Josephine Baker may be living in the lap of luxury in Paris, but a nightclub singer in 1930s Harlem, where “nobody’s working and nobody’s got prospects,” is just trying to survive. At least, that’s according to Angel Allen, the Cotton Club singer in Pearl Cleage’s murky “Blues for an Alabama Sky.”
The play opens with a drunken Angel (Alfie Fuller) staggering down the street in a fuchsia gown, half-carried by two men. She got dumped and fired by her gangster boyfriend-slash-boss, and gigs are hard to come by, she says, because “everybody in Harlem is singing the blues.” Her friend Guy (John-Andrew Morrison), a self-described “notorious homosexual” who fled Georgia with her, also got the boot as a costume designer at the club.
But Guy promises to take care of them. He’s just waiting for an invitation from Ms. Baker to join her in Paris and design her stage attire. Meanwhile, Guy and Angel’s neighbor, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), works to get a family planning clinic open and cautiously flirts with a neighborhood doctor, Sam (Sheldon Woodley). And a gentleman caller (Khiry Walker) from Alabama aims to save Angel from a life of scrapping.
“Alabama Sky,” produced by Keen Company and directed by LA Williams, begins at a leisurely pace, full of entrances and exits, people stopping by for a drink and chat. (You-Shin Chen’s set design, featuring two parallel doorways center stage to create a hallway, spotlights the motion.) Harlem is referred to constantly, insistently, through clunky name-drops of local greats: Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Langston Hughes, with whom the characters are conveniently on a first-name basis.
But Harlem has lost its shimmy and shake, Guy swears; Amsterdam Avenue can’t hold a candle to the Champs Élysées. This, it initially seems, is where the play is headed — a glimpse of life in Depression-era Harlem through the eyes of its residents, a meditation on hopes and dreams. Instead, a pregnancy and conversations about the ethics of contraception and abortion reconfigure the play as a story about the choices women make.
“Alabama Sky” wants to be about the relationship between Guy and Angel, but his character lacks dimension, and it’s her choices that are at the nexus of the action. And yet the play fails to commit its focus to its protagonist. At first styled as resourceful during a time of poverty, Angel is later drawn to be selfish and cutthroat at the expense of those around her. (Sam, Delia and Leland seem to exist as filler material to cushion Angel’s arc.) But the roots of her ruthlessness and Guy’s persistent loyalty to her aren’t accounted for by the play’s bread crumbs of a back story about their past lives in Georgia.
Cleage’s script and Fuller’s performance serve Angel best when they lean into her diamond toughness, but we don’t see enough of it until the final act, when the stakes rocket upward. And despite her spunky appeal, Fuller can’t pull off a believable performance as a nightclub songbird in a thin rendition of “St. Louis Blues.”
“I’m tired of Negro dreams,” Angel says, but the statement outweighs the play’s material, which approaches then crab-walks away from its would-be Pole Star. She must be talking about more than “the myth of the magical Josephine,” but we have no way to know. Paris is a long way away, but, here, so is Harlem, its residents and anything sounding like the blues.
Blues For an Alabama Sky
Through March 14 at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, keencompany.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
