Only a boy preacher who had grown up to become one of
America's most eminent writers could have produced a play
like The Amen Corner. For to his first work for the
theater James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic
rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along
with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches
exacted from their worshipers.
For years Sister
Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a
mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when
Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician,
comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her
standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on
the godly path.
The Amen Corner is a play
about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and
black women and black fathers and black sons. It is a
scalding, uplifting, sorrowful and exultant masterpiece of
the modern American theater.
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