About the Play:

Blues for an Alabama Sky has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Blues for an Alabama Sky is a full-length drama by Pearl Cleage. It's the summer of 1930 and the promises of the Harlem Renaissance are giving way to the dashed dreams of the Great Depression. Playwright Pearl Cleage tells a strikingly modern story about four friends whose lives and passions collide when an innocent newcomer from Alabama arrives in New York.

Blues for an Alabama Sky is the story of five African-Americans experiencing the "Harlem Renaissance" at the beginning of the Depression. It is the summer of 1930 in Harlem, New York. The creative euphoria of the Harlem Renaissance has given way to the harsher realities of the Great Depression. Young Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., is feeding the hungry and preaching an activist gospel at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Black Nationalist visionary Marcus Garvey has been discredited and deported. Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is opening a new family planning clinic on 126th Street, and the doctors at Harlem Hospital are scrambling to care for a population whose most deadly disease is poverty. The play brings together a rich cast of characters who reflect the conflicting currents of the time through their overlapping personalities and politics. Set in the Harlem apartment of Guy, an openly gay costume designer, and his friend, Angel, a recently fired Cotton Club back-up singer, the cast also includes Sam, a hard-working, jazz-loving doctor at Harlem Hospital; Delia, an equally dedicated member of the staff at the Sanger clinic; and Leland, a recent transplant from Tuskegee, who sees in Angel a memory of lost love and a reminder of those "Alabama skies where the stars are so thick it’s bright as day." Invoking the image of African-American expatriate extraordinaire, Josephine Baker as both muse and myth, Cleage’s characters struggle, as Guy says, "to look beyond 125th Street" for the fulfillment of their dreams.

Blues for an Alabama Sky premiered in 1995 at the Alliance theatre Company in Atlanta, Georgia. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been staged throughout the U.S. It was revived in 2022 at the National Theatre in London.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Deliciously funny and deeply affecting... a bittersweet delight." — Evening Standard (London)

"A supreme achievement... I've rarely seen a play in which the imprint of identification and affection for the protagonists is so strong and so involving. It's a work that makes you want to lean in, holding your breath as their fortunes shift and stir, hoping for the best but somehow always fearing the worst... It has a humanity that provokes profound emotion." — WhatsOnStage

"Transfixing... an old-fashioned melodrama with sly winks to Ibsen and Tennessee Williams, but the issues [Cleage] addresses are freshly resonant... A tale for our times." — The Guardian (UK)

"Compelling... makes a fraught, fascinating era of Black cultural history feel real and alive... And it paints rich, complex friendships with a warmth that stays with you, long after its final notes have faded." — Time Out

"Scintillating... will catapult [Pearl Cleage] to everyone's attention and precipitate a frantic scramble to uncover other gems from her back catalogue... quite the best evening I have spent at the National in a long time." — iNews

"Nothing short of mesmerising... leaves audiences on the edge of their seat." — Broadway World

"A breathless whirl of Jazz Age joy and blues... a seamy pleasure... glorious." — The Telegraph (London)

"Wonderful and bittersweet... There's more than a hint of Tennessee Williams in Cleage's story, but she brings her own quick wit and quiet understanding to her characters, which means you grow deeply attached to them." — Financial Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Pearl Cleage is a celebrated African American playwright, novelist, poet and political activist, and was one of the first Black women in America to achieve national recognition as a dramatist. Her plays, also including Flyin' West and Bourbon at the Border, provide a remarkable and penetrating look at the African-American experience over the last century.