Seattle Rep continues its excellent 2024–2025 season with an exemplary revival of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky, a wonderful reworking of Tennessee Williams’s work and especially of his great dream play about the experience of Southerners in the Northern, urban portions of the States.
Here, like in William’s The Glass Menagerie, there’s a strong woman figure, Angel (Ayanna Bria Bakari), who is a parallel in many ways to Amanda, wanting to get out, though you know she never will; there’s a Tom, here Guy (Jamar Jones), a dressmaker and “homosexual” (his word, used for its shock value as he draws it out, "ho-mo-sex-u-al") just wanting to live his life by moving from the Harlem Renaissance to Paris during its expat heyday to design costumes for Josephine Baker. This would be his dream, one far removed from Tom’s unsuccessful foray into making shoes, the last thing he wanted to do.
Laura’s place is taken, again mostly, by Delia (Esther Okech Lewis)—though not physically disabled like Laura, Delia is socially awkward and shy, represented not so much by her behaviour as by her very conservative, even dowdy, dressing. For a 25-year-old, she sure seems to want to make herself into an old woman before her time. And the Gentleman Caller—referenced as such by Angel—here is Sam (Yusef Seevers), a successful Harlem physician, at the height of his career just like the Gentleman Caller of the Menagerie, but in middle-age; unlike Jim, whatever Guy might have done in high school hardly matters.
Jim will be telling tales of his high school sports successes when he’s well on his way to becoming his play’s Willy Loman. There's a reason Cleage borrows the nickname "Big Daddy" from William's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for Sam: he's successful but in trouble from the start.
This play boasts a second gentleman caller, a young man referenced as “country” but in fact apparently Southern urban. Leland (Ajax Dontavius) actually sticks around long enough to get engaged to Angel. The final character is another new addition: a musician (Nathan Breedlove) who plays trumpet and represents the fast-moving North and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance and its own lures and attractions, though also its dangers. (This is mostly represented by the overuse of alcohol. There’s little to no mention of drugs, which surely would have been at least seen, if not used, in the circles in which Angel and Guy run.)
There’s even a portrait on one wall. Instead of a long-departed and absent husband, it’s a picture of black icon Josephine Baker. This picture looks forward to Guy’s dreams of a life in Paris, not back to a long-departed husband who went out for cigarettes and never came back.
A major difference between the two plays is that the issue driving the plot of Menagerie is the economics of a failed plantation South and a growing, if inhumane, industrial North. Instead, the common concerns of all the characters in Blues are driven by racism, a blight over the South and the North. The characters who have fled to the North find themselves still fighting for their own difference and for autonomy over their own lives. They're poor, sure, but they also fight racism and some of the characters connect their poverty to their colour, rightly or wrongly.
The period is well defined, drawn by both references such as that to the Abyssinian Baptist Church and its well known and loved pastor, the Rev. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., of which Delia is a member attempting to open a family planning centre in Harlem for poor black women, and Josephine Baker, a well-known singer who had left the States for Paris and part of the community there, but also by the play’s set (designed by Matthew Smucker), reminiscent of those created for Williams, O’Neill, and other American playwrights created by Jo Mielziner with projections of the streets of Harlem maps. With its two floors and two separate first floor apartments and built on a turntable, Smucker creates a real sense of place in which these people live what feel like very real lives. The costumes (created by Melanie Taylor Burgess) do the same. You know, from looking at the way they dress who these people are.
And the acting and direction by Valerie Curtis-Newton are superb. I found myself very concerned with who would survive the circumstances in which these characters found themselves and who would not, both a matter for surprise which I will not spoil here.
The play is a glimpse into a past not all folks know, the wonderful, heady times of the Harlem Renaissance and its connections, for better or worse, to the rest of then contemporary culture. It’s also an honest look at people living tough lives and fighting to get out, a concern which absolutely engages our beliefs about how lives are supposed to operate, that hard work will pay off and, I suppose, lack of discipline is punished, a not uncommon American trope. But this production is also gripping in its own right as a piece of theatre. If you find yourselves in Seattle, don’t miss this.