Abstract
Isaiah Matthew Wooden reviews THE AMEN CORNER. By James Baldwin. Directed by Whitney White. Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. February 28, 2020.
Often heralded as one of the most formidable and influential American novelists, essayists, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, James Baldwin remains underappreciated as a playwright. While he did not contribute a vast body of work to the modern theatrical canon—only publishing two full-length plays during his lifetime—it is notable that drama was one of the forms Baldwin began experimenting with earliest in his career. Indeed, not long after achieving acclaim with his first novel, the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin turned his attention to The Amen Corner (1954). The evocative three-act epic, which tells the story of Sister Margaret Alexander and the conflict-riddled storefront church she leads in Harlem, excavates and reckons with many of the moral, racial, and existential themes that preoccupied Baldwin during his early years as a “boy preacher” and would later become hallmarks of his work. In the soul-stirring, roof-raising revival she staged at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, director Whitney White surfaced fresh resonances and meanings in many of those themes and, in so doing, laid bare the enduring beauty and bounty of Baldwin’s dramatic imagination.