FLYIN’ WEST COURT THEATRE
WHEN Through 4/8: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM
Blues for an Alabama Sky
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Flyin’ West, which put Cleage on the map when it premiered at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Company in 1992, takes place in 1898 in the black farming community of Nicodemus, Kansas. The play’s all-female household, a sisterhood without genetic bonds, is made up of migrants from Memphis, part of the great exodus from the south after the collapse of reconstruction and the resurgence of white supremacy. Stubborn, rifle-totin’ Sophie is determined to keep Nicodemus from falling into the hands of white land speculators; bookish, genteel Fannie is engaged in a tentative courtship with lumbering, good-natured neighbor Wil; and elderly Miss Leah shares heart-wrenching tales of the brutality endured by female slaves, who were not only field hands and kitchen workers but breeders of babies to sell. The trio are visited by Fannie’s delicate sister, Minnie, who lives in London with her husband, Frank, the self-described mulatto son of a former slave and her master. Superficially cultivated (he professes to be a poet and spouts verse by Paul Laurence Dunbar), Frank simmers with a poisonous self-hatred, expressing his rage by disparaging other blacks and abusing his wife. He’s returned to America to claim part of his dead father’s fortune; when that effort fails, he turns his attention to Minnie’s deed to the farm, defying Sophie’s passionate campaign to keep Nicodemus under black control.
