In Pearl Cleage's old-fashioned, larger-than-slice-of-life drama Blues for an Alabama Sky, the ironically named central character Angel (Brenda Pressley) is a woman who makes her own bad luck.

        When we meet her, a drunk Angel is being hauled up the street by her gay best friend Guy (Ray Ford) and a naive, God-fearing, handsome young stranger from Alabama (Lawrence Ballard). Angel is having a bad night.

        The Harlem Renaissance has waned, the Great Depression has a death grip on the world, but particularly on those places where money wasn't thick on the ground to begin with. Angel has managed to lose her Italian gangster boyfriend and her job singing in the chorus at the Cotton Club in the same night.

        Blues is all about dreams — lost, found, deferred, turned to dust. The dreams belong to Guy, who plans an escape to Paris and a career of costume designing for Josephine Baker; to shy and practical Delia (Lisa Renee Pitts) who lives across the hall and is committed to helping Margaret Sanger establish a family planning clinic in Harlem; to charming and rakish Doc (Marcus Naylor), who's ready to fall in love;

        To Leland, that hopeful, quiet-spoken (and narrow-minded) Alabama stranger, who sees in Angel a physical resemblance to his dead wife but doesn't recognize that she's a different woman altogether.

        As for Angel, her dream of security becomes a nightmare as she attempts to disguise herself as something she isn't and can't be.

        Playwright Cleage looks back in time not just for material but to the long-established style for writing the kind of drama that rarely gets written anymore. (It has the same way-back-when feel, say, as The Last Night at Ballyhoo, produced by Playhouse a couple of years ago.)

        In Blues, Ms. Cleage raises lots of big issues — poverty, abortion, homophobia — then takes almost three hours to wrap them up neatly in a dramatic package. (It's rare, indeed, for contemporary writers to wrap up the messiness of life with a big bow.)

        Happily, Ms. Cleage knows how to create a laugh, and delicate romance (persuasively enacted by Ms. Pitts and Mr. Naylor), and she knows how to drop a dramatic bomb at exactly the right moment.

        Director Hal Scott, returning to the Playhouse for the first time in more than 25 years (since a brief stint as artistic director), shows a sure hand with Ms. Cleage's theatrical rhythms.

        For all that Mr. Scott has the show well in hand, and that the ensemble is as well-cast as one expects from the Playhouse, they can't manage the impossible task of hiding the script's occasional dry spells.

        Everything about Blues gets the job done: Joseph Tilford's apartment building set. It's high-ceilinged naturalism balanced by a surround of giant canvases that establishes both the places where the characters live and their sense of place.

        Costume designer David Kay Mickelsen also does a fine job of establishing character — these people truly are what they wear.
        Blues for an Alabama Sky, through Feb. 15, Playhouse in the Park Marx Theatre. 421-3888.

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