The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, is among the most acclaimed producing theaters in the United States outside of Broadway, with programming reaching in excess of 165,000 people each year. Dozens of original productions have premiered there since it opened in 1968. Additionally, it has orchestrated successful partnerships with leading Atlanta playwrights, including Pearl Cleage.
Cleage, an award-winning playwright, author, and poet, has been the Alliance’s distinguished artist-in-residence since 2013 and has premiered several plays at the theater. Most recently, she wrote Sit-In, a play that informs younger audiences about the sit-in movement that is based on Brian Pinkney and Andrea Davis Pinkney’s book of the same name. She also helped develop the play for film.
Cleage, 74, is a graduate of Spelman College and has lived in Atlanta since 1969. Several of her plays take place in Atlanta’s West End, and she often explores the reality of Black life with a sense of hope and optimism in her writing. Below is a closer look at Cleage’s life and works.
Alliance Theatre Premieres
In addition to producing Sit-In for the Alliance, Cleage debuted her play Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous during the theater’s 50th anniversary season in 2019. Directed by Susan V. Booth, its themes address building bridges between generations and overcoming insecurities. Many of Cleage’s other plays, including Pointing at the Moon and The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years, premiered at the Alliance.
Cleage’s play Flyin’ West, which also premiered at the Alliance, was the most produced new play in the US in 1994. Another of her Alliance premieres, Blues for an Alabama Sky, has been shown at numerous theaters throughout the US and was performed at the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta.
Her Other Plays
Cleage has also written plays that have debuted elsewhere. She wrote two short plays, Late Bus to Mecca ‘s and Chain, that opened at the Judith Anderson Theater in the 1991-92 season. Additional plays include Bourbon at the Border and A Song for Coretta. Bourbon at the Border highlights the oppression—and sacrifice—of African-Americans during the civil rights movement. A Song for Coretta tells a fictionalized story of five people who waited in line all day and night to pay respect to the late Mrs. Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. outside Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Atlanta’s First Poet Laureate
During her State of the City address in 2021, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms named Cleage the city’s first-ever poet laureate due to her steadfast dedication to the arts and creative community in the Southeast. Cleage has published three volumes of poetry and three essay collections and was once selected by Oprah Winfrey to be the poet for her “Legends” gala, which celebrated Black women who have made a positive impact in civil rights, politics, and the arts. She co-authored the poem, “We Speak Your Names” with her husband Zaron W. Burnett Jr. for the event.
Along with the poet laureate distinction, the Mayor’s Office for Cultural Affairs commissioned Cleage to pen a poem in honor of the victims of cases involving missing and murdered children in Atlanta from 1979-81.
Novels
Cleage has also written and published eight novels, the first of which, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day, was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks and was an Oprah Book Club selection. The book, which tells the story of a young Black woman diagnosed with HIV, explores the intersection of race, sexuality, gender, and class in American society.
Cleage’s other novels include Things I Never Thought I’d Do, Babylon Sisters, I Wish I Had A Red Dress, and Baby Brother’s Blues, the latter of which won an NAACP Image Award for Literature. She also published a memoir, Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons and Love Affairs, which includes a series of journal entries she wrote over the course of 18 years.
Early Life and Activism
Cleage was born to Doris Graham and Albert B. Cleage Jr., a church pastor who founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna, on December 7, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts. However, she was raised in Detroit, Michigan and later graduated from Howard University in Washington, DC. Because her father was a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, she was introduced to activism and aware of the struggles Black people in America faced from an early age.
“I was raised in a very activist household so that I grew up surrounded by people who were activists. My father formed political parties, ran for office all the time, they founded a newspaper,” she explained during an NPR interview in 2014. “I mean—so my family was very involved in the civil rights movement in freedom struggles so that it was just a part of our lives. As I grew older, I was going to be a writer, always knew it, but I always knew that that writing was going to be grounded in the kind of activism that had defined my life as a member of this very political family.”
After graduating Spelman College with a bachelor of arts in drama, Cleage remained involved in politics and activism while pursuing a career as a playwright. She was a speechwriter and press secretary for Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, during the 1970s.