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by Pearl Cleage, directed by Kimberley Rampersad

Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 14-October 4, 2025

“Feeling’ tomorrow like I feel today

I’ll pack my grip and make my getaway” (“The Saint Louis Blues”, 1925)

The Shaw continues its project of staging plays by female authors and those by authors of colour. It is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of Blues for an Alabama Sky, a play by Pearl Cleage (pronounced “klegg”), a Black American playwright, novelist and activist. Unlike Trouble in Mind (1955) by Alice Childress that the Shaw staged in 2021, Blues does not represent the discovery of an unjustly neglected play. Rather, Blues has seen productions by major theatres since its premiere in 1995, most notably a production at the National Theatre, London, in 2022. The Shaw production reveals the play as a fascinating work if not quite a masterpiece.

The action is set in two apartments across the hall from each other in an apartment building in Harlem, New York, in the summer of 1930. As Cleage states, “The creative euphoria of the [Harlem] Renaissance has given way to the harsher realities of The Great Depression”. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual flowering of Black positivity and liberal ideas that affected music, literature, art, dance, fashion and politics. What Cleage illustrates in the play is how characters who have lived in an era of idealism are brought up short by the Depression and the overturning of all its freedoms.

The play has one main plot and two subplots which intertwine. The main plot centre on Angel Allen, a backup singer at the fabled Cotton Club, who just before the action begins has been fired from her job by its White, mob-linked manager Nick. Nick fired her because Angel stopped a song in mid-performance to criticize him for how badly he has been treating her. She had been living with Nick, but now he has kicked her out and she has nowhere else to live but with Guy Jacobs, a costume designer for the Club who has bailed her out of trouble many times before. Her goal is to find another job singing at a time when there are no such other jobs, or, failing that, to find a man who will give her some financial security. Her friend across the hall, Delia Patterson, suggests Angel should learn to type, but Angel won’t even consider such an idea.

As it happens, a young man from Alabama, Leland Cunningham, has spied Guy helping a drunken Angel home on the evening she was fired and comes around again to check up on her. Angel is the image of his wife who died in childbirth along with their child, causing Leland to think that Angel is his second chance at love. The well-spoken but conservative Christian Leland is willing to do anything to help Angel, making her think that he is her “good luck charm”. The problems are that he wants the free-spirited Angel to become a traditional wife and mother and that he abhors Angel’s friends and the liberal ideas they represent.

One of these ideas is that of family planning enthusiastically promoted by Delia. She is a devotee of the White activist Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and wants to establish the first-ever family planning clinic in Harlem as a way of helping Black women obtain personal independence. In this Delia is helped by the local doctor Sam Thomas, who spends most of his time delivering babies to mothers who already have too many children. Delia’s struggle to set up the clinic, along with the increasing attraction between Delia and Sam, forms one of the play’s two subplots.

The other subplot involves Angel’s best friend Guy. Unbeknownst to Angel, Guy was also fired from the Cotton Club the same night as Angel. Guy makes enough money designing for other clients that he can take care of Angel on a temporary basis, but his life’s goal is to become a designer for the famous Black singer Josephine Baker (1906-75), star of the Folies Bergères in Paris. The play charts his gradual progress in pursuing this aim. What makes him an “abomination” to Leland is that Guy is openly gay. Guy goes to a party held by Bruce Nugent (1906-87), one of the first openly gay Black American artists, for the return to Harlem from France of the great Black poet Langston Hughes (1902-67). Guy’s account of the party that Angel, Delia and Sam find exciting, Leland finds disgusting. Angel is torn between seeking security and trying to live the free life she used to live with her like-minded friends.

Cleage writes in a realist style very similar to that of Tennessee Williams. Angel’s habit of calling Guy “Big Daddy” and Angel’s friends referring to Leland as Angel’s “gentleman caller” would seem to be Cleage’s acknowledgement of this influence. Williams, of course, never wrote a play with an all-Black cast or one that included a proudly out gay man. The primary similarity comes from the anxiety Cleage creates, like Williams, of characters in changed circumstances expressing their dreams. We know that one or more of these dreams will not come true because something dreadful will happen, since gritty reality is inimical to dreams.

The question that only grows stronger throughout the play is what sort of calamity it will be that shatter the characters’ happiness. While Cleage is excellent in creating a set of complex characters and of detailing the struggles and aspirations, she, unlike Williams, is unable to conclude her play in a way that feels inevitable. In Act 2 she introduces a clichéd complication of social drama which leads to a conclusion that feels far too arbitrary. Near the end, Angel could make the point she wants without blurting out a secret she knows she should keep hidden. Leland’s final actions don’t seem to fit the character we have seen on stage. And Angel’s unexplained disappearance and equally unexplained reappearance seem to happen just so Cleage can arrange a particular kind of dual ending – one happy, one unhappy.

This criticism aside, Cleage has engaged us so much with her characters that most people will not realize the artificiality of the last two scenes. Director Kimberley Rampersad has drawn such powerful performances from the entire cast that we feel for the play’s three hours that we have been fully immersed in the world of another place and time.

For Virgilia Griffith, Angel is a dream of a role since it allows her to delineate in such detail the huge range of emotions that Angel traverses. Griffith shows us a woman who has become used to adulation and an extravagant way of life who is shocked and confused suddenly to have nothing. Griffith brings out Angel’s innate optimism as Angel repeatedly talks herself into believing things will turn out right. Griffith thus makes it all the more painful for us to see how blow after blow of unkind circumstances eventually knocks all the hopefulness out of her. Angel’s attempts to be the type of woman Leland wants her to be would be comic except that Griffith shows how much Angel chafes at his view of life. What Griffith does so well is to depict the gradual change in Angel from someone struggling to return to her old life to someone who must acknowledge the grim reality of her new life.

Mary Antonini’s Delia is a complete contrast to Angel. Delia is a regular church-goer and an independent young woman who focusses her attention on bettering the lives of other people while seldom thinking of herself. Antonini imbues Delia with unshakeable optimism and kindness. Antonini is especially delightful in the scenes in which the naturally shy Delia becomes confused about what to do when she notices that Sam, the local doctor, is attracted to her.

Another optimist is Guy Jacobs, played with verve by Stewart Adam McKensy. Guy is the rock that Angel clings to in her isolation. Guy’s only unusual trait for the period is that he is openly gay. McKensy plays Guy’s gayness with the utmost taste. This is someone living in a time and place where homosexuality is a crime. Therefore, McKensy uses gestures that other gay men of the time might recognize, like more expressive facial movements and more hip-swaying when walking, but that straight men, like Leland, might not notice. McKensy makes clear that Guy has his own plans for his future. It is therefore intriguing to see how McKensy shows an inner battle within Guy between doing everything to help Angel and not wanting Angel to become too attached to him.

Allan Louis’s bachelor doctor Sam knows how to ply his craft but also doesn’t wish to miss out on enjoying life. At the start of the play Louis shows that boredom with his current life has already begun to set in. Louis shows in his face how Sam begins to see that the energetic, idealistic Delia may be just the person to bring out the best in him. It is a pleasure to follow the growing romance between Sam and Delia and how it changes them both. Louis plays Sam as a complex man whose life experience has given him the deepest self-understanding of all the characters.

At the Shaw we have seen J.J. Gerber primarily in musicals. Blues gives him a chance to demonstrate that he is also a fine actor. There is something about the utter earnestness he gives Leland that makes us feel uneasy right from the start. When we hear that Leland is attracted to Angel because she reminds him of his recent deceased wife, our suspicions are confirmed that his interest in Angel is more an obsession than love. What Gerber does so well is to shade Leland’s earnestness from being suspicious to be downright incensed since it is a product of an extremely narrow view of morality and human relations.

Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart has managed create a set showing two rooms of one apartment, one room of another and a hallway in between all on the small stage in the round of the Studio Theatre. By providing only the outlines of doors and windows, Urquhart allows us to view all four spaces simultaneously. It is a tight fit, but Rampersad has choreographed the movement of the actors so smoothly that we hardly notice how compressed the spaces are. Chris Malkowski’s lighting is invaluable in directing our attention within this busy playing area and in conjuring up its varying moods.

Urquhart has also designed a wonderful array of period costumes, all expressive of the characters who wear them. The presence of a costumier as a character allows Urquhart to create an impressive suite of gowns that Guy has designed for Josephine.

The song that Cleage has Angel sing more than once is “The Saint Louis Blues” written in 1914 by W.C. Handy but made popular in 1925 by the great jazz singer Bessie Smith (1892-1937). That quintessential blues number expresses the feelings of emptiness, loss of love, depression and the wish to escape. All the characters of Blues for an Alabama Sky experience these feeling at some point during the action so that the play seems in itself to embody the spirit of the blues. Cleage’s depiction of the death of a period of liberal-mindedness gives the play an uncanny relevance. Whatever the flaws of its conclusion, Blues provides such a complex, full-bodied experience it should not be missed.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: J.J. Gerber as Leland and Virgilia Griffith as Angel; Virgilia Griffith as Angel, J.J. Gerber as Leland, Allan Louis as Sam, Mary Antonini as Delia and Stewart Adam McKensy as Guy; Virgilia Griffith as Angel; Stewart Adam McKensy as Guy and Mary Antonini as Delia. © 2025 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.