Soul-stirring theatre: Shaw Festival’s The Amen Corner explores the intersection of heaven, home and heart

I wasn’t familiar with James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner before the new Shaw Festival production blew me out of my seat the other night at the Shaw Festival.  

I didn’t know about the famed Black writer’s little-performed first play, which was published in 1954 as he began to get famous. I didn’t know about its talky microcosmic study of the Harlem Black experience at the nexus of poverty, organized religion, and art. I didn’t know about its magnificent tragic heroine Margaret Alexander (Janelle Cooper), who is the pastor of a small Harlem church and head of a broken family, and is headed for a fall. 

I did know from the ads that there would be a gospel choir. But I didn’t know how effectively it would put me in the mood to ponder receiving – or resisting – the Lord.  

I do now, amen. 

The Amen Corner, adroitly and purposefully directed by Kimberley Rampersad, is at once a soaring and claustrophobic, naturalistic and stylized slice of 1950s life. Its geography, embodied in Anahita Dehbonehie’s brilliantly compact set design, neatly maps the terrain of human aspiration – heaven, the home and the world — in the form of a compact, spinning two-story Harlem building.

Cooper’s Margaret Alexander, who has been raising teen son David (Andrew Broderick) as a single mother, has been moved by a compulsion to focus on “higher” good – that is, to rise above the smallness of her life and serve God. The second storey of the set manifests that impulse in the form of a brilliantly illuminated storefront church, complete with colorful stained glass window. As the play opens, that second floor – which is open to the sky as if directly connected to heaven –is teeming with life. Margaret is at the pulpit in her proud, self-made glory: preaching hard and dispensing absolute truths with reckless certainty. The Amen corner to her right is filled with gospel choir members singing shoulder-to-shoulder. 

We’re swept away by the heaven-ward rise of music and energy, amen. 

But on the first storey right below, we can also see clearly – in its dingy colours and low lighting — the family home on whose bones Margaret’s small preaching empire has been built. Here, her patient, long-suffering and supportive sister Odessa (Alana Bridgewater) rules. Here, a different drama of family aspiration vs actuality will play out. 

And outside lies the world. The building swings around at key moments to show us the street behind it. Its impassive brick face is broken by the stained glass window through which we can just glimpse the interior of the church. But its dominant feature is a set of floodlights shining into the dark, open streetscape. This blank canvas promises unseen and yet-to-be-encountered opportunity — or danger – depending on your view. 

The unexpected return of Margaret’s estranged husband Luke (a dazzling Allan Louis), a trumpet player who is plainly familiar with the world, brings with it revelations that relocate the center of gravity from the church upstairs to the first-floor home, and set the plot in motion. Contrary to what we and the parishioners have been told, their marital fracture was not the too-familiar tale of a father who left. Instead, it’s a tangled mix of the systemic – intergenerational poverty, religious community, the Black urban experience – and the personal, in the form of aspiration, self-protection and impossibly high standards. The consequences will play out on both storeys, and outside. 

For Luke returns at a time when son David has been playing piano upstairs in the church for Margaret . . . while slipping out back into the world to make music of other kinds.  David is poised between competing, complicated truths that encapsulate his two parents’  very different lives. 

“Music is a moment. But life is a long time,” Luke tells David. The absent father argues that the transcendent immersion and joy of artistic creation – a pull that David is feeling – must be balanced with the longer-term need for the anchor of relationship, connection, and family. Luke’s sober guidance is about choice and agency. He shares hard-won wisdom to enable his son to make his own choice. 

Meanwhile, Cooper’s Margaret lives by edict, not choice. She insists repeatedly (callously even, to parishioner Ida Jackson, played with dignity by Caitlyn MacInnis) that the Lord doesn’t give you what you want . . . he gives you what you need. His will may not be immediately apparent, but we must surrender to it. Margaret’s guidance is a causal loop, where what is must be accepted. The only agency available is retroactive divination of God’s intended purpose. 

Obviously, there’s a critique of the church here. But watch and feel what happens in the play . . . because it’s complicated. When we ponder the decisions and the fates of Margaret, Luke – and yes, David poised between them – aren’t both of these philosophies borne out?

The note-perfect performances of the three stars and the supporting actors are fitted snugly to fill this emblematic world perched between heaven above, the home below, and the world outside. Whether upstairs or downstairs, Cooper’s Margaret commands our attention: first with her God-given certainty, then with the Lear-like emergence of her too-long-denied humanity. After his flamboyant first appearance, Louis’ Luke pursues an opposite but equally compelling path of authentic, earnest understatement. And Broderick plays a muted, almost mysterious David whose surreptitious exits and exhausted re-entrances are the most eloquent and definitive articulations of who he is becoming.     

The actors playing the principal members of the congregation bring equal nuance and specificity, as well as  welcome levity. Monica Parks’ Sister Moore serves up a comic-yet-substantial brew of self-serving ambition, virginal piety and community-mindedness. Jenni Burke’s Sister Boxer is a dynamo of narrow forthrightness who kicks up self-righteous sparks every time she opens her mouth. David Alan Anderson’s Brother Boxer swaggers and speechifies with aggressive, mansplaining entitlement. And Alana Bridgewater’s versatile Odessa is indefatigable and incisive: calling it like it is, to great comic or serious effect, whether she is downstairs in the home or upstairs in the church.  

So no . . . 

I wasn’t familiar with James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner before the new Shaw Festival production – tragic and funny, marked by crisp dialogue and substantive characters brought to life by a stellar cast on a stunning set — blew me out of my seat the other night.

But I am now. And I’m still thinking about it. 

Amen. 

The Amen Corner runs until October 8, 2023. Reserve tickets online at shawfest.com.

©Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023