Light Drama With a Touch of the ‘Blues’

Angel, arranged dramatically on the divan, has a hangover. No one has aspirin. Delia enters, fresh from church. “How are you feelin’ ?” Delia asks energetically. Angel barely moves her hooded eyes. “How do I look?” Sam, the friendly neighborhood doctor, enters. Says Angel: “Doc, if you ain’t got no aspirin . . . (beat, beat) . . . just shoot me.”

As played by Loretta Devine, Angel can turn any line--even “it’s too early for chop suey”--into a laugh line. With her sultry gaze, extra-strength eyelashes and undulating body, she always reminds you that she is a lot of woman. And if this sounds like a sitcom, the kind in which audiences hoot at every double-entendre, it sometimes is. But this is also a play, “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” set in 1930 Harlem and playing downtown at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Between punch lines, the characters talk about unemployment, homophobia, birth control and what Adam Clayton Powell is preaching down at the Abyssinian Church.

Playwright Pearl Cleage is more interested in social issues than in grounding those issues in character. Accordingly, her characters are more lovable than they are believable. As the first produced show by Black Artists Network Development, “Blues” is a juicy and enjoyable light drama for much of its almost three hours, thanks in large part to actors who know how to take care of an audience. But the drama unfolds very slowly, and the climax, when it comes, is hyperbolic and not nearly rooted enough in characters with whom we have spent a long time.

Angel is a nightclub singer, a great one, judging from the little we hear from Devine’s lips. She got fired after she had a fight with her mobster boyfriend--from onstage. She shares the first floor of a Harlem brownstone with the dapper Guy Jacobs (T.C. Carson), a charming costume designer whose dream is to go to Paris and work with Josephine Baker, a fact he refers to in virtually every other sentence.

Delia (Mona Wyatt), the resident virgin, lives upstairs. Neither her churchgoing nor her campaign to set up birth control clinics stops her from appreciating the good company of Angel and Guy (nor does she dispense birth control to her closest friends, but never mind that). Rounding out the party is Sam Thomas (James Avery), a bighearted obstetrician who sometimes performs less joyful work. Sam’s motto, which he repeats as often as Guy mentions Paris, is “Let the good times roll.” On a first-name basis with Langston Hughes, the characters are involved in their neighborhood, love to go out and are good company for much of the evening.

Enter Leland Cunningham (Terrance Ellis). A young widower fresh from Alabama, Leland is a church-loving primitive, vehemently anti-homosexual and antiabortion and even anti-birth-control. He is anathema to everything the happy quartet stands for. And yet he enters their lives through the most unlikely connection--Angel--and their union proves as disastrous as it is unbelievable. It does stoke the drama, however, very late in the play and leads to a climax that might have been shocking had it been credible.

Ellis never overcomes the disadvantage that his character is merely a means to an end. But under Gary Yates’ direction, the other actors expertly field their characters’ defining traits, and their four-way intimacy is the most established component of the evening. Carson is endearing as the homosexual costumer; his polite distaste for Delia’s prim dresses is perfectly done. As Delia, Wyatt combines a demure attitude with a zest for life, which makes her attractive to Sam, played by Avery as exhausted but not too tired to try for love one more time. Devine is always commanding.

But given that “Blues” needs to be trimmed and better grounded, the director could have resisted lolling in his characters’ presences for quite as long as he does. As it is, “Blues for an Alabama Sky” seems to go on almost till the morning light.

*

* “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 28. (213) 485-1681. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

A production of Black Artists Network Development in cooperation with the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department’s Performing Arts Division. By Pearl Cleage. Directed by Gary Yates. Sets Edward Haynes Jr. Costumes Fontelle Boone. Lights Sylvester Weaver. Sound Mitchell Greenhill. Stage manager Joyce Maddox.