Janelle Cooper as Margaret Alexander, Jenni Burke as Sister Boxer and David Alan Anderson as Brother Boxer with the cast of The Amen Corner at Shaw Festival.David Cooper/Shaw Festival/Supplied
- Title: The Amen Corner
- Written by: James Baldwin
- Director: Kimberley Rampersad
- Actors: Janelle Cooper, Alana Bridgewater, Andrew Broderick and Monica Parks
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Festival Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: until Oct. 8
There is a show-stopping number in the last act of The Amen Corner at the Shaw Festival when Jeremiah Sparks takes his solo. He is the director of the festival’s gospel choir, reunited to add song to this production of the 1953 James Baldwin play about a female Pentecostal preacher in Harlem, and his voice seems to freeze time, elevating the moment to another plane. That is part of what this Black American classic is about: the promise of transcendence, be it in a theatre or a church. It happens erratically in this big production directed by Kimberley Rampersad where her theatrical instincts sometimes seem at odds with Baldwin’s kitchen-sink realism.
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Baldwin, one of America’s most sensitive writers on race, is better known as an essayist but he wrote this drama soon after his early literary success with the autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. The play treads similar territory, drawing on Baldwin’s own teenage experience as a junior preacher in a Pentecostal assembly, but the script received little initial attention and no Broadway production until 1965 (and has virtually no production history in Canada). By then, as African American studies scholar Soyica Diggs Colbert points out in a program essay, audiences were accustomed to a more experimental approach than Baldwin’s tragic realism presents.
Alana Bridgewater as Odessa and Andrew Broderick as David in a scene from The Amen Corner.David Cooper/Shaw Festival/Supplied
Indeed, today the play, about a pastor’s fight to keep her congregation after they discover she was married to an alcoholic jazz musician, does seem a bit fusty with its domestic confidences and prolonged deathbed scene. Rampersad’s solution, often but not always effective, is to soup up the play’s hymns, turning the show into a mini gospel musical with Sparks leading the “saints” in song in the assembly hall above Sister Margaret’s modest home. This effectively evokes the attraction of Pentecostal religion, the joyous possibility of moving outside oneself and belonging to something bigger that music can offer. On the flip side, Janelle Cooper’s magnificently righteous Margaret captures the impossible demands the faith can place on believers.
But as the play’s domestic tragedy unfolds – Margaret’s estranged husband returns only to fall ill in her house while her faithful young son begins to stray – a gap opens between drama and musical. It’s summed up by the costume design: A.W. Nadine Grant has had great fun trotting out the crinolines, white gloves and dainty hats favoured by church-going ladies of the 1950s but gradually the chorus-line costumes suggest easy wealth rather than pride in appearance. This church, we are repeatedly told, is poor and the parishioners on whose donations Margaret depends are envious of her fancy new Frigidaire.
While the choir enlivens the action with song, the principals work away to capture the darker emotions of Margaret’s looming tragedy. She’s an unusual dramatic figure – not a falling woman felled by circumstances but a genuine tragic hero trapped by her own failings – and not easy to play. In initial scenes, Baldwin’s script is certainly a critique of the charismatic preaching he himself fell away from as he lost faith: Margaret is an unattractive person, far too certain of her God and far too ready to dictate obedience to her parishioners, who eventually turn against her.
A subplot about a young woman with a sickly baby, who Margaret simply urges to pray, points to the standard challenge to faith: If God is good, why do bad things happen? Ultimately, Margaret has no answers and Cooper, so riveting as the righteous one, is less interesting as a real woman losing her son and her job.
At the crisis point, it’s the supporting cast playing the church elders that steps up, gradually exposing their own flaws. David Alan Anderson and Jenni Burke as the Boxers and Monica Parks as Sister Moore, always insisting on her virginity, make much of the progression from pleasantly comic characters to telling examples of hypocrisy.
That’s upstairs in the church. Downstairs in kitchen, as Margaret’s sister Odessa, Alana Bridgewater successfully anchors the realism with homespun wisdom and cups of tea, while Allan Louis is suave and sensitive as Margaret’s ex-husband Luke, playing one of those improbable characters who is dying one minute and delivering soliloquies the next.
The main beneficiary of his wisdom is Margaret’s piano-playing son David in a pert performance from Andrew Broderick that neatly captures the boy’s youthful fragility as he sadly awakens from faith and family. The moment when his mother loses him to “the world,” he walks off the stage into the audience rather than into the wings, in one of Rampersad’s best gestures.
You shouldn’t need to be a true believer in anything but theatre for The Amen Corner to stir your soul; sometimes this production delivers and sometimes it leaves room for doubt.