James Baldwin’s ‘The Amen Corner’ Sings the Blues at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company

This story is featured in CityBeat's Jan. 24 print edition.

James Baldwin, the powerful Black writer and civil rights activist, is best known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). But, from an early age, he was fascinated by the theater and yearned for success as a playwright. A year after publishing that novel, living in Paris, Baldwin completed a play, The Amen Corner. It includes a young man who leaves his home and his mother’s church to become a musician. It’s a bit of an extension of Go Tell It on the Mountain — and contains elements from Baldwin’s own life, including a mother who encouraged his creative endeavors and a stern stepfather who condemned any activity outside of the church. 

From the ages of 14 to 17, Baldwin was a preacher. But his stepfather queried him, “You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?” That was the path Baldwin followed, but he often stated that he “never left the pulpit.” He used his skills as a writer and a public speaker to convey messages that remain powerful.

The Amen Corner, on stage soon at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, is rooted in many of the same issues in Baldwin’s novel. In the play, set in a 1950s storefront church in Harlem, Pastor Margaret strives to control her congregation and her teenage son, David. Her struggles are framed by a gospel choir, while her son and his long-absent father, Luke, bond over their love of jazz. 

For this tale, rich with music, humanity and Baldwin’s evocative vernacular prose, Cincy Shakes has chosen actor and director Candice Handy to stage the show; musician Yemi Oyediran will give authenticity to its musical tapestry. Both have backgrounds in the Black church: Handy’s father was pastor at Montgomery, Alabama’s Dexter Baptist King Memorial Church, a church once led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Oyediran grew up in the Pentecostal church and, like Baldwin, trained to become a pastor from his mid-teens to his early 20s.

“I watched my father wrestle with the responsibility of being a pastor,” Handy says in a recent phone conversation with CityBeat. “There’s conflict around the responsibility of being a pastor…the flock often want the pastor to be an administrative leader. It can feel like the Black church is being run like a social club…whereas biblically the pastor’s job is a more spiritual leader. There can be a conflict of interest with a lot of the bureaucracy of an organization and a calling from a higher power.”

She adds that Margaret’s position as a female pastor is even more complicated. “Love is at the center of the play, a struggle with romantic love, with sensual love and how can a woman be soft and also lead with respect that a man just has from being a man? There’s so much in the play that I connect to from my childhood background and who I am as a Black woman.”

Handy has a clear sense of Baldwin’s message in The Amen Corner. “The play is about the oppression of Black women and the complicated relationship between Black men and women that is a result of white oppression.” She asserts that the hierarchical structure of society formed by white supremacy is synonymous with religion, especially Western Christianity. “Therefore, Sister Margaret’s role as pastor who is called by God allows her to be revered by the other characters. But her gender does not allow her to be respected, due to stereotypical racist notions about Black women codified by white society and infiltrating the consciousness of Black men.”

Oyediran, also part of the CityBeat phone interview, has spent time digging into the music in Baldwin’s play, relating back to his own experience in the Pentecostal church from an African tradition. He especially cites gospel blues, a tradition that Baldwin learned from singer Bessie Smith. “A lot of these tunes Baldwin uses represent discourse in the church at the time that’s also being reflected in the music — beginning to use elements of the secular in the church and liturgical music.” Luke, Margaret’s estranged husband, represents jazz “and everything that’s secular that’s coming into the play,” Oyediran suggests. Their son David wants to pursue jazz. “Baldwin uses gospel blues to show this interplay of the liturgical and secular existing in one musician who not only has to work this out, musically and within the play, but as this conflict between Pastor Margaret and Luke.”

Handy has an accomplished cast of actors. Local veteran Torie Wiggins plays Pastor Margaret, and “ranney,” the singularly named guest actor from Texas, is Luke. Both are veterans of Cincy Shakes’ productions of August Wilson plays: Wiggins was the title character in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2022 and performed with “ranney” in Fences in 2019. The large cast includes Adrian DeVaughn Summers as Margaret’s son David.

Wilson’s Century Cycle of plays about African American life across the decades of the 20th century uses colloquial language that’s also a feature of Baldwin’s script. “There’s a density to Baldwin’s writing,” Handy says. “It feels like a novelist is writing a play — in his stage directions and the amount of monologuing. It’s rich, muscular language.”

Handy is eager for audiences to experience The Amen Corner. Baldwin, she says, “knows that the more cultural detail you bring, the more universal it becomes.

“This being such a specifically Black experience, the play will really focus on its humanness. There’s some villainous behavior, but really no actual villain in the show. That really goes to Baldwin’s brilliant writing,” she says. She plans to “make it an immersive experience. The audience will be very much a part of it — not just watching a day in the life but experiencing the Black church service.”

The Amen Corner, presented by Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, opens on Jan. 26 and continues through Feb. 11. Info: cincyshakes.com.