A mesmerising production at the National Theatre triumphs with sleek performances and clever set design.
Blues for an Alabama Sky is an elegy for the lost potentiality of liberation in the Harlem Renaissance and yet a celebration of its vivaciousness. Written in 1995 by activist and writer Pearl Cleage, the play is set at the closing of the Harlem Renaissance – despite the end of the Renaissance, this production directed by Lynette Linton at the National Theatre revels in the vibrant colour of the cultural moment which the play’s characters inhabit.
The production is sustained by strong central performances, particularly Samira Wiley as Angel Alllen. Out of a job because of a stormy breakup with an offstage gangster type, Angel is continually buffeted by the headwinds of events. She meets a complicated southern man (Osy Ikhile) who soon falls madly for her but doesn’t really fit in Harlem, she clashes with her dreamer best friend Guy (Giles Terera) who fantasises about moving to Paris and designing costumes for Josephine Baker. Throughout, Wiley elegantly captures the sense of Angel being pulled apart by the pressures placed on her by other characters and the structural forces at work in 1920s America. Similarly, Terera’s Guy is vulnerable and outrageous in equal parts, a joyous campy tableau of an out gay man at the time tinted with the prejudice and homophobic violence of the period. Both performances thrive of the complex dichotomy between the exuberance of life and the pain of oppression in the character’s experiences. Strong performances were also given from Sule Rimi and Ronke Adekolouejo who’s characters, slowly falling for each other, form a sub-plot around the struggle to provide access to birth control to black women in Harlem against religious conservatives in their own community.
The play’s dramatic structure lies somewhere between dated and tongue-in-cheek, with twists and plot developments being entirely unsurprising; occasionally it veered into the melodramatic. Never was it unengaging though, a decidedly contemporary stagecraft breathing life into the text. Blues for an Alabama Sky strength is not primarily driven by plot but by the energy of the performances and this productions distillation of the energy of the cultural moment – drag, blues, emerging birth control clinics combine to give an audience a blast of Harlem in 1930. Elevating this aspect of the production further was Frankie Bradshaw’s set, a semi-rotating half of an large house carved up into flats. It’s many windows, doors and fire escapes being utilised, allowing itself to become the site of an enormous energy – the daily passage of many Harlem residents through its doors. With only ever eight or nine actors at most on the large stage, the set augmented their presence and upscaled it to evoke the bustling community of Harlem.
Careful and restrained use of Langston Hughes’ (the most famous of the Harlem Renaissance writers) poetry set to music by Benjamin Kwasi Burrell on the theme of dreams accentuated and heightened crucial moments of feeling. Stirring vocals from the ensemble (Lincoln Conway, Eddie Elliott, Kimberly Okoye and Helena Pipe) served to throw the adversity and hope that run through the play into sharp relief. A repeated refrain to ‘hold fast to dreams’ echoes the central struggle of the play, for the characters to hold onto dreams in the face of a society structured to suppress them. As the character’s hopes clash and diverge, Cleage seems concerned with excavating who suffers from this conflict of dreams and the result is mesmerising.