t appear in Pearl Cleage’s very well-made Blues for an Alabama Sky, he’s mentioned. It’s very likely Cleage has been thinking of the Hughes’ poem that asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?—Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun…?”
That’s because Cleage is concerned with dreams deferred—and only occasionally fulfilled—during the Depression. The five urgent dreamers include the perhaps incorrectly named Angel (Alfie Fuller). She’s the one who at one tense moment announces that she’s had it with “Negro dreams.”
Angel has recently been, as she puts it, “dumped” by her boyfriend. He announced he’d gotten married, and In reaming him out publicly, she succeeds in being fired from her singing gig at a Harlem club. When Blues for an Alabama Sky begins, she’s continuing to live, now salary free, with gay costume designer Guy (John-Andrew Morrison). His fervent dream is to design costumes for Josephine Baker, whose face blares from a poster on their apartment wall.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
Another dreamer, living across the hall on You-Shin Chen’s accommodating set, is the young and virginal Delia (Jasminn Johnson), one of whose dreams is to open a Margaret Sanger clinic in the not necessarily welcoming Harlem. This does become one dream realized before Cleage ends her close and empathetic look at the striving quintet.
Delia also becomes slowly involved with 40-year-old Sam (Sheldon Woodley), a doctor friendly to Angel, Sam and her. It could be, though, that their group closeness turns out to be another dream unhappily deferred. The remaining dreamer is Leland (Khiry Walker), who’s arrived from Alabama and falls for Angel. He looks to be successful in his pursuit, although the devious, on-the-rebound Angel repeatedly tells her pals—and eventually Leland—that she resolutely does not love the enamored fellow.
Cleage watches the five over several weeks, when at one point Guy says of his friends and himself, “We’re tawdry and tainted and running for our natural lives.” During their natural run, Guy conceives five costumes to send to Baker at the Folies Bergére in Paris. For a time, Angel acts as if she’s fallen for Leland although events become complicated when he—still attuned to Alabama manners and mores—learns the obvious: Guy is homosexual. At that, Leland angrily declares his ingrained prejudice.
Then much worse takes place before Cleage closes her look back at Depression days and nights when blacks could live quite separately within a predominantly white world and when, however, rent parties were a common occurrence up and down Manhattan. Though no rent party happens here, there is an eviction notice that hovers before a positive twist of fate changes some things for the better.
A possible spoiler involving a very negative twist of fate is that a pistol appears, and everyone knows what Chekhov said about a gun showing up on stage: Before the play ends it must be fired.
The Blues for an Alabama Sky acting, under LA Williams’ sensitive direction, is right on the money, even if the characters aren’t flush with any kind of cash. Fuller’s unhappy, scheming Angel demands constant audience attention. When first seen so drunk she needs Guy and Leland to carry her home until last seen peering out of a window, Fuller is simultaneously gallant and pathetic.
Morrison’s Guy is bold and unwavering in his girth-y sexuality. Nothing will daunt this Guy, and Morrison lives it with vitality. Johnson’s Delia is a strong mixture of girlishness and conviction. Woodley, as a Harlem physician attending to patients’ needs (including what seems to be the occasional abortion), is pleasantly forthright. As Leland, the tall and handsome Walker, with intensity in his eyes, is the passionate lover as well as the intolerant Southerner. This naïve, tough fellow has left the South, but the South hasn’t left him.
As far as this reviewer can tell, Blues for an Alabama Sky lacks only one thing. But naming it includes another spoiler: The costumes that the often “comment ca va?”-spouting Guy sends to Baker in Paris go over extremely well with her. Earlier, Guy is seen fitting one of them on Delia, but it’s never shown completed. Nor are the other four hot items. Does he attach any bananas to them to honor one of the American-born chanteuse’s signature looks? There’s no way of knowing
So while costume designer Asa Benally’s well-chosen period costumes for Guy, Angel and the rest are on display, Guy’s for Baker are not. Sure feels like an unfair tease.
Blues for an Alabama Sky opened February 19, 2020, at Theatre Row and runs through March 14. Tickets and information: keencompany.org
