"What Happens to a Dream Deferred?"
A haunting image closes the Keen Company’s satisfactory, if unremarkable, production of Pearl Cleage’s Blues
for an Alabama Sky, now on Theatre Row.
It’s a sultry night in 1930 Harlem and,
as she’s done before, Angel (Alfie Fuller, BLKS), a sensual, dark-skinned woman, rebounding from disappointment, sits
at a window in her Harlem flat, exposing a burnished shoulder and flipping open
a fan. As a predatory shadow falls across her ice-cold eyes, she surveys the
street outside, searching for her next opportunity to come along.
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| John-Andrew Morrison, Alfie Fuller, Sheldon Woodley. All photos: Carol Rosegg. |
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| Jasminn Johnson, Alfie Fuller, Sheldon Woodley. |
When the play begins, Angel, 34, the kept woman of Nick, an
Italian gangster, has been betrayed by his marriage to another woman, provoking
her to insult him publicly. Not a good idea. The price: her man, her
belongings, and her apartment, as well as her job singing at the famed Cotton
Club. Also fired is her best friend, Guy (John-Andrew Morrison), elegantly accoutered
and openly homosexual, at a time when to be so was to court attacks. Credit Asa
Benally for his and all the other nicely designed period costumes. 
It’s in Guy’s Harlem brownstone apartment, where he puts
Angel up as she tries to get back on her feet, that most of the action
transpires. Scenes are also played across the hall in the apartment of a mutual
friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson)—nicknamed “Deal”—and, using the space fronting
the stage, in the street. Unfortunately, You-Shin Chen’s clumsy scenic design
fails to solve the complex needs of this arrangement.
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| John-Andrew Morrison, Jasminn Johnson. |
Angel (don’t let the name deceive you) is transactional, a
woman who doesn’t shy from deploying her physical charms to gain male support.
Speaking of her earlier work as a prostitute, she notes: “It was better than
living on the street.” When Leland (Khiry Walker), a sweet but super-conservative,
church-going country fellow from Alabama who—seeing her resemblance to his late
wife—falls in love and wants to marry her, she agrees, even if she doesn’t love
him. He represents the security her joblessness doesn’t provide. Eventually,
she’ll do something shocking, not so much the deed itself but its shallow
motivation.
Delia is the opposite of the flashy Angel, a frumpy, self-effacing
25-year-old virgin. Her social consciousness, inspired by Margaret Sanger’s
birth control movement, helps her convince Harlem bigwigs on the board of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church—whose pastor is Adam Clayton
Powell, Sr.—to support a family planning center. At the time, fearful black
leaders considered birth control a genocidal conspiracy to control the
propagation of their race.
Helping to further Delia’s cause is Sam (Sheldon Woodley), a
hip 40-year-old physician at Harlem Hospital, a busy baby deliverer who also
dabbles in abortions. His emerging love affair with Delia balances that of
Leland with Angel until their fates tragically intertwine.
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| Alfie Fuller, Jasminn Johnson. |
Meanwhile, in a play concerned with folks dreaming of a
better life, Guy is obsessed with getting to design costumes for the popular
black cabaret star, Josephine
Baker, in Paris. It’s a goal he speaks of almost as Chekhov’s sisters do about
going to Moscow, albeit with a rosier outcome.
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| Alfie Fuller, Khiry Walker. |
In the second act, the two-and-a-half-hour play welds
together its significant themes, among them homophobia (Leland calls Guy’s
orientation “an abomination”), abortion, birth control, female empowerment, prohibition,
joblessness, and the struggle of black artists for recognition. A script largely
concerned with character development ultimately piles incident on incident, not
always convincingly, to bring about a foregone (if you subscribe to the rule of
Chekhov’s gun) melodramatic
conclusion.
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| Sheldon Woodly, Jasminn Johnson. |
Cleage’s well-researched writing captures
a time and place, given flesh and blood by resonant performances. Fuller is dynamic
as the Angel with soiled wings, her tough-as-leather persona a sturdy shield against the struggle for her daily bread. Morrison plays Guy with upbeat
confidence but tends to be one-note, while Walker’s Leland epitomizes the innocent, if ignorant, Southern rube. Johnson is
appealingly serious as Delia, but her casting creates a problem. She’s so much
bigger than Fuller you can’t help but wonder how the latter could fit so
perfectly into one of her dresses. Finally, Woodley is a believable Sam, even
if it’s hard to believe he’s only 40.
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| John-Andrew Morrison, Jasminn Johnson. |
LA Williams’s staging, which links the scenes with Lindsey
Jones’s bluesy music, is vivid enough but doesn’t solve the set’s problems,
like the upstage area showing characters going who knows where within the
brownstone’s interior. I understood there to have been a picture of Josephine
Baker hanging on a wall at stage right but, seated on the extreme left of the
auditorium, I had to take it on faith because the sight lines hid it entirely.
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| Sheldon Woodley, Jasminn Johnson, John-Andrew Morrison, Khiry Walker, Alfie Fuller. |
I still give Williams props, however, for that closing image
of Angel, sitting at her window, her features heightened by Oona Curley’s
lighting, ready to pounce on the next male-ticket to stroll her way.
Theatre
Row
410
W. 42nd St., NYC
Through
March 14
