GOD’S TROMBONES
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Take Sister Pinkson, for example. As played by Velma Austin she’s a bantamweight battle-ax who struts about when filled with the Holy Spirit, sings like a slide whistle (to the amusement of the choir), and displays enough self-possession to intimidate the archangels themselves. She’s a thoroughly ridiculous figure–until she recounts the parable of the Prodigal Son, dropping her clownish mannerisms to describe the corrupt city of Babylon so vividly that we can almost smell the sweat and perfume of the women “dressed in yellow and purple and scarlet / Their lips like a dripping honeycomb.” And when she entreats us, her voice dropping to a whisper as though cajoling a child, to turn our backs on that sinful city, we can hear her quiet strength and certain faith. Austin gives Pinkson a dignity she never loses, even after she resumes her comic persona.
These contrasting elements are also present in other characters. The Reverend Parham (Ron Pearson) arrives at the meeting on a bicycle seconds before it is to commence, but when he speaks of Death’s horses riding through heaven’s golden streets with “hoofs striking fire from the gold” he stamps his feet in imitation of the sound, a gesture that in other circumstances would be ludicrous but here only reinforces the image conveyed in the eloquent words. In her interpretation of the expulsion from Eden the Reverend Sister Alexander (Cynthia Jackson) has enough fire to strike lightning with her shoes as she sneers at Adam for “blaming his sin on a woman,” and John Crowley puts his opera-trained voice to good use in the role of the Reverend Washington, delivering a thunderstorm of a performance as he describes Judgment Day (“And I hear a blood-chilling sound / It’s the clicking together of the dry bones / And I see coming out of the bursting graves / Marching up from the valley of death / The army of the dead”) and repeats the final message from Exodus (“Listen / All you sons of Pharaoh / Who do you think can hold God’s people / When the Lord God himself has said / Let my people go?”).
