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Blues for an Alabama Sky Characters - eNotes.com. by Pearl Cleage. Start Free Trial. Characters. PDF Cite Share. Angel Allen is a thirty-four-year-old woman who, as the play opens,...
- Critical Essays
Reviewers of Blues for an Alabama Sky frequently focus on...
- Blues for an Alabama Sky Analysis
Hughes is referred to many times in Blues for an Alabama...
- Critical Essays
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Pearl Michelle Cleage (pronounced “cleg”) was born December 7, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She grew up in Detroit, where her father, a minister, founded his own denomination and became widely known for the fifteen-foot-high painting of the Black Madonna and Child, called the “Shrine of the Black Madonna,” which adorned his church. Cleage’s...
Act 1
Scene 1 takes place at 3:00 a.m. Angel, who is drunk, is being helped home to Guy’s apartment by Guy and Leland, a young man who happened to be passing them on the street. Angel’s boyfriend, Nick, an Italian gangster, has just gotten married and has broken off his relationship with her. During her nightclub performance at the Cotton Club, which Nick was attending, Angel interrupted her dance routine to yell and throw things at him from the stage. As a result, she has been fired, as has her fr...
Act 2
Scene 1 of act 2 takes place two weeks later on a Sunday afternoon. Guy is preparing a tea party to celebrate sending his five costumes off to Josephine Baker in Paris. Sam, Delia, Leland, and Angel are all there to celebrate. But when Leland finds out that Guy is homosexual, he calls it “an abomination.” Guy angrily kicks Leland out of the apartment and then interrogates Angel as to why she intends to marry Leland even though she doesn’t love him. Angel explains that she wants to marry Lelan...
Angel Allen
Angel Allen is a thirty-four-year-old woman who, as the play opens, has been fired from her job as a backup singer at the Cotton Club. Angel has just broken up with Nick, an Italian gangster who recently married another woman. Angel, hurt by the breakup, saw Nick in the audience of the nightclub and interrupted one of her dance routines to berate him and throw things at him. As a result of the breakup, Angel has also lost her apartment, paid for by Nick, as well as all of her clothes and othe...
Leland Cunningham
Leland Cunningham is a twenty-eight-year-old man from Alabama who has been in Harlem only six weeks. Eight months earlier, his wife, Anna, died giving birth to a baby boy, who also did not survive. Leland encounters Guy and Angel on the street in the middle of the night and helps Guy to accompany Angel, who is drunk, back to the apartment. He later tells Angel that he was drawn to her because she looks like his deceased wife. Leland’s manner is that of a Southern gentleman, and his dress is n...
Deal
SeeDelia Patterson
Economic Hardship
A central theme of Blues for an Alabama Skyis economic hardship. Cleage set her play in 1930, early in the depression. The writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, which flourished during the 1920s, were hard hit by the depression because the struggle for economic stability detracted from the time and resources necessary to pursue artistic endeavors. Cleage thus focuses on the unknowns of the Harlem Renaissance, those struggling singers, dancers, and other artists who were so financiall...
Family Planning
Family planning and reproductive rights are also important themes of this play. Delia’s goal is to open the first family planning clinic in Harlem. As a social worker, Delia is working with Margaret Sanger, a pioneer in women’s reproductive rights, to gain community support for the project. Delia’s primary concern is to convince the popular Reverend Adam Powell of the Abyssinian Church in Harlem to support the opening of a clinic. Delia explains that she is “trying to give women in Harlem the...
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Cleage has set her play in the context of the Harlem Renaissance movement in African-American literature. Learn more about one of the important writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, or Richard Wright. What are the major works of this author? What obstacles—financial, social, or personal—did this author overcome to become a successful writer? What central themes does this author ad...
Setting: Harlem, New York
Blues for an Alabama Sky is set in Harlem, New York City, during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. This setting is important to Cleage’s fictional story, which takes place in a real historical and geographic context. In order to appreciate the significance of this setting, it is helpful to have an understanding of the significance of Harlem to African-American history. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, the Harlem district of New York City came to...
Historical Fiction
Cleage’s play can be categorized as historical fiction because of the stylistic choice of integrating real historical figures into a narrative focused on fictional characters. Cleage successfully and convincingly integrates the historical with the fictional, creating characters who are acquainted with such important historical figures as Adam Clayton Powell, the activist and political leader; Margaret Sanger, the pioneer in family planning; Josephine Baker, the famous nightclub performer; and...
Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance, also referred to as the New Negro Movement, designates a period during the 1920s in which African-American literature flourished among a group of writers concentrated in Harlem, New York City. Harlem Renaissance writers launched African-American literature into a new era, focusing on the experiences of black life and culture with an attitude of racial pride and self-determination for the African-American community. Two important magazines, the Crisis and Opportunity, w...
The Depression Era
Blues for an Alabama Skyis set in 1930, a year after the 1929 stock market crash that brought on the depression. The Harlem Renaissance petered out when the depression of the 1930s affected the financial status of many African-American writers and artists. Throughout the play, Angel makes a number of comments describing the economic conditions of the depression in Harlem. She has trouble finding a new job because, as she says, “the Depression has killed all the nightlife in Harlem.” She goes...
The Reverend Powell and the Abyssinian Church
Throughout the play, Cleage makes reference to several important political leaders in the African-American community, such as Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey. The fictional characters in this play are acquainted with the historically real Reverend Powell, a popular pastor of the Abyssinian Church in Harlem. In the play, Delia successfully convinces Reverend Powell to support the opening of a family planning clinic. Historically, Powell worked as an el...
Reviewers of Blues for an Alabama Sky frequently focus on the play’s treatment of issues of race and gender in historical context. Freda Scott Giles, in the African American Review, compared Blues for an Alabama Sky to Cleage’s plays Flyin’ West(1992) and Bourbon at the Border(1997), commenting that, in all three, “Cleage seeks to bring us to grips...
Liz Brent
Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in film studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema. In the following essay, Brent discusses the theme of dreams in Cleage’s play. An important theme of Blues for an Alabama Skyis the pursuit of dreams. While Angel is easily diverted from her dream of being a blues performer by the immediate concerns of economic hardship, Guy steadfastly pursues his dream without f...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. The much-celebrated experimental play for colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem(1977), by Ntozake Shange, addresses issues of race, class, and gender in the lives of African-American women. 2. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom(1985), by August Wilson, is the most celebrated play by an African-American writer of the 1980s. It takes place in Chicago during the 1920s and centers on the blues singer Ma Raineyand her band. 3. Flyin’ West (1995), by Pearl Cleag...
Joyce Hart
Hart has degrees in English literature and creative writing, and her published writing focuses on literary themes. In this essay, she examines the two female characters in Cleage’s play, exposing how they are both sympathetic, as well as contradictory, images of one another. Pearl Cleage, in her drama Blues for an Alabama Sky, has created two strong female characters who develop a relationship that exposes both their similarities and their incongruities. Throughout the passing sequences of th...
American Theatre,Interview, Vol. 13, No. 6, July–August 1996. Cleage, Pearl, Blues for an Alabama Sky, in Flyin’ West and Other Plays,Theatre Communications Group, 1999, pp. 87–186. Effinger, Marta J., “Pearl Cleage,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 228: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Second Series,edited by Christopher J. Wheat...
Cleage, Pearl, Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot,Ballantine, 1993. _________, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day—: A Novel,Avon Books, 1997. Fabre, Genevieve, and Michel Feith, eds., Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance,Indiana University Press, 2000. Floyd, Samuel A., Jr., ed., Black Music in the Harlem R...
View All Characters in Blues for an Alabama Sky. Guide written by. Emma Houlahan. Blues for an Alabama Sky plot summary, character breakdowns, context and analysis, and performance video clips.
“Blues for an Alabama Sky” looks at the lives of five characters who cross paths in a Harlem apartment building during the summer of 1930. Each character fights racism, sexism and prejudice daily.
Characters. Angel, a 34-year-old woman who looks five years younger, former back-up singer at The Cotton Club. Guy, a 30-something costume designer at The Cotton Club. Delia, a 25-year-old social worker on staff at the Margaret Sanger family planning clinic. Sam, a 40-year-old doctor at Harlem Hospital.
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Delia Patterson. Female. Supporting. Non-singer. Guide written by. Emma Houlahan. Blues for an Alabama Sky characters breakdowns including full descriptions with standard casting requirements and expert analysis.
