Back to All Events

Blues for an Alabama Sky


DATE: Thursday, Sept. 26 and Friday, Sept. 27; 7:30PM

ADMISSION: $15 General Admission; $10 Students

Ticketing for this event is handled solely by the presenter. Tickets on sale at UGA Tate Center Ticket Office in person, by phone at 706-542-8579 and online at http://bit.ly/tatetixuga19

PRESENTED BY: UGA Black Theatrical Ensemble

It is the summer of 1930 in Harlem, New York. The creative euphoria of the Harlem Renaissance has given way to the harsher realities of the Great Depression. Young Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., is feeding the hungry and preaching an activist gospel at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Black Nationalist visionary Marcus Garvey has been discredited and deported. Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is opening a new family planning clinic on 126th Street, and the doctors at Harlem Hospital are scrambling to care for a population whose most deadly disease is poverty. The play brings together a rich cast of characters who reflect the conflicting currents of the time through their overlapping personalities and politics. Set in the Harlem apartment of Guy, a popular costume designer, and his friend, Angel, a recently fired Cotton Club back-up singer, the cast also includes Sam, a hard-working, jazz-loving doctor at Harlem Hospital; Delia, an equally dedicated member of the staff at the Sanger clinic; and Leland, a recent transplant from Tuskegee, who sees in Angel a memory of lost love and a reminder of those “Alabama skies where the stars are so thick it’s bright as day.” Invoking the image of African-American expatriate extraordinaire Josephine Baker as both muse and myth, Cleage’s characters struggle, as Guy says, “to look beyond 125th Street” for the fulfillment of their dreams.

CONNECT:

Instagram: @ugabte

Twitter: @ugabte

Facebook: Black Theatrical Ensemble of UGA

BTE Blues for an Alabama Sky--landscape.jpg