The Amen Corner
By James Baldwin. Directed by Chuck Smith. Set design by Felix E. Cochren. Costumes by Birgit Rattenborg Wise. Lighting by Robert Christen. Sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen. Original music by William Kilgore. With Nikkieli DeMone, Percy Littleton, Greta Oglesby, Felicia P. Fields, Pat Bowie, Jacqueline Williams, Kimberly Hébert-Gregory, and Phillip Edward VanLear. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through June 17.

The Amen Corner is situated in a somewhat dilapidated dramaturgic neighborhood. Written by James Baldwin in the mid 1950s, the play’s a bit creaky. As an intersection of deep feeling and rousing gospel music, however, it’s a place you don’t mind loitering in for three hours. That’s especially true when the pageant of black life in and under a Harlem church at mid century is as dynamic and as fluid as the Huntington Theatre Company’s collaboration with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre is. Directed by Chuck Smith, on a gorgeously detailed two-tier set by Felix E. Cochren, this Amen Corner is inhabited by a cast that who are as at home in the music as they are in their characters’ skins.

Although written between the autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin’s play did not make it to Broadway until 1965, when, viewed against the angry African-American drama then coming to a boil, it struck some as dated. The critic Harold Clurman, noting the work’s “crudities, banalities, longueurs, etc.,” nonetheless lauded it for its “genuineness.” Indeed, the play — filled with the pain and urgency of the author’s earlier break with his minister stepfather’s Pentecostal church — is heartfelt. And its language, like August Wilson’s bluesy yap, combines eloquence with flavorful black idiom. Throw in William Kilgore’s heavy handful of rollicking, well-sung gospel tunes and you damn near drown out the creak of the dramatic wheels as Sister Margaret, rigid pastor of a small but vigorous church, confronts a moribund husband she thought she had stopped loving, a “half-grown” son headed from the choir loft to the nightclub, and mutiny in the ranks.

You enter the Huntington and immediately start humming the set, a lovely tune whose treble is a simple storefront church complete with wooden pulpit and folding chairs, upright piano, and insipid pictures of Jesus. The bass line is Sister Margaret’s apartment below, which she shares with her sister Odessa, her 18-year-old son, David, and a Frigidaire everyone treats like the Holy Grail. There are stairs on both sides, so that Smith can move the play in circles, the characters laboring up and down between God’s house and the world.

Pretty quickly, the set is drowned out by the gospel sound as the congregation drift into the church and start rockin’ and responsin’ while Sister Margaret extols the “way of holiness.” But for some, the pastor’s way is a little holier-than-thou, and when Luke, the trombone-playing, now-tuberculosis-ridden husband she threw over for God, shows up and David strays from the faith, the worshippers question Margaret’s right to the pulpit. Meanwhile, she struggles with her inability to hold onto the son or stop caring for the husband, who for his part just wants to die in the secular sanctity of their love.

As Margaret, Pat Bowie starts imperiously, but when she ceases preaching to help her errant husband “join hands with the darkness,” she takes on a choked intensity that is quite moving. And Phillip Edward VanLear’s Luke, convincingly racked, greets her acknowledgment of their bond with a delighted moan that’s heartbreaking. There is a strong, understated turn by Kimberly Hébert-Gregory as a grieving young mother who doesn’t understand how God could kill “such a nice baby” and robustly comic yet artfully vindictive work by Felicia P. Fields and Percy Littleton as the chief Judases.

The Amen Corner is a poignant but cumbersome drama that, despite its portrait of a strong woman growing stronger in the crucible of compassion, is burdened by a Bible-meets-1955 sense of gender hierarchy. But Baldwin gleans sly humor from the Lord-loving backbiters, and considerable oomph is supplied by the gospel music, which is skillfully and spiritedly rendered here by a cast of truly AC-DC singer-actors. The play’s a little clunky, but in these hands it makes both an impassioned and a joyful noise.

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001