Theater review
It's hot in Harlem, and people are doing wild things. For one: Angel, the singer at the heart of Pearl Cleage's "Blues for an Alabama Sky," tells off her gangster ex-boyfriend in the crowded club where she worked, and that's just the beginning of our story.
In Cleage's 1995 play, set in Harlem in 1930, times are tough for Angel (Ayanna Bria Bakari) and her best friend and roommate Guy (Jamar Jones), a self-described "notorious homosexual" and costume designer.
"Blues," now running at Seattle Rep through Feb. 23, is directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton and presented in partnership with The Hansberry Project, where she is founding artistic director. While the play meanders enough to undercut its more dramatic moments, it offers some lovely insights about community and culture using the intertwining stories of five Harlem residents.
After her ignominious firing, Angel's looking for both a job and love -- and not necessarily in that order. Guy's priorities, on the other hand, include taking care of Angel and getting to Paris, where he's certain dancer and singer Josephine Baker will j'adore his costumes and turn their lives around.
Until that trans-Atlantic ship comes in, these two are basking in the glow of the Harlem Renaissance despite the Great Depression, partying with Langston Hughes, Bruce Nugent and other Harlem A-listers whose careers thrived in that flourishing of Black American cultural brilliance.
Across the hall, their neighbor, social worker Delia (Esther Okech Lewis), works toward her goal to open up a family planning clinic in Harlem. And coming and going at all hours is Sam (Yusef Seevers), a doctor who, in his free time, dedicates himself to letting the good times roll.
An invasive species interrupts this ecosystem when Angel meets Leland (Ajax Dontavius), a recent Southern transplant who brings with him some of the small-town ideas that she and Guy hoped to leave behind when they left Savannah, Ga., years ago. But that doesn't stop Angel from giving Leland a chance, for reasons you (and she) may or may not understand or forgive.
While there is no question that the issues in the play remain relevant today -- reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights in particular come to mind -- Cleage crams so many issues into one play that it becomes unwieldy. In doing so, she leaves too little room for the characters to develop as fully fleshed-out human beings.
What at first seems like a portrait of a community pivots first into the hot social and political topics of the day. Then again, it shifts into an exploration of the choices that women must make for their safety, and the hard-baked notions men have about their own worth. These are all strong choices, but the pivots mean that none of them reaches any satisfying conclusion before we move on to something else.
And while Matthew Smucker's clever, rotating set is a lovely piece of stagecraft, it almost seemed to work against itself narratively. Why disorient the audience by literally shifting the focus from one apartment to another by partially rotating the set, rather than just fitting together as part of the visual whole?
These rotations contributed to languid transitions between scenes, which were slowed further by the moody addition of blues trumpeter Nathan Breedlove, who emerged at different spots around the set with a hat pulled down over his eyes, to play a few bars before we jump back into our story. A nice idea, perhaps, but for my money it was more distracting than illuminating.
The cast as a whole gave excellent performances, making the most of somewhat thinly drawn characters. Of particular note are Seevers as the exhausted, hedonistic doctor; and Bakari, who plays Angel in all her contradictory, selfish and desperate glory. And she can sing.
While the quotidian parts of the play simmered nicely, the tension never quite reached a boil when it needed to, rendering the show's dramatic denouement a blink-and-you-miss-it event rather than a heartstopper.
Even so, my heart broke for everyone on stage at one point or another. Whether I agreed with them or not, watching so many dreams butt up against the hard limits of reality felt painful. But the beauty of "Blues for an Alabama Sky" came in realizing how necessary everyone felt to this community -- and also in the real world. We need jazz singers and social workers, doctors and costume designers and carpenters and everyone else, and a community is lesser for missing any one of them. We'd all do well to remember that.