11
Mar
2013
Playcrafters Barn Theatre's Blues for an Alabama Sky manages to be an adjective I've come to love regarding theatrical productions: surprising. Playwright Pearl Cleage takes her story in directions I did not expect from the outset of Saturday's performance, as her play moves from the plight of a recently out-of-work singer in Harlem to a study of societal views on homosexuality and abortion in 1930. I had no idea that was the direction the plot would take, but I was grateful for it, as the proceedings kept me on my mental toes, and continually interested in what was going to happen next.
Area performer and radio-show host Shellie Moore Guy is slender in frame, and not particularly tall. Yet in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's presentation of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the actress -- in her role as matriarch Lena Younger -- projects such expansive love, pride, and strength of character that she appears larger than life. Lena's adult children, Walter Lee (Curtis Lewis) and Beneatha (Alysha McElroy-Hodges), may tower over her, but there's never any doubt that Guy's selfless, resolutely devout mother is the one in charge; she guides both her family and Hansberry's drama with an impassioned righteousness that would be mythic if it weren't so complexly structured, and so wonderfully human.
