There are many things going on in The Sty of the Blind Pig but all so s-l-o-w-l-y. This despite the play being altered from three acts to two. With the change come constant blackouts or dimmed lights to the tunes of jazz or, in a jarring switch toward the end, train sounds. Lost in the change is the fundamental structure of exposition, embroilment, resolution that author Phillip Hayes Dean’s text would seem to demand.
What goes on begins with a sign of change. A dysfunctional family has to move soon because their building will be torn down. It’s supposed to be dilapidated, although one wouldn’t know it from Rick Cannon’s not-unpleasant set. (It’s the furniture that needs replacing.) Mama Weedy sits by a window looking out . . . (at what? The close-up building next door has well-mortared bricks unlike many on Chicago’s South Side, Fall 1955) . . . and arguing, in turn, with brother Doc and, mostly, daughter Alberta.
Natty Alan Bomar Jones is a charming Doc, who loves scotch, runs numbers, and when visiting puts the touch on Weedy. She (Cassandra Small, full of gumption and adept at comic timing) is sometimes silly -- as when she keeps packing to leave -- but consistently self-righteous, bossy and religious in the extreme.
Irreligious daughter Alberta (Kimberly Webb, always less real than acting) writes obits for a living. She is nervous. She may be mentally disturbed or reacting to constant pill popping.
Into a bad mother-daughter relationship comes a typically dramatic stranger, Blind Jordan (Ron Bobb-Semple). This street singer with guitar has been working the neighborhood’s halls looking for old acquaintance Grace Waters. (Whether she’s real or not, she has an obviously symbolic name.) Why Alberta lets Jordan in is a mystery, though he’s necessary to the plot. He may be metaphorically the blind who’ll be leading the blind to the reality of the time and their situation -- to see the light, as it were.
Unfortunately, his late-in-the-play story of his hideous background in a New Orleans “sty” spreads darkness. Bobb-Semple, who’s believable early on as the sightless one who sees the situation, finally becomes unbelievably hideous facially and in motion.
It’s a stretch for Alberta to take up with Blind Jordan and even more to move to a religious frenzy. Though at the start, she had not gone with her mother to a funeral, presumably because of it being a religious ceremony, she lastly has either a hallucination or mystic epiphany. It’s mixed up with shedding sexual repression and her vision of an angelic young man who died and whom she presumably kissed only when he was in his coffin. She may be hallucinating over someone whose obit she wrote and who has become real to her.
The centerpiece of Alberta’s progress (or regression) is her extended monologue. Webb seems to detach it from the play as a whole, but I suspect it’s under Southers’ amateurish direction. He’s also probably responsible for a light descending on her in an otherwise blackened scene. So dramatic style goes from realistic to naturalistic to melodramatic. What hurts most is not capturing Dean’s attention to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. Weedy alludes to “nappy-haired” youngsters making trouble while she was on a trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Doc thinks he’ll get away from “struggles” by going to Memphis. “We `bout the last ones, sister,” he tells Wendy. (It’s doubtful that would have bothered Dean.)
Finally, if the building coming down is the inciting incident for the decisive clash between Alberta and her mother, why does she end up sitting in Weedy’s chair and watching out the window? Good thing that audiences get to hear Dean’s wonderfully realistic dialogue and to see Ross Boehringer’s just-right costumes. They’re the nearest thing to a saving grace (minus waters) for Banyan for this production!
