Blues for an Alabama Sky: Writer's Methods and Techniques (Cambridge (CIE) IGCSE English Literature): Revision Note

Pearl Cleage uses a wide range of dramatic and literary techniques to convey meaning and explore key themes in Blues for an Alabama Sky. In the exam, when you are asked to analyse the writer’s methods, you should focus on how Cleage’s choices of language, imagery and symbolism, form, and stagecraft shape character, relationships, and the audience’s response.

The following guide contains sections on:

• Form

• Stagecraft

• Language 

• Imagery and symbolism

Form

Blues for an Alabama Sky is a social realist drama. Black playwrights started to move towards writing realistic portrayals of Black life in the early 1900s, as they looked to present Black people as they are, rather than the stereotypical caricatures they had often been shown as by white playwrights. Cleage’s play, although written much later in 1995, conforms to these same ideas.  

Social realism

Social realist dramas focus on real social issues. Blues for an Alabama Sky follows this by:

• Addressing prominent social issues of 1930s Harlem:

  • Each character in the play faces the struggles of the time

  • We see homophobia, poverty caused by the Great Depression, sexism, the fight for women’s reproductive rights and racism all explored in the play

  • There are also examples of different, and sometimes contrasting personal identities, and how the difficulties of the period shape identity and circumstances, and change the attitudes in the area

• By referencing real-life icons like Josephine Baker, Margaret Sanger and Langston Hughes, the audience is grounded in the real world:

  • The play then shows us how the characters, representative of everyday people inspired by those icons, deal with how wider society affects their lives

Naturalism

There are also aspects of a naturalistic drama:

• Blues for an Alabama Sky takes place almost entirely in one setting, a Harlem apartment building

• The dialogue is natural and realistic:

  • There is no meta-commentary or speech

  • The characters do not turn away from set to perform monologues (opens in a new tab) or speak to the audience

• The characters behave like real people, and react to incidents in a believable way:

  • This keeps them realistic and helps them to resonate with the audience

• There is no fantasy or exaggeration, no breaking into songs, no pauses that suggest this could not be real life

• All of this ensures the audience remains immersed and is not taken out of the drama or the narrative

Stagecraft

Structure 

• The play being split into two acts helps to create two distinct periods

• Act 1 establishes the characters, their motivations and dreams, relationships with each other, and the social pressures of 1930s Harlem

• Act 2 shows the consequences of their choices, the progress of their dreams, and the tragic resolution

• This structure mirrors the contrast between hope and reality

• It also keeps the play tight and focused, meaning the audience remains fixed on the characters and their struggles, rather than being drawn into subplots:

  • The play stays on its course throughout, with no superfluous plots 

  • This means the world is built by our understanding of the time, and how it affects the characters

  • We only see the impact of Harlem on the characters of the play, and how it affects their stories

  • This means there is no need to world-build, as all that is important is the impact on the characters and the focused story

Staging

• The split-stage design — stipulated by Cleage in the stage directions — with one part of the stage as Guy’s apartment and another as Delia’s, is very significant

• It allows simultaneous action, so the audience can see characters' parallel lives:

  • Cleage stresses that is should seem “to be one large living space”

  • This connects their fates, and also emphasises that they are a chosen family

• By showing us both Delia’s and Guy’s living spaces, we can see their contrasts

• Guy’s apartment is cluttered; Delia’s neat, tidy and sparse:

  • This shows that even as two loving friends, they are very different

  • Their personalities mirror this:

    • Guy is loud and dramatic, open to chaos and drama

    • Delia is shy and quiet, approving of order

    • This allows Cleage to show her characters’ personality, priorities and social status without the need for exposition (opens in a new tab)

• Cleage also stresses how Guy’s apartment should look, especially the workspace:

  • This is significant, as Guy is a dramatic and loud character who takes little seriously, except his work

  • This shows that he is a serious and focused designer, even if he seems chaotic in his social behaviour

  • The image of Josephine Baker on the wall reminds the audience of a key Black figure in fashion at the time

• The single apartment-building setting reinforces intimacy and domestic realism:

  • This keeps the drama grounded in real life

• The only view of anything not inside the characters’ apartment building is a window:

  • This focuses the drama on the domestic aspect of the characters

  • It signals that the play is going to be focused on what affects the everyday lives of the characters, not who they are in public or how they adapt to outside factors

• All of the above keeps the focus on character relationships, dialogue, and the social commentary of how their lives are affected

• It also supports the naturalistic style, making the audience feel almost like they are in the building themselves, eavesdropping on real lives

• The set also subtly communicates the theme of dreams and escapism:

  • We see the characters trapped in the small rooms, and how all their dreams are outside of the building

Aristotle’s Three Unities

The play follows two of Aristotle’s Three Unities:

• Unity of place is adhered to, staying in one location:

  • This keeps the focus on the characters, rather than settings, stage-dressing and landscape

  • It also allows immersion, as there is no time needed to change setting, nor any jarring changes

• Unity of action is also followed:

  • The play is succinct, with every plot point driving the story to its conclusion

  • Each individual’s story leads to the tragic end:

    • Guy moving to Paris encourages Angel’s actions

    • Delia and Sam with their family clinic help drive the abortion storyline and the tension between women’s autonomy and Leland’s more traditional and conservative views

    • Angel losing her job and her partner lead her to Leland

    • Leland’s past pushes him to Angel, who looks like his ex-wife, and the loss of his loved ones fuels his violent reaction to the abortion

• Unity of time is less strictly followed:

  • For Aristotle, a play conforming to his Three Unities would be set within a 24-hour period

  • The play is in fact set across about eight weeks

  • The main narrative spans six weeks, with the final scenes two weeks after the death of Sam, an addendum to show the fates of all the characters after this

Language

The language of the play follows the style of social realism. There is no dialogue that is unnatural, and nothing is presented to be anything outside of genuine conversation and story. There is nothing performative, like outbursts of song or monologues.

• In keeping things realistic, the play remains grounded, and portrays a view of 1930s Harlem as real, rather than dramatic:

  • This keeps the audience immersed in the story

• The language choices are suitable for the time, but without overly lingering on ways of speech that may seem archaic now:

  • There are vocative nouns that suit the time — like calling someone “Ace” — that fit the 1930s and are less common now, but little that would stand out as unknown today

• There are also instances like in Act 1, Scene 3 where Angel says, “Italians don’t care nothin’ about no blues”:

  • These are conversational deliveries, and show the informal speech patterns of early 1930s Harlem

  • These ground the play in an era, but are not so outdated that they detract from the audience’s immersion

Imagery and symbolism

There is plenty of subtle and more explicit symbolism presented by Cleage in Blues for an Alabama Sky that helps to fill out the world and the lives of the characters. Some of this simply helps the audience to understand the characters and setting without forced exposition in dialogue, while other aspects have deeper meanings or foreshadow (opens in a new tab) plot points.

• There are specific choices made, and insisted upon by the playwright:

  • Guy having a cluttered apartment except his sewing corner shows his priorities, and shows he is serious about his work, even if it seems like he is serious about little else

  • The fact that both apartments have hot plates, and no kitchens, shows that they are not affluent, and projects an image of people that make-do to get by

  • Even the open door to Guy’s bedroom, specified by Cleage in her stage directions, has meaning:

    • It bids the audience to see Guy as open, with nothing to hide, and willing to share everything with the people he loves

• There are limited scenes outside the building:

  • The story starts outside with Leland and Guy carrying Angel

  • While the last scene is inside, that is almost an epilogue

  • The climax (opens in a new tab) of the narrative, its last dramatic moment, is outside as Leland shoots Sam

  • It could have been Cleage’s intention to symbolise Leland as an outsider by having him in all the scenes that are outside the building

  • He is an outsider, breaking into their group, and disrupting it to its bitter end

• There is dramatic irony (opens in a new tab) involving Leland’s gun:

  • The audience knows he has it, but Sam does not

  • In the tragic end, Sam’s lack of knowledge means he has no idea when he turns his back on Leland what might happen

  • The audience seeing Leland’s gun earlier means they are aware

  • This can be seen as foreshadowing violence against one of the group

• There is more foreshadowing when Angel mentions that Leland knows some of the men who attacked Guy:

  • This shows the audience that Leland is mixing with men who are happy to use violence to reinforce and establish their beliefs over others

  • In the end, Leland does the same

• Cleage uses real Black icons of the era with purpose:

  • Pictures of Josephine Baker are not incidental as they are written into the stage directions

  • We also have mentions of other figures like Langston Hughes and Margaret Sanger

  • The play’s characters all have aspects of these icons, whether it’s the fashion of Guy (Baker), performance of Angel (Hughes) or the activism of Sanger (Delia/Sam)

  • More than just establishing the setting, this could be Cleage showing us the mundane, normal lives, and the struggles that came with them, that these icons may have faced

Sources

Cleage, P. (1999), Blues for an Alabama Sky (Dramatists Play Service Inc.)