Listen to Sister Margaret (Joz McCaw) preach and you get the sense that she has the Holy Spirit on speed dial. As pastor of a Harlem congregation, her life is one of piety and fierce protection of her only son, David.
But it all begins to unravel with the arrival of someone from her past, a boozing, womanizing jazz musician. Luke (Beko Wood) is her ex-husband and father of her son whom Sister Margaret has insinuated abandoned her and her child.
“Who left the house?” Luke asks over and over again.
“I did. I left to get away from the stink of whiskey to save my baby.”
The moment of truth, the lie at its core, a new refrigerator and a trip to Philadelphia provide the keg of gun powder that leads the play to its explosive climax.
Published in 1954, The Amen Corner was Baldwin’s first play and while it is at heart an interrogation of faith and family by a preacher’s son, the play straddles many themes – love and loss, nostalgia and regret, denial and abandonment, masculinity and emasculation and more.
For a play published in 1954, The Amen Corner has aged well and could have been written about a 21st century church pastor hiding a secret and scared to death of losing her son to sin and debauchery even though as David reminds her “you knew this day was coming.”
The Amen Corner is sweeping in its excoriation of fundamentalist Christianity. The thesis is that love or as the Bible puts it, Charity, is paramount, something Sister Margaret and her Amen Corner elders fail to take to heart.
Sister Moore (Samya De Meo) is a sanctimonious spinster who wields her virginity like a sword and Sister Odessa (Mariama Mansary) is Margaret’s sister who has mortgaged her life in support of her sister. Brother Boxer (Jamal Covin) is a gossip while his wife, Sister Boxer (Gloaria Olajide) is a longsuffering wife who admits that “God don blessed me with a womanly nature.”
These characters alongside Sister Sally (Brie Covington) act as jury in The Amen Corner Vs Sister Margaret but these are men and women who have come to equity with unclean hands blinded as they are by their self-righteousness and the proverbial mote in their eyes.
The entire cast made up of students of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art supported by staff members and industry experts deserves applause for their interpretation of the text and their delivery, American accent and all. The stage design which collapses the three acts into one seamless whole is also deserving of commendation as does Nicholai La Barrie who directed the play.
Samya De Meo is brilliant as the “virginal” Sister Moore and no one is immune from her holier-than-thouness. “I ain’t never been sweet on any man but the Lord Jesus.”
So is Phoenix Edwards who pulled double duty as Sister Rice and Ida Jackson. Her portrayal of a young mother forced to bury her child is gut wrenching and evocative especially when she tells Sister Margaret that “I am scared to do it once again.”
But Beko Wood is the real revelation as the dying musician, Luke. Making his entrance about 30 minutes into the play and delivering most of his lines while sitting down, Mr. Wood owned the stage every time he spoke with his charisma, his voice and gravitas.
His relationship with Margaret provides the play with its moral core and highlights something universal; how hard it is for a marriage to survive the loss of a child but at the end Margaret finds her way to the truth shorn of religious artifice.
“My man is dying and my son is gone. I can’t preach when I can’t pray… To love the Lord is to love his children.”
And that is true Christian charity.
**The Amen Corner ran at The Linbury Studio at LAMDA from Friday 7 – Thursday 13 February 2025 in London
