That most volatile of issues figures into Blues for an Alabama Sky, giving the play a freshly powerful resonance.Ĭleage’s tale (which clocks in at just under three hours, not that it needs to be that long) takes place in neighboring Harlem apartments and on the sidewalks outside. The battle over abortion has again become a raging pro-choice/pro-life war, leading to protests throughout the United States. What no one could have anticipated in scheduling the show is that, not long before the opening, a draft of a Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. The play is having its encore production at the Sandrell Rivers Theater in Liberty City.
Miami’s M Ensemble, the 51-year-old Black theater troupe that is Florida’s oldest continuously producing professional company, first presented Blues for an Alabama Sky in the summer of 2001.
And oh, does Cleage’s play give them plenty to navigate. But they have become a kind of family by choice, looking out for each other as they try to navigate the highs and lows of Harlem in 1930. The gay designer, the singer-showgirl, the neighborhood doctor, and a family planning crusader aren’t blood relatives. The characters in Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky are caught somewhere between the creative, hopeful heaven of the Harlem Renaissance and the hellish economic collapse of the Great Depression.
