A Song for Coretta

TYPE CAST Cleage’s ladies line up.

On February 6, 2006, five African-American women gather in the rain, waiting to make it inside Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church long enough to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King. Cleage poses a fascinating question: What impact did this invaluable civil-rights leader have on the black women who followed her? Unfortunately, the conversation that ensues rings shallow. The women never become freestanding characters; instead they’re stand-ins, vehicles to highlight the worst obstacles America has thrown at women of color (with a few outliers for good measure): Hurricane Katrina, the disappointment older civil-rights activists feel toward the younger generation, teen pregnancy, Abu Ghraib.

For all its anecdotes, it’s difficult to locate a story in Cleage’s Song. None of the characters has an identity beyond her assigned tragedy, and as hard as the performers work to add nuance, only Owens as a drifting artist who lived through the horror of the post-Katrina Superdome truly succeeds.

With both Chris Corwin’s imposing brick-wall set and Kaitlyn Kearn’s subtle, marvelous costumes reinforcing a sense of barriers, be they racial, economic or generational, a hopeful ending feels stitched on and unearned. We wonder how Song would’ve played if the Beckett echoes seemed more purposeful. A number of characters muse, “What would Coretta do?” One imagines she’d take action. Our guides stand in the rain and wait for instruction that won’t come.

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