Playwright, best-selling novelist and poet Pearl Cleage has noticed that the likeliest time to see her work is February — Black History Month.

        “We laugh about that,” she says, with a half-“ha-ha,” half-sigh from her Atlanta home. “I have two months — March is women's month.”

Pearl Cleage during a 2001 interview in Atlanta. (Associated Press photo) | ZOOM |

        Playhouse in the Park opens her Blues for an Alabama Sky this week (continuing through mid-February).

        It's 1930, the waning days of the Harlem Renaissance. It's a community that, like the world, is crushed by the Great Depression. In a romantic drama that plays out like a blues song, Angel has just lost her job singing at the Cotton Club.

        “There's a tendency to pluck famous people out of context, as though they're not part of a community,” says Ms. Cleage. “I was interested in placing them in context. Who went to Adam Clayton Powell's church?”

        Who listened to Langston Hughes' poetry? Who loved Josephine Baker? What happened to them after the bottom dropped out of the economy?

        While the icons of the Harlem Renaissance don't play roles in Blues, their presence is felt.

        Ms. Cleage is proudly political, and Blues is rife with issues of the day that remain issues of our day: Angel's neighbor Delia works in Margaret Sanger's family planning clinic.

IF YOU GO

What: Blues for an Alabama Sky     When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 15     Where: Playhouse in the Park Marx Theatre, Eden Park     Tickets: $30-42. 421-3888

        Her gay best friend dreams of designing costumes for Josephine Baker. The Southern Christian right and Northern liberal left clash with the arrival of a gentleman caller.

        There's an ongoing debate about Ms. Cleage's work, with white reviewers often using the word “melodrama.”

        Notes Ms. Cleage: “Black people have a different kind of history. There's a history of oppression, of slavery. We have coping mechanisms, jokes we tell to laugh to keep from crying.

        “I've seen my plays performed in front of primarily black audiences and primarily white audiences.

        “They laugh at different things, are moved by different things. Hopefully by the end they come around to the same place. A woman doesn't have to be black to understand Angel's terror of being by herself.”

        Ms. Cleage has described herself as “a third-generation black nationalist and radical feminist” whose work is fueled by “a determination to be part of the ongoing worldwide struggle against racism, sexism, classism and homophobia.”

        So it's not surprising she has some thoughts about that February thing.

        “It's sad,” ventures Ms. Cleage, “but it's true of every community outside of New York. Regional theater isn't representative of white people, either. It reflects the high-income, highly educated middle class.

        “A lot of mainline season ticket-holders want to experience what they've always experienced.

        “Theater is part of the larger conversation that needs to be happening politically: Who does this country belong to? Who gets to determine what is culture and high art?

        “Race is such a complex issue with intricate levels of denial.”

        Ms. Cleage remarks that while her novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (Avon Books; $13 paperback), have made the New York Times best-seller list, “my readers look to Oprah. My primary audience reads Essence magazine, not the New York Times, but we're all programmed to look at the Times as the arbiter.”

        Perception runs deep through American culture, she notes, and to commit to presenting “good plays that are representative of all the communities in a region, that speak to a community in an honest way over time, that challenge the status quo” acknowledges Ms. Cleage, “is a long, expensive process.”

        These days, Ms. Cleage, whose favorite writing continues to be writing plays, has two books due at the publisher before she can turn to her next stage project.

        “The main character has spent 20 years in Cuba. I'm very interested in the whole idea of expatriates.”
       
       

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