Besides being the title of a play and the name of a cathouse from which a character escapes, what else does “The Sty of the Blind Pig” mean? After all, the play, now at TheaterWorks at City Arts on Pearl (through February 26), is not about a pig, blind or otherwise, and doesn’t take place in a sty. But just as with its second cousin, “A Raisin in the Sun,” a title is more than a title: it is a signpost and an undercurrent alluding to many issues, problems, consequences or personalities that make for compelling theatre.
That’s one of the great things about plays—any literature, really: there’s often plenty of discernment in the titles, plots and characters to draw some good conclusions and walk away feeling dramatically or comically satisfied, while at the same time there is just enough mystification to leave room for some healthy speculation and interpretation of your own.
Such is the case with the “The Sty of the Blind Pig,” a 1971 drama by Philip Hayes Dean that is getting a healthy revival in Hartford. Just what the title is saying about the characters and their stories, and just how much significance there is to the speakeasy that is central to the shocking back-story of one of its characters, can be up for grabs long after you’ve spent an engaging two-and-half hours (with two intermissions) at TheaterWorks, a professional company long known as Hartford’s very own off-Broadway theatre. An apt description, indeed. And even though the last third of the final act is abrupt and out of synch with the rest of the play in terms of pacing and tone, it is still good theatre.
When “The Sty of the Blind Pig” debuted in New York it was hailed by Time Magazine as one of the year’s ten best plays. It also won Philip Hayes Dean a Drama Desk Award as one of the most promising playwrights. A few years later there was a television version on PBS directed by Ivan Dixon (who played Kinch in “Hogan’s Heroes”).
Mr. Dean’s dramatic sensibilities have been compared to those of August Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright whose works, which came after “Blind Pig,” include “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” And of course there are the inevitable “Raisin” comparisons, because like that classic, “Blind Pig” is about a clashing African-America family in Chicago in the middle of the 20th Century.
Neither Mr. Dean nor “The Sty of the Blind Pig” seem to have quite the enduring illustriousness of Lorraine Hansberry and her “Raisin in the Sun” or August Wilson and his “Fences,” but those are mighty memorable shoes to fill. “Blind Pig” is memorable, but just doesn’t squeeze every last drop of dramatic potential out of its story. There are too many holes—all those pesky little who, what, where, why and how questions—to make what is essentially a realistic play entirely believable. But that, of course, is not the production’s fault. TheaterWorks, for the most part, did a great job with what it had.
The play, set in a condemned apartment in Chicago’s South Side in the late 1950s, invites its audience to sit in on the sometimes aching, antsy and amusing relationships between Alberta, her mother Weedy, her uncle Doc, and a stranger named Blind Jordan. Weedy is an obstinate old-fashioned Southerner displeased with the standards of her attractive unmarried daughter, who is more sensitive and erudite than Weedy can ever be. Meanwhile, Doc, a dapper, reckless gambler, stops by frequently only to find himself dapperly and recklessly in the middle of the mother-daughter fray. It’s all very zany, but entirely normal for them—that is until Blind Jordan happens by. A street musician also from the south, he comes to Chicago to look for someone, and in the process seriously affects the lives of the three South Siders in ways that collectively are poignant, awkward and inevitable.
As Alberta, Krystel Lucas is the embodiment of sensitivity and sophistication—and also of torment and yearning. Those are precisely the traits the character calls for, and she delivers all four at once. Even in a curious turn near the end, when Alberta undergoes a spiritually and almost sexually-infused deliverance of sorts, she doesn’t entirely lose the character’s sense of authenticity.
Brenda Thomas brings a pleasant familiarity to the role of Weedy that is nonetheless original. There are many characters like Weedy in other plays, movies and TV shows, and not just African-American characters, either (Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” comes to mind), but Thomas keeps Weedy’s comic and caustic posturing fresh and real.
Jonathan Earl Peck, who plays Doc, seems to have been born with a persona that simply demands to be seen and heard. Those traits alone, of course, do not always mean that an actor will be skilled or that his character will be finely captured. But in this case it does. Peck has a great presence, a great voice, and creates a very real and enjoyable Doc.
And Eden Marryshow nicely taps into the many complicated nuances of a mysterious man like Blind Jordan. Although the character as written is ultimately unsettling because of too many unspecified motives and sentiments, the character as played by Marryshow is entirely engaging and credible.
Donald Eastman’s set and Harry Nadal’s costumes capture the specific era and personalities perfectly, and J Hagenbuckle’s sound design is impressive; frequent street corner singing from off-stage is very effectively used not just to help tell the story, but also to build emotion, much as a great score does for film. The lighting, by Scott Bolman, is equally accomplished in building the proper mood, although some distracting and improbable shadows seem to be thrown against the wall from time to time.
The director, Tazewell Thompson, is a skilled professional who brings as much realism, control and watchability to every scene as needed. Until the ending, at least, which seems as if it came from another play and inadvertently prompts its audience to temporarily misplace the one they’ve been watching all along. There happens to be a very long scene change near the end, too, which doesn’t help matters. It breaks the mood and rhythm. Perhaps the use of lighting could have been used to isolate a character downstage while, concealed in darkness, the crew changes the set.
Oddly, another play reminiscent of “The Sty of the Blind Pig” is 1969’s “Butterflies Are Free.” It, too, has four characters, a single apartment set, an overbearing mother, and a young blind musician. Those are the similarities; the difference (other than the fact that it’s about white people in New York in the late 1960s) is that “Butterflies Are Free” is a comedy with a significant amount of drama, whereas “The Sty of the Blind Pig” is a drama with a significant amount of comedy. Furthermore, in “Butterflies Are Free,” the musician quotes a line from a book that his mother wrote for blind children: “There will be none so blind as those who will not see.” Which in the case of “The Sty of the Blind Pig” may describe a few of the characters and, given the fact that so many questions are left unanswered, may describe some people in the audience, as well.
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