Theater Review—

Caught In The Great Migration

Of The 1930s-40s, On Stage In Hartford

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD — February being Black History Month, the airwaves are once again broadcasting reminders of the days of the Civil Rights struggles of the Sixties, and the long legacy of segregation and discrimination that led up to the sit-ins and freedom rides. It is this legacy that pervades Philip Hayes Dean’s 1971 comedy-drama, The Sty of the Blind Pig, which at TheatreWorks Hartford for a few more weeks.

Set in 1950’s Chicago, its four characters are part of the Great Migration of the 1930s and 40s, in which some two million mostly rural African-Americans moved from the South to the big cities of the Northeast, the Midwest, and California in search of work.

While they found good paying jobs in factories during World War II, these jobs all but vanished with the end of the war and the return of white male veterans. At the same time the newcomers found themselves excluded from the dominant social, political and cultural life of the cities in which they settled. They were relegated to urban slums with dilapidated housing and inferior schools.

Having been denied the vote in their old homes, they lacked the habit of voting and hence the political clout to gain favorable public improvements. Having grown up in a world where they were legally forbidden from attending theaters or concerts or museums or parks or beaches, they rarely ventured to these places in their new locality. (Nor would they have been welcome if they had.)

The result was a ghetto culture in which jobs were menial, and the chief social outlets for black residents were the church (for respectable people) and gambling, alcohol and sex (for the profligates). Like August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle, or John Henry Redwood’s The Old Settler (set in 1940’s Harlem), The Sty of the Blind Pig focuses on the dynamic tension of family relationships, and the dream of finding something more in life.

The current revival being staged in Hartford, under the direction of Tazewell Thompson, benefits from a marvelous ensemble cast. Brenda Thomas is Weedy, a sanctimonious, domineering, manipulative church lady who shares a rundown apartment with her daughter, Alberta.

Beautifully played by Krystel Lucas, Alberta is a gentle, soft-spoken, thirty-something spinster who works as a maid in a white household, where the children have begged her to stay on until they are old enough for college, and their father “pinches her behind” every chance he gets. (Her revenge for this is to pilfer bottles of his whiskey, which she feels is only fair payment for what she has to put up with.)

Jonathan Earl Peck is Weedy’s brother Doc, a dapper shoeshine man who drinks too much and dreams of scoring a big enough hit on the numbers to finance a return to his glory days as a cool dude in Memphis. And Eden Marryshow is Blind Jordan, a charismatic and enigmatic blind street singer who has come from Mississippi in search of a woman he once knew.

While her mother prattles on with a mixture of gossip and vilification, the tightly-wound Alberta hides her own romantic yearnings, drowning them in pills and whiskey, and acts as a buffer between Weedy and Doc. Into this mix comes Blind Jordan, guitar hanging down his back, groping his way into their lives like a force of nature, pushing them all to act on their talk. He tells Doc a lucky number and gives him money to bet with, he pushes Weedy to venture down to a two week church convocation in Montgomery Alabama, and he challenges Alberta to open herself to love and sexual expression.

But in this play — as in the wider worlds of Martin McDonagh and Tennessee Williams, who dealt with similar situations — it is easier to have dreams than to make them come true. As in McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane and Williams’ Glass Menagerie, the times are too tenuous, and the mother’s grip on her daughter too destructive, for even the best laid plans to work out.

Haunting the background of the play is the shadow of the future. It is 1955. Weedy’s “convocation” in Montgomery is not what she remembered: an upstart young preacher is persisting in organizing a bus boycott, and the young people are more interested in demonstrating for their “civil rights” than they are in coming to church meetings.

Doc is worried that if something like this comes to Memphis, there will be “trouble” and life as he imagines it will be ruined. If there is more to life than drinking, gambling and fine clothes, he doesn’t know what that would be, nor does he think he wants it.

This three act work ends with a series of shocking revelations and events that might have been expected, but which the characters are not ready for, leaving the audience to sit open mouthed. If it isn’t quite pity and fear that they experience, it is certainly a sense of sadness and inevitability.

(Performances continue until February 26. See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for full details.

Parents should note that no one under the age of 12 is allowed into this production.)