The motion of herstory: three plays by Pearl Cleage.

Pearl Cleage, highly regarded poet and essayist, first gained widespread recognition as a playwright with the production of puppetplay by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1983. The chronicle of a failed marriage, puppetplay expressed the divided consciousness and ambivalent emotions of the wife through the use of two female actors to portray her, while expressing the perceptual gulf between marital partners by representing the husband as a seven-foot marionette. Though puppetplay was moderately successful, and though several of her other works(1) have been produced outside of the Just Us Theater and Club Zebra, performance venues which she helped to found in her home city, Atlanta, Georgia, it is through an artistic partnership forged with Atlanta's Alliance Theatre and its Artistic Director, Kenny Leon, who commissioned Cleage to write Flyin' West (1992), Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995), and Bourbon at the Border (1997) that Cleage has realized a rare achievement for African-American playwrights: consistent professional production in regional theatres. Each production has further distilled her exploration of essential thematic elements which fuel her dramatic vision.

Through these three plays, Cleage seeks to bring us to grips with our American past and to help us understand and acknowledge its impact on present conditions, especially with regard to issues of race and gender. She examines great historical events and movements not through the eyes of leaders and celebrities but through the experiences of the ordinary people who lived them. The issue at hand and its relationship to our actions remains the focus, rather than the impersonation of an iconic figure. Cleage's interest is in helping us face our responsibility for being part of the flow of history (interview). Describing herself as "a third [-]generation black nationalist and a radical feminist," Cleage defines her task as a dramatist as creation of dialectic and political/social action:

My response to the oppression I face is to name it, describe it, analyze it,

protest it, and propose solutions to it as loud[ly] as I possibly can every

time I get the chance. I purposely people my plays with fast-talking,

quick-thinking black women since the theater is, for me, one of the few

places where we have a chance to get an uninterrupted word in edgewise.

(Perkins and Uno 46)

Cleage has turned to the familiar structure of the well-made play, subtly subverting what appear to be stock situations and characters to invoke new ideas. She is a resistant reader of history, turning her audience toward interrogation of "standard" interpretations, be they from black or white perspectives, and is not hesitant to force the audience into the uncomfortable psychological and emotional areas into which an honest dialogue on race and gender relations must venture.

Flyin' West, for example, turns domestic melodrama into a polemic against domestic violence while it addresses the issues of what constitutes and defines a family and whether black nationalism will hold together the community of Nicodemus, Kansas, founded by the Exodusters who "flew" West to escape racist oppression during the late nineteenth century. A family of homesteading sisters--Fannie, Minnie, and adopted sister Sophie--augmented by Miss Leah, a survivor of slavery who has passed the long winter on their farm, not only persevere but thrive on the products of their labors. As Minnie approaches her twenty-first birthday, they prepare to turn over her portion of the homestead to her. However, her new husband, Frank, through his verbally and physically abusive behavior, threatens not only Minnie's life, but the homestead itself, since he plans to sell Minnie's share to white land speculators who are attempting to buy out Nicodemus and the surrounding area. Empowered by his legal position as male and husband, Frank feels he can act with impunity, and can only be stopped by a family conspiracy which leads to his death.

Flyin' West is primarily a study in character contrasts. Sophie, oldest sister and head of the family, like Frank, is of mixed race. Frank follows the tragic mulatto pattern of internal conflict and hatred of his black heritage, while Sophie embraces her black identity and the idea of nationalistic autonomy that Nicodemus represents. In defense of the things she loves and believes in, she finds her voice as a woman and a community leader, while Frank plots the course of his own destruction. Another male character, Wil, appears as a suitor for Fannie and contrasting foil for Frank, but it is the struggle for the direction of the family and the community, represented through the struggle Sophie leads against Frank, which is paramount. Despite his painful past and his stature as a recognized poet, Frank is held accountable; his violent acts bring violent retribution. In one of her most well-known essays, "Mad at Miles," Cleage explains that no artist, no matter how brilliant the art, is excused from responsible behavior toward family and community, and that the creations by artists who refuse this responsibility is tainted and should be rejected by the community. Even the creations of a Miles Davis must be rejected in light of his documented abuses of women.

In a similar vein, Angel, the pivotal character in Blues for an Alabama Sky, is called to account for her refusal to take responsibility for her actions. Angel, an entertainer riding the last wave of the Harlem Renaissance, must survive in Depression-era Harlem. Through Angel's relationships with Guy, her resolutely un-closeted gay friend and protector; Delia, an idealistic social worker; Sam, a world-weary black doctor; and Leland, a suitor freshly arrived in Harlem from Alabama, Cleage gives us a view of a Harlem embroiled in controversy over the issue of reproductive rights. Using historical fact, she dramatizes the conflict between Margaret Sanger, who opened a family-planning clinic in Harlem with the support of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the remnants of Marcus Garvey's followers and others, who viewed Sanger as an agent of genocide.

To relieve their anxiety over their economic survival, Guy shares with Angel his tenement apartment and his dream of designing costumes in Paris for the legendary Josephine Baker, who "laughs like a free woman." Angel, however, can only see her destiny in terms of the economic and emotional support of a man, and uses her body as the commodity through which she will achieve this support. Her myopic pursuit of self-interest strains her relationship with Guy to the breaking point and leads her to ignore the dangerous ground she treads in her relationship with Leland, who tries to recast her in the mold of his deceased wife, who died in childbirth. The disastrous results of Leland's obsession with Angel culminate in a crime of passion which costs Sam his life. In a final act of poetic justice, Guy leaves for Paris, taking Delia, Sam's grieving lover, with him and leaving Angel alone to contemplate her next move.

The action of Bourbon at the Border is set in 1995, but actually pivots around the events of Freedom Summer, the black voter registration drive which took place in Mississippi in 1964. Murdered volunteer workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Cheney were only three among the casualties of that effort. Two who survived, physically if not emotionally, Charlie and May, are the protagonists of Bourbon. Their antagonists are wounds that cannot heal, outrage that cannot be quelled, and guilt over their inability to protect each other from suffering. They share a small apartment near the Ambassador Bridge which connects Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario. Their odyssey to escape their pain has led them there, "like desperadoes drinking bourbon at the border and planning our getaway." May's dream, like the dreams of runaway slaves, is to find peace in the Canadian wilderness; she and Charlie cling to the memory of a few happy days they once spent there.

May walks an emotional tightrope as she struggles to negotiate the couple's material and emotional survival, trying to help Charlie regain his balance without losing her own. When Charlie enters the apartment, returning from another in a series of confinements in a psychiatric hospital, he vows to make one more attempt to overcome his despair. Hope arrives in the form of Rosa, their downstairs neighbor, and her latest paramour, Tyrone, a truck driver who helps Charlie get a job where he works. Left with a permanent limp from wounds he received in VietNam, Tyrone bonds with Charlie in the realization that they are in actuality casualties of the same war.

At first Rosa and Tyrone appear to be comic relief, bruised but hearty survivors of hard times, dancing to Johnnie Taylor's blues and Motown oldies. Rosa's employment-seeking ventures, including an audition for a job as a phone sex operator, provoke empathetic laughter. However, Cleage makes them much more. Rosa and Tyrone have tried to skate on top of the system, while May and Charlie have paid dearly for trying to change it. They have received nothing but indifference or hostility in return. In an explosive second-act confrontation with Rosa, May recounts the traumatic events of Freedom Summer which inexorably shaped her future and drove Charlie to madness. Through May, Cleage demands that we examine our own positions on the borders between white and black experiences as well as the lines of demarcation of our perceptions of the events, and the ramifications of those events, which surrounded the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s.

The violence of the past, violence our nation has yet to come to terms with, is eventually manifested in the present, directly and indirectly, and death ensues. May's efforts to endure the unendurable and to fight to the end a losing battle to regain for herself and for Charlie what was brutally taken from them in Mississippi raise her to tragic stature. She is the most complete and ultimately heroic of the women at the core of Cleage's three "history plays." Through Flyin' West, Blues for an Alabama Sky, and Bourbon at the Border, Cleage demands that we air the festering wounds of our history, as black and white Americans and as men and women, so that we can begin to clean and heal them.

Note

(1.) Hospice (1984); Porch Songs (1985); A Little Practice (1985); Essentials (1986); Come and Get These Memories (1986); Late Bus to Mecca (1992); and Chain (1992); and earlier works--Banana Bread (1982), Hymn for the Rebels (1974), The Sale (1972), and Duet for Three Voices (1968).

Works Cited

Cleage, Pearl. Blues for an Alabama Sky. American Theatre 13 (July/Aug. 1996): 22-43.

--. Bourbon at the Border. Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 8 June 1997.

--. Flyin' West. Perkins and Uno 46-78.

--. Personal interview. Athens, GA, 15 May 1996.

Perkins, Kathy, and Roberta Uno, eds. Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: An Anthology. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Freda Scott Giles earned her Ph.D. at the City University of New York and is currently Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Georgia. Her article "In Their Own Words: Pearl Cleage and Glenda Dickerson Define Womanist Theatre" will be published in the Spring 1997 issue of The Womanist. She has had articles published in Theatre Journal, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and American Drama. Last summer she served as Dramaturg for the production of Othello at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival.