‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’ W B Yeats
This revival of Pearl Cleage’s 90s play, directed by Lynette Linton, is absolutely right for now. Not only is stellar cast excellent and finely tuned, but Cleage’s witty and sad story brings a number of current threads front and centre.
The story has Angel (Samira Wiley), a nightclub singer in 1930s Harlem, as its pivot. Angel is sacked at the start of the play and it is her tragic downward trajectory that forms the backbone of the story. But this is a play with a good number of story lines, each worthy of a full play. Delia (Ronke Adekoluejo) fights for women’s reproductive rights, finds love and then (spoiler alert) loses it in the worst of ways. Guy, magnificently played by Giles Terera, has the dream of designing clothes for Josephine Baker, and stays resolute in his quest to have a dream fulfilled. Sam (Sule Rimi), the unlikeliest doctor you are likely to meet, has an irrepressible charm and hopefulness as he always seeks to ‘let the good times roll.’ This disparate group of accepting friends meet Leland Cunningham (Osy Ikhile) when he is the epitome of the kindness of strangers, and he is then pulled in by the gravitational force of Angel’s mesmerism and achingly real insecurities.
The Depression was hitting hard and you have a sense of how the backdrop of homelessness, hunger and a lack of work conspire to make the already precarious life of black people at this point in time even harder. The writing is not depressing despite the Depression though, and Guy’s witticisms continue in a triumph of hope over experience. There are wins for the group too – Delia gets her women’s reproductive health clinic, and despite threats, keeps it open. The temporary magic of the nightclub, the party and the vision of Paris, rather than the rather dour sounding religion and implied hypocrisy of Abyssinia church, keep hope alive.
We see the north/south differentiation of the traditional values of Alabama (‘a state of mind’) with the more free flowing Harlem dwellers – all of whom have moved there in pursuit of dreams. The full set accentuates the huge number of comings and goings, lives intertwined and constant bustle. Angel struggles to conform to Leland’s dream of what a woman should be, beautifully represented in the use of costume by Frankie Bradshaw. But it is more than a straight line between north and south (you know life isn’t that simple for those who want to build walls), the intersectionality of issues is what makes this such an important work for now. Guy is gay and gets attacked by other men for how he walks and dresses. His insistence that he should be able to walk where he wants and dress as he wants is a triumph of how he holds on to dreams, working contrapuntally with Angel’s increasing desperation. Though both (spoiler alert) sold sex to get by, Guy is determined to leave his past behind him and get to Paris as a designer; Angel’s dreams seem less tangible beyond the security of home and a drink, and even these look her reach. ‘You can’t make it real just because you want it to be,’ Guy tells Angel, even though his dreams seem so much more optimistic than hers. Is this because, as she accuses him, he’s a ‘genius, and I’m just some coloured woman out of a job?’ The assumptions made about the roles of men and women get challenged, reinforced further by the differing attitude to planned parenthood. Sam may be daily dealing with ‘premature labours and gun shot wounds’, but he is without a philosophy on life’s practicalities. When it comes down to it, he does what is needed, but he is not planning change, like Delia is. This is one of the reasons why this is great writing; although they are a community, they are not homogenous in any way.
The singing is pretty fabulous too.
See it while you can.
At the National until 5 November 2022
