Janelle Cooper, Andrew Broderick as David, Jenni Burke, David Alan Anderson, Allan Louis, Monica Parks and Alana Bridgewater in ‘The Amen Corner’ (Shaw Festival, 2023), Photo by David Cooper
The Shaw Festival production of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner is both grand and deeply nuanced. It is also a striking and sumptuous piece of nostalgic Americana (well-paired with Gypsy)—delving into the fraught and impassioned world of an African-American evangelical Christian community in early 1950s Harlem.
Margaret Alexander (Janelle Cooper) is a zealous paster, beloved by her parishioners who meet in the chapel above the cramped apartment she shares with her son, David (Andrew Broderick). Tension mounts when gossip about her integrity runs rampant just as her estranged husband Luke (Allan Louis) creeps back into her life.
Luke is very ill and death is imminent. An aging jazz musician, his husky voice betrays the boozy playboy lifestyle that caused the rift between them. In a now weakened body to match his tormented soul, we sense a rich history. His charismatic and remorseful olive branch sends Margaret spiralling. At first clinging ever more vehemently to her faith, she’s eventually forced to interrogate her own devotion.
Cooper’s portrait of this fierce and conflicted woman is absolutely riveting. Because her intense conviction is so intimidating, it’s a devastating spectacle to see her whole carriage collapse at the prospect of loosing her husband, son and congregation in one fell swoop.
Her son David, who shares with his father a musician’s heart, is torn between his parents’ contrasting ideals. His own painful process of individuation has begun. As he tries to explain to his heartbroken mother why he must pull himself out from under her religious guidance, Baldwin gives him rather cryptic language. We may read Baldwin’s own struggles in the lines or, perhaps, fill in our own—either way, they resonant. And Broderick’s manner fully conveys the ache and excitement pulsing beneath his gentle and reverent exterior.
Though we can feel righteously contemptuous of those members of her congregation who have been trying to undermine Margaret’s reputation with back-biting and hypocrisy, we can also understand their behaviour as an extension of internal struggles. Within this poor, Black community, the threat of financial irresponsibility and self-aggrandisement is a powerful agitator.
The strained dynamic between familial duty and religious propriety is externalized in Anahita Dehbonehie’s stunning set. The apartment—with its drab textures punctuated by the bright blue of the pastor’s contentious new fridge—seems almost crushed beneath the overhead chapel. Especially when either space is full of people, the environment feels cozy yet uncomfortably confining.
The set revolves to give us the exterior view and provide stylized, stunning scene transitions. More ambitiously, it also serves to show us how intimately contained this drama is while also hinting at a world that exists beyond it. Like the characters, we become so fixated on immediate conflicts and this subtle reminder of their ultimate smallness helps put their lives and our own in context.
Director Kimberley Rampersad’s production takes its time to establish mood and atmosphere, to let tension quietly fester and give emotion plenty of room to breath. Even in silence and stillness, the air is charged. The gospel numbers (with music direction by Jeremiah Sparks) are rousing and sonorous. In body and voice, these people are forever reaching towards the heavens, but their humanness remains too heavy to escape—a reality that grounds and unites them.