Consecration

By * T.E. Kalem

Last season, Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company wallowed in polemics. Now the company has made a brave new start with the most impressive drama it has yet staged. The Sty of the Blind Pig by Philip Hayes Dean is steeped in the humor, the passion, and the frustration of black life. It is eloquent, powerful, moving and beautiful.

This is a family play, though it only contains the fragment of a family: a mother, her daughter and the mother's brother, who drops in from time to time. The mother, Weedy (Clarice Taylor), is both possessive and plaintive, one of those women who suck up so much of the oxygen in a room that no one else can breathe. Her thirtyish daughter Alberta (Frances Foster) is all nerves--lonely, desperate and starved for a man's caressing hands. Uncle Doc (Adolph Caesar) is an alcoholic numbers player.

Into Weedy's claustrophobic Chicago apartment comes a mysterious stranger. Blind Jordan (Moses Gunn), who calls himself "the last of a long line of blind singers." He may be the symbol of a quest, of the black racial unconscious or of the power and primacy of blood. In a mesmerizing second-act curtain scene that builds to a crescendo of religious and erotic frenzy, Blind lordan becomes Alberta's lover. In Act III he leaves, and the two women sit in disconsolate resignation, like the heroines of Chekhov. Words of praise cannot do full justice to the play or the players, or to the skillfully unobtrusive direction of Shauneille Perry. Everybody involved deserves cheers for making The Sty of the Blind Pig a consecrated act of theater.

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