Play Reading Roundup: August Wilson's Late 20th Century

Blake Morris and Harvy Blanks in a production of King Hedley II at Two River Theater in 2018.

Summer 2021 has ended and so has my “Summer of August Wilson” book club. Thoughts on the final 3 decades of the Century Cycle—which also cover more than 30 years of Wilson’s playwriting career.

P.S., have you got your August Wilson postage stamps yet?

Jitney by August Wilson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The charitable thing to say about Jitney is, well, every great playwright has to start somewhere, and Wilson certainly had a sharp ear for Black men’s dialogue from the get-go. And also, wow, what an incredible leap in quality he made between this play and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom .

The uncharitable thing to say is that this really feels like an early effort, with clunky plot twists and telegraphed emotion. I couldn’t agree more with the New York Times review from 2000: “Its sentimental ending feels hammered on, with the nails showing, and a couple of the work's pivotal confrontations have a whiff of assembly-line melodrama.”

I quite enjoyed the beginning of the play: the interactions of the drivers at a Pittsburgh jitney company in 1977 feel lively and lived-in, and, with the phone constantly ringing in the background, it’s faster-paced than some of Wilson’s other plays. (He did have a tendency to overwrite.) But from there, he takes the story in implausible and overwrought directions. The fast pace even becomes a detriment: the scenes at the end of Act Two are very short, meaning that the melodramatic incidents pile up without being given their due weight, their due room to breathe.

The seeds of future Wilson plays are here, but that’s the problem: it can be painful to read the early versions of characters and scenes that Wilson would handle more skillfully in later works. The theme of father-son generational conflict will obviously reach its apex in Fences . And I wouldn’t say I loved Two Trains Running, but it’s certainly a more mature and nuanced version of just about everything Jitney is trying to do. Both plays are about a small Black-owned business that’s about to be demolished in the name of urban renewal; both plays feature a large cast of men and one young woman; both have a character who is a numbers runner, etc. I think this could also hamper theater companies who wish to produce the whole Century Cycle in decade order: Jitney may seem both crude and redundant coming right after Two Trains.

King Hedley II by August Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For all the talk of August Wilson’s ten plays as a “cycle,” most of them are standalone works—they may occasionally reference characters or events from other plays, but they don’t directly build on one another. The biggest exception to this principle, though, is King Hedley II, the 1980s play, which is probably incomprehensible if you don’t know Seven Guitars , the 1940s play. King is the son of Ruby from Seven Guitars (she was pregnant with him during the events of that play) and his eponymous play involves the secrets, lies, and omissions from 1948 finally coming to light.

It also shows how Pittsburgh’s Hill District has deteriorated over those forty years. Despite the bad things that happen in Seven Guitars and the racism its characters face, that play also depicts them as members of a lively, friendly community. There is no such neighborhood camaraderie in King Hedley II, and a vacant lot stands onstage in place of the communal backyard. The play emphasizes cycles of retributive violence, the carceral state, urban blight, teenage pregnancy. In some ways, it feels like a portrait of 1980s “ghetto” life that a conservative would love: Black people have civil rights now, but they can’t stop shooting and looting!

But conservatives would probably have a big problem with the astonishing monologue by Tonya (King’s wife) that explicitly says that Black women are right to have abortions because life in their communities isn’t worth living. “I ain’t raising no kid to have somebody shoot him. To have his friends shoot him. To have the police shoot him. Why I want to bring another life into this world that don’t respect life? I don’t want to raise no more babies when you got to fight to keep them alive.” And Tonya isn’t the only excellent female character in the play (this is rare for Wilson!). Ruby, who seemed like a one-dimensional “sexy bad girl” stereotype as a 25-year-old in Seven Guitars, has become a rich and complex character in her early 60s.

The male characters fall more neatly into some familiar Wilson archetypes, but they’re archetypes because they’re dramatically compelling. There is Stool Pigeon, an elderly prophet-type who engages in voodoo-like rituals. And there is King Hedley himself, an ex-con, a striver, a proud and defiant man. But, similar to the ending of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom , the protagonist is made to pay for his hubris: he can try to challenge God, but he doesn’t realize God is the baddest motherf----r of them all (to quote Stool Pigeon). You come at the king, you best not miss.

Radio Golf by August Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A bittersweet fact of American theater history is that August Wilson was granted just enough time on this earth to finish writing his ten-play “Century Cycle.” The last Cycle play, Radio Golf, had its world premiere in April 2005, and a month later, Wilson was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. (He died that October, only 60 years old.) As such, some critics have suggested that Radio Golf never got the final polish it deserved; and even if it had gone through another couple of drafts, I still don’t know if it would be meaty enough to be ranked among Wilson’s best.

Radio Golf takes place in 1997. The protagonist is Harmond Wilks, a Black real estate developer who wants to gentrify the “blighted” Pittsburgh Hill District with a Whole Foods and Starbucks. He has a social conscience, though: he’s planning to run for mayor on a proto-Black-Lives-Matter platform denouncing police violence. Overall, Harmond is a sympathetic portrait of a middle-class Black man torn between competing values. But his wife, Mame, doesn’t have much to do in the play; and his business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, is a broadly drawn caricature of a Black bourgeois. (Roosevelt adores golf and even says it makes him “[feel] like I had my dick in my hand and was waving it around like a club.” It is difficult to take him, or his friendship with Harmond, seriously.)

This competent but undemanding dramedy doesn’t quite seem thunderous enough to be the conclusion to the huge Century Cycle. I do appreciate that it ends on an optimistic note, as opposed to Wilson's more typical mood of bloody cataclysm. But the emotional climax of the play (which involves the over-explanatory, unplayable stage direction “They recognize that this is one of the important moments of their lives in which everything may change for them”) relies on the audience remembering previous plot points in the Cycle, especially the first/penultimate play* Gem of the Ocean . As such, it’s hard to imagine anyone producing Radio Golf as a standalone… and though it’s the finale of a major theatrical project, it still feels like minor Wilson.

*First when considered in terms of the Cycle’s internal chronology (it takes place in 1904); penultimate when considered in terms of Wilson’s writing process (it premiered in 2003).