The Sty of the Blind Pig (Promotional Photo) |
Set in the late 1950s in Chicago, Philip Dean Hayes' The Sty of the Blind Pig conjures up four distinctive and memorable African-American characters as the era of bus boycotts is just beginning in the deep South. It's a play about family and frustration and (misplaced) hope.
All the action takes place in the cramped confines of a dingy south-side apartment, on a street with lots of such buildings. Weedy, played by Brenda Thomas, is a compact church-going woman who has stricter ideas about respectability than do her relatives, despite her own transgressions. Nostalgic for the Montgomery of her childhood, she puts her faith in the annual revival meetings down home — and is unprepared to see that world swallowed up by civil rights marches.
Weedy lives with and oversees the narrow life of her 30-something daughter Alberta, who has worked for a white family for years; they are the unwitting source of her supply of half-finished whiskey bottles. As played by the long-limbed Krystel Lucas, Alberta projects a fresh sort of innocence mingled with exhaustion. She's got a romantic side that emerges in eloquent funeral orations at church but otherwise is entirely frustrated.
Weedy's brother Doc (Jonathan Earl Peck) is a bit of a dandy who plays the numbers, and dreams of hitting it big. He drops in on the apartment to take advantage of the booze Alberta steals and to find some human sustenance by relating to his crusty sister and his needy niece.
The final character is a blind seer and guitar man, up from the south where he was raised in a brothel that gives the play its name. Played by Eden Marryshow, Blind Jordan is searching for a woman. Going door to door in this run-down neighborhood of apartment buildings, he runs across Alberta, who finds him alluring. He's no predator, but his presence busts up the tenuous balance of the household.
Each of these four actors brings strong individuality and credibility to characters caught in a bygone time and place, off to the side of history. Each has tenderness despite their travails and the friction of their relations. Meeting them makes the play work, despite its odd and unsatisfying structure, which includes two intermissions.
This script dates from 1971. It isn't a landmark play like 1959's Raisin in the Sun or August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (from 1984) but it does fill in the space between these with a compassionate portrait of some lives worth knowing. It also provides a humdinger of a monologue for the actor playing Alberta. Krystel Lucas builds with nuance, up to full-out hysteria, which is visceral in the small space.
The Sty of the Blind Pig
Through Feb. 26, $13-$50, TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford, (860) 527-7838, theaterworkshartford.org
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