Sty of the Blind Pig (Broadway Theatre Archive) Review

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(More customer reviews)This 1974 production by the Negro Ensemble is a powerful play with emotional characters, gospel music, and unrequited love. The setting is the Warren apartment bound for demolition, on the southside of Chicago. It is occupied by an elderly mother, Weedie Warren, and her spinster daughter Alberta.
Visiting periodically is Weedie's brother, Uncle Doc, played by Scatman Crothers, a drinker, a smooth dresser and he loves to play the numbers. Alberta is also a drinker, pill popper, frustrated, and has been driven up the wall by her overbearing and meddling mother, who calls Alberta a whiskey head.
While mother goes back to the south for a convocation, she observes the civil rights movements and its uprising, something not quite in Chicago yet. Meanwhile, a street singer named Blind Jordan wanders the neighborhood, looking for a woman he knew. Alberta invites him in and soon befriends him.
Witness a powerful performance, possibly 10-12 minute soliloquy by Alberta as she recites her most memorable obituary she wrote for a love she craved, Emmanuel Fisher. Then, she displays the sexual frustration reliving her angst at his funeral. This performance by veteran actor Mary Alice is worth the watch.
The play's title Sty of the Blind Pig is in actuality a house of ill repute that Blind Jordan tells about, where women, whiskey and food were sold. We also learn more of Weedie's past.
Because of Weedie's faith, gospel music is often heard in the background, such as Precious Lord, Farther Along, and Amazing Grace. The actors have all had extensive television experience. This is a wonderful play. Writer Phillip Hayes Dean has also written Freeman (Broadway Theatre Archive), where a black man struggles to break the stigma of being black in the 70s. .....Rizzo


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Philip Hayes Dian's play is about an uprooted black family from the South, living in Chicago at the start of the civil rights movement. Stars Mary ALice, Richard Ward, Maidie Norman, Scatman Crothers.

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