Grand dramatic cycles can drive a playwright crazy. Tony Kushner put himself through the wringer in order to complete part two of “Angels in America.” In the 1930s, when he won the Nobel Prize yet was utterly out of vogue in America, Eugene O’Neill mapped out an 11-play monster called “A Tale of Self-Possessors Dispossessed,” a land-grabbing saga about American mendacity. Only the seldom-staged “More Stately Mansions,” and “A Touch of the Poet” survive. O’Neill destroyed the fragments of the ones he left unfinished.
August Wilson didn’t let his own monster get the best of him.
Thursday night, it was remarkable simply to see the 60-year-old, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright surrounded by family and friends at the Yale Repertory Theatre world premiere of “Radio Golf.” The play marks Wilson’s final installment in a 10-play, decade-by-decade cycle devoted to 20th Century African-American dreams, deferred or otherwise.
It was remarkable to see Wilson back at his old and fertile stomping grounds, for the first time since “Two Trains Running” ran here 15 years ago. His first five major works under the direction of Lloyd Richards received their premieres here in this converted Baptist church, after warm-ups in staged-reading form at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. The list includes “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”; “Fences”; “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”; and “The Piano Lesson.” Pick any two — I’d go with “Joe Turner” and “Fences” — and you’re picking two of the richest American plays of the past quarter-century.
Cycle complete
Even though Wilson’s Broadway fortunes have dimmed of late, with the short, 72-performance runs of “King Hedley II” and “Gem of the Ocean,” his overall achievement remains incredible. The cycle is now finished, even if the work on “Radio Golf” has just begun.
It is no secret that Wilson’s new plays open, breathlessly, in a semichaotic state before beginning a long and winding process of revision. (In the old days the first drafts came out at three, four or four-plus hours long; by contrast, “Radio Golf” runs 2 hours and 25 minutes in its present form.) It is no secret, too, that Wilson’s plays tend to be more vivid the further back they’re set on the historical timeline. “Radio Golf” takes place in 1997, making it the sole Wilson play to date referencing things such as Starbucks, Whole Foods and Tiger Woods.
A five-character piece set in a Pittsburgh Hill District redevelopment office, it is his smallest full-length play to date, a minor-key and, at this point, tentative companion piece to Wilson’s previous play, “Gem of the Ocean.” That one was set at the other end of a century Wilson sees as a continuous loop of cultural struggle — a fight against forgetting the blood, chains and racial legacies America cannot wash away.
“You are the future,” says Roosevelt Hicks to his old college buddy and now business partner, the presumptive Democratic mayoral candidate Harmond Wilks. The Pittsburgh men, African-Americans with an eye on the economic prize, have a plan to redevelop the blighted Hill District, wiping away the neglected remnants of better days. The centerpiece of the plan calls for a multistory mixed-use apartment complex called Bedford Hills.
They want to erect it at 1839 Wylie Ave., which happens to be the site of a home once belonging to Aunt Ester, the soul, seer and memory storehouse of Africans in America. (Ester, an offstage character in “Two Trains Running” and “King Hedley II,” was a central figure in “Gem.”) Opposition to the plan comes in the form of Elder Joseph Barlow, the son of Citizen Barlow (introduced in “Gem”), who claims ownership of the house and has begun painting it, days before its scheduled demolition.
Past as present
As he has done in other plays, Wilson writes here about the descendants of characters he introduced in earlier work. Harmond Wilks is the grandson of Caesar, the bull-headed lawman of “Gem.” With Sterling Johnson, the ex-con of “Two Trains Running,” he reintroduces a character who is now a generation older, and still on the side of the rebellious angels. On the other side are the successful but, in Wilson’s view, overassimilated buppies — black men of means who have turned their backs on the Hill District.
The fifth character is a surprisingly weak one, Harmond’s free-spending, class-conscious wife, Mame. The relationships between Wilson’s characters in early versions of his work can be fuzzy, but there’s something distressingly incomplete and desultory about the marriage on view here. Like many aspects of “Radio Golf,” including its preponderance of half-digested exposition regarding bank loans and radio station ownership, this surely will improve by the time the play gets its second production, this summer at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. (The rumored director is Kenny Leon, who staged “Gem.”)
“Radio Golf” is no epic summation of Wilson’s themes. It is a modestly scaled effort, more wryly comic in its tone than much of his earlier work. The title (invented by Wilson’s younger daughter, Azula) refers to the Sansabelt-wearing golf fan Roosevelt, who worships Tiger Woods and hosts a golf-tips program on a local radio station. He sees the lily-white links as his entry into the land of opportunity. He remembers when he swung a golf club as a young man. “I felt free — truly free — for the first time,” he says, and it’s a sharply satiric line.
In a similar vein, when Harmond and Roosevelt learn that the Hill District has been declared blighted and their redevelopment money is forthcoming, they erupt in a joyous cry of “Blighted! Blighted!” Elsewhere Wilson offers some good, sardonic observations, including a provocative speech, about the difference between “Negroes” and the associated racial slur, in which Wilson appears to be reclaiming the n-word after tiptoeing around it for a few plays.
“Radio Golf” at this stage lacks an engine. The container for his characters and their riffs has an uncertain shape, and there’s not much in the way of lyricism. Now and then he’ll hit on a sustained passage of dialogue that plays to Wilson’s poetic strengths while making sense in 1997 Pittsburgh. But the central characters of “Radio Golf” are, intentionally, hollow and misguided men, and Harmond’s road to self-discovery is a haphazardly drawn one. Issues of credulity-straining logic intrude on the story: Mame has a big kiss-off speech near the end — but without sufficiently dramatized setup, it comes out of nowhere. The redevelopment office seems pretty lonely. Wouldn’t a big shot like Harmond have an assistant or two around?
Still, there are some choice poetic delicacies, as in any August Wilson play. Elder Joe, played by Anthony Chisholm (so good as Solly in “Gem”), has a hilarious speech about being arrested for impersonating a blind man. Elsewhere, we hear what one man says he learned about women: “I don’t let one woman rule my life.” Pause. “It takes six or seven.”
Director Timothy Douglas’s production reveals John Earl Jelks (Citizen Barlow in “Gem”) to be a forceful, wryly comic actor of real distinction. As Mame, Michele Shay (wonderful in “Seven Guitars” a decade ago) does what she can with a role that hasn’t really happened yet. As Roosevelt, James A. Williams finds clever variations to play in a potentially caricatured role. As Harmond, Richard Brooks is merely adequate — a sonorous actor stuck in a role that is a revision or two away from finding a vital reason for being.
Unlike O’Neill and his “Dispossessed” cycle, Wilson did not set out to write an intricately intertwined series of plays. I suppose I’ll always wonder if he would’ve been better off not looping back on himself, not reintroducing characters and writing about the sons and daughters of an earlier play’s inventions. The best of this writer’s work stands alone, yet in subtly charged ways, it feels very much a part of a larger idea.
The idea is that of a country that learns from where it has been, an America that doesn’t so much redevelop as simply develop in the first place its communities, its democratic ideals, its citizens, with everyone in mind and everyone at the table. It’s not easy. If it were easy, August Wilson wouldn’t have so much to write about. The cycle is complete. Let the development of this writer, whose dramaturgical answer to the blues has voiced so much that is gorgeous and true, continue in the new century.
———-
“Radio Golf” continues through May 14 at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven, Connecticut. Tickets $20-$45 at 203-432-1234 or www.yalerep.org.
mjphillips@tribune.com
