The Sty of the Blind Pig (1974)

 

 

In 1974, PBS broadcast a production of Philip Hayes Dean's The Sty of the Blind Pig, masterfully directed by Ivan Dixon. (A link to the YouTube video of the Blind Pig broadcast is below.) Dixon was best known to television audiences as Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes and to movie buffs as the male lead in Nothing But a Man (1964), opposite Abbey Lincoln.

Like Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Dean's play is set in the Chicago apartment of a Black family -- the scolding and sanctimonious matriarch Weedy Warren (Maidie Norman) and her long-suffering and repressed daughter Alberta (Mary Alice). The pair are frequently visited by Weedy's brother, called Uncle Doc (Scatman Crothers), a boozy gambler who is trying to get back to the sportin' life in Memphis.

It's the early years of Civil Rights protests in the South, a region both familiar and foreign to the Warrens. (Out of sight ...) From her seat by the living room window, Weedy needles her daughter about her appearance and secretiveness, and Alberta pacifies her mother with grudging compliance. Uncle Doc ineffectively referees disputes between his sister and his niece.

One day, a sightless musician who calls himself Blind Jordan (Richard Ward) knocks on the door asking after Grace Waters. Alberta lets him in, tells him she doesn't know the person he seeks, but soon joins him in his search, which, as one might expect given the symbolism invested in the story, leads to the discovery of a different kind of grace.

Being a theater kid, I remember lending the broadcast my rapt attention, not picking up on every nuance Dean had woven into his wonderful play but enough to appreciate how important this story was. Later, I came to further understand that it was telling the world, at least that portion that watched public television, something about the souls of Black folks.

The play was also telling African Americans who may have been feeling as if they were in another country that life was unavoidably complex, a strange mix of the profound and the profane, and the blood spilled over the years -- in slaughterhouses, under lynching trees and in city streets -- may have blinded some to the truth but gave others greater clarity.

This play is one of many I would likely never have seen if public broadcasting had not scheduled programs that spoke to all of us.