Angel and Dr. Sam
Blues for an Alabama Sky
Shaw Festival 2025
Photo: David Cooper
Shaw Festival 2025/Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, directed by Kimberley Rampersad, Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, closes Oct. 4.
In the past few years, the Shaw Festival has mounted plays designed specifically to feature the excellent Black actors in the ensemble and as a result, audiences have been exposed to a whole new group of playwrights that until now have been under the radar. It has certainly been an edifying experience.
Take for example Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, Blues for an Alabama Sky.
There are a lot of improbables in the plot, and if you really wanted to poke holes in it, you certainly could. But none of that matters because the play packs a powerful emotional punch that supersedes any structural quibble. Its heart and message land hard.
Set in 1930s Harlem, the story unfolds not at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, but at its waning edge — as the Great Depression begins to suffocate the cultural explosion that had lifted African-American voices in music, literature, and politics. Clubs are closing. Jobs are disappearing. Hope is evaporating. And that’s the backdrop Cleage sets for her story of five interconnected lives.
At the center is Angel Allen, a nightclub singer whose world implodes after she drunkenly hurls an insult— and an object — at her gangster boyfriend during a performance. He dumps her, she loses her apartment and her job, and ends up crashing with her best friend, Guy Jacobs, a flamboyant gay costume designer who’s been her lifelong protector.
Angel is played by Virgilia Griffith, and she is absolutely brilliant. Her presence dominates the production — emotionally, vocally, physically. It’s a layered, mood-shifting performance that never slips into caricature. She is grounded, mercurial, stubborn, world-weary and heartbreakingly self-absorbed. Stuart Adam McKensy’s Guy is equally commanding. Played with overt and deliberate flamboyance, Guy is a deeply sympathetic figure — his loyalty to Angel unwavering, even when she takes him for granted. We learn that they met in a brothel in Georgia. She was going to leave him behind. He chased after her. That dynamic continues in subtler form: she rarely thinks of him; he never stops thinking about her.
Their supposed shared dream is Josephine Baker. There’s a line about how Josephine once lived with them before she made it big in Paris. Guy clings to the fantasy that one day Josephine will send for them, that he’ll design her costumes and she will find Angel a wonderful job. Angel, more jaded, doesn’t believe it for a second. Guy gets by stitching wedding dresses and the occasional club costume, but with the Harlem nightlife fading, even that work is drying up.
That’s when Leland Cunningham (JJ Gerber) enters the picture — the man who helped get Angel home the night she got drunk. A stranger from Alabama, Leland is charmed by Angel and begins courting her. He’s also unnervingly conservative — traditional, religious, and repressed. He is the antithesis of everything Angel and Guy represent.
Also on the liberal side of the fence are Delia Patterson (Mary Antonini), a social worker trying to open a birth control clinic in Harlem, and Dr. Sam Thomas (Allan Louis), a progressive physician and one of the few prominent Black doctors in the city. The two fall into a tentative romance, even as Delia works alongside Margaret Sanger to bring family planning services to a neighborhood in crisis.
.Leland doesn’t approve of any of it — not Angel’s drinking, not Guy’s sexuality, and certainly not abortion. And somewhere along the line, he mentions that he bought a gun — for “protection.” It’s one of those playwriting contrivances that you clock immediately. You know the gun will come back. And it does. The second act includes a killing — tragic, awful, and inevitable. Leland’s conservatism turns violent when he can no longer reconcile his love for Angel with the liberal world she represents.
Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s set, cleverly constructed, gives a sense of interlocking lives in a Harlem tenement. You can see Guy’s cramped apartment in the foreground, with a hint of Delia’s living space just beyond, and a curved hallway that suggests the rest of the building. It’s claustrophobic — and purposefully so. There is also a laid wooden floor and so you hear the heavy tread of feet and the creak of boards to add to the realism. The production is staged in the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre — the smallest venue at the Shaw Festival — and that intimacy works in the play’s favor. The tension feels close. The performances feel lived-in. Urquahart’s costumes are also wonderfully period specific.
Miquelon Rodriguez’s original music is rich with bluesy undertones. The recurring theme — a take on “St. Louis Woman” — suits Angel perfectly. The music drifts in and out like memory and sorrow. Chris Malkowski’s lighting is also moody. There’s a darkness to it. There’s no warmth, no release. The light feels suffocating — a perfect metaphor for these cramped lives at the end of an era.
Happily, the symbiosis of this cast is as fine as it gets because the intimacy of the production demands a strong nsemble and that is what director Rampersad and her actors have given us. There is never a moment in this play where the action flags or the tension drops.
Blues for an Alabama Sky is not a perfect play, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s impassioned, relevant (given the conservative turn taking place in the world today), and emotionally forceful — especially in this finely tuned Shaw Festival production. You may see the ending coming a mile away, but it still hits you like a brick. That’s how theatre should work.