Pearl Cleage's 1995 drama, Blues for an Alabama Sky has long been a favorite of Sheldon Epps, artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse. (Epps successfully mounted the same writer's Flyin' West some years ago). Now Epps has been able to catch up with Blues,bringing it to vibrant life in a production that skillfully surmounts the play's problems.
Cleage has set her story in 1930's Harlem, against the backdrop of the Depression. Deftly using the music of the era to spice things up, Epps coaxes wonderful performances out of his five-person cast, which is led by Robin Givens in the role of Angel Allen, a plucky blues singer fighting to find her way in a hard, tough world. Angel lives in a tenement apartment with Guy Jacobs (the dynamic Keven T. Carroll), an old pal from Savannah who is a costume designer. If Angel's dream is to find success as a singer, Guy's dream is to put Harlem behind him and sail off to Paris and make fabulous dresses for the famed entertainer, Josephine Baker.
Guy is openly -- and a touch flamboyantly -- gay, a fact that the streetwise Angel takes in stride. Guy is also a part of Harlem's homosexual underground, a demimonde headed by the poet Langston Hughes, an important (but unseen) character in the play.
Living next door is Delia Patterson (a perfectly cast Tessa Thompson), a shy young social worker with a dream of her own: to open a birth-control clinic in Harlem with the help of her employer, Margaret Sanger (also talked about but never seen). Delia is also the love interest of Sam Thomas (Kadeem Hardison), a fun-loving, hard-drinking doctor on staff at nearby Harlem Hospital.
Into the picture comes Leland Cunningham (the estimable Robert Ray Manning, Jr.), a young man fresh off an Alabama farm. Leland is handsome, upright and uptight, thanks to his smalltown, Baptist origins. Shocked as he is by Guy's sexuality, Angel's drinking, Sam's carousing and Tessa's line of work, Leland still manages to fall deeply in love with Angel.
Blues for an Alabama Sky moves back and forth between these disparate but all-too-human characters, shedding a sharp, knowing light on their actions, their struggles for survival and fulfillment. Author Cleage never loses her compassion for them, not even when they make terrible and tragic mistakes in life. And always she manages to capture their pungent language, their gallows humor.
The play's many scene changes present a problem for any director; this time around, though, Epps and designer John Iacovelli have nimbly employed a revolving set to keep the flow going. The play also suffers somewhat from predictability, but not in a fatal way.
With its unique look at 1930's Harlem and, above all, its richly, sympathetically drawn characters, Blues for an Alabama Sky is a fine, worthy piece of work.
