NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — Virgilia Griffith has made a career of tackling complex, enigmatic characters. And in recent years, Toronto theatre audiences have been treated to a bevy of her exhilarating performances.
Last fall, she was a lightning rod at Crow’s Theatre, playing a devious power broker in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm.” Earlier that year, in an adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” set amid the Nigerian Civil War, she lent shades of empathy to a role of bitter melancholy. And in 2022, she commanded the stage at Soulpepper in the double bill of “King Lear” and “Queen Goneril,” a feminist retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Now, in her debut season with the Shaw Festival, Griffith is sinking her teeth into yet another meaty role — and delivering one of the year’s strongest performances in the process.
In Pearl Cleage’s 1995 drama “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” now running at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, Griffith plays a sensitive, down-on-her-luck jazz singer struggling to get by in rapidly changing 1930s Harlem.
When we first meet Griffith’s Angel Allen, she’s just been sacked from her job and dumped by her boyfriend — and now finds herself crashed on the sofa of her close confidante Guy Jacobs (Stewart Adam McKensy), a gay costume designer who, unbeknownst to his friend, is also out of work.
The world of “Blues” is that of the Harlem Renaissance. Or, at least, the dying days of that era. It’s a New York City of opportunity and defeat, of hope and disappointment, of dreams and dreams deferred. And for Angel, it feels like all her opportunities, hopes and dreams have run dry.
Her life is sputtering. She carries herself through her day with a sense of weariness. Sometimes, this frustration manifests itself quietly: through the rapping of a fist on a wooden table or a stare filled with quiet sadness. At other times, she’s swept up in a cyclone of her own self pity: kicking, flailing, frothing at the mouth.
Angel is a role that demands virtuosic skill, and Griffith is every bit up to that challenge, delivering a performance buttressed with overwhelming intensity and emotionality.
It’s a pity, then, that her performance could not be in a stronger vehicle. “Blues,” while often vibrant and compelling, is far too overstuffed, to the detriment of its central narrative.
Rather than focusing on Angel, Cleage’s ambitious story also explores the lives of Angel’s friends. Another plot involving Delia Patterson (Mary Antonini) and Sam Thomas (Allan Louis), a social worker and doctor working to increase access to birth control in the neighbourhood, is stuck in an awkward no man’s land: too developed to be a subplot, yet lacking sufficient detail and conflict to be a parallel narrative to the main storyline.
“Blues,” clocking in at two hours and 45 minutes, is also hampered by issues of pacing. Its dialogue is verbose and tends to drag. It’s not until after intermission when the play’s central conflict is introduced: Angel’s courtship with a staunchly conservative man from the south named Leland (JJ Gerber, excellent in the small role) causes tension among her friends and threatens to tear the group apart. It all concludes with an ending that feels far too unbelievable, puncturing the carefully rendered naturalism that precedes it.
Director Kimberley Rampersad’s stimulating production, however, more than makes up for the deficiencies in the material, and does well to capture the oppressive world of the play.
Miquelon Rodriguez’s original music fills the air with jazz and blues, undercut by the clanging of metal grates on Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s set, a model of a cramped and stifling apartment in Harlem. Angel’s flashy dresses, also designed by Urquhart, serve as a constant reminder of the life she no longer lives.
But the best part of Rampersad’s production is that she offers her cast space to dig deep into their characters, to mine their inner turmoil. And Griffith, in one of her finest performances to date, does just exactly that.
