Carol Rosegg, Associated Press James A. Williams as Roosevelt Hicks, Carnegie Mellon University graduate Michele Shay as Mame Wilks and Richard Brooks as Harmond Wilks star in the world premiere of August Wilson's "Radio Golf" at Yale Repertory Theatre. Click photo for larger image. More on August Wilson Link to more coverage of August Wilson and his Pittsburgh Cycle, a dramatic epic of plays dealing with African-Americans' struggles and aspirations through each decade of the 20th century.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- According to the Yale Repertory Theatre, it began here 21 years ago. But we know it actually began earlier in Pittsburgh.

However you date it, the cycle is now complete with August Wilson's "Radio Golf," set in 1997 during a confrontation over the redevelopment of the Hill District. It's as current as newspaper headlines but steeped in the struggles over heritage familiar from Wilson's other plays -- the Pittsburgh Cycle, we can call it, the 10-play masterwork with which he tracks the tragedies and aspirations of African-Americans with a separate play set in each decade of the 20th century.

In one sense, the Pittsburgh Cycle begins in 1904, when "Gem of the Ocean," the earliest play chronologically, opens with a pounding on the door of 1839 Wylie Ave. in Pittsburgh's Hill District. Fittingly, that house and what it represents are at the center of the conflict in "Radio Golf," which is set in the Centre Avenue storefront office of Bedford Hills Redevelopment, Inc.

In another sense, the Pittsburgh Cycle began in the late 1960s, when the young Wilson first began messing around with theater; or in 1945, when he was born. But the claim made by Yale Rep is also true, that the Pittsburgh Cycle began here in New Haven in 1984, when "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" was launched, the first of the nine plays that have so far reached New York. "Radio Golf" should follow them after other productions in which Wilson will refine what is already powerful and telling. Then we can talk of completion completed.

The honor of directing the debut of "Radio Golf" goes to Timothy Douglas, who has worked at three Pittsburgh theaters. Among other directors who have had a hand in the cycle are Marion McClinton, who nurtured "King Hedley II" and "Jitney" from their Pittsburgh premieres to New York, and Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway debut of "Gem of the Ocean."

Michelle McLoughlin, Associated Press Playwright August Wilson talks with actor Anthony Chisholm during a rehearsal for "Radio Golf." Click photo for larger image.

But the name to recall as the end of the cycle is reached is of Wilson's first professional director and essential collaborator, Lloyd Richards, who in 1984 ran Yale Rep and Yale Drama School as well as the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theatre Center, where "Ma Rainey" received its professional development in 1982. This completion of the Pittsburgh Cycle is a validation of his work, too.

So what is this August Wilson play with the very un-Wilsonlike title of "Radio Golf"?

It's unlike any of the others, to start. The themes of individual and community are similar, as is the struggle with a heritage that both frustrates and sustains. But along with the references to Model Cities and Mellon Bank and black radio stations, there is a slick surface modernity that feels eons distant from the doomed 1980s world of "King Hedley" or the feisty 1970s gypsy cabbies of "Jitney."

For the first time in the Pittsburgh Cycle, we meet the black bourgeoisie in the person of Harmond Wilks, whose father made his money in real estate, which, along with the church and funeral home, has been a traditional source of wealth in black communities.

It's no surprise to discover that Harmond also is the grandson of Caesar Wilks, the constable who, in "Gem of the Ocean," ran black Pittsburgh on behalf of the white Downtown establishment. As Harmond's aggressively upwardly mobile wife, Mame, and partner, Roosevelt Hicks, keep pointing out, he has had money, education (a Duquesne law degree) and position (his real estate firm) handed to him. Now he is said to be the Democratic Party's choice to run for mayor of Pittsburgh -- shades of his grandfather's more naked role as overseer of the mill owners' plantations.

But Harmond also is the survivor of twins. The other, Raymond, was the athletic star who gave up a scholarship to an ivy league school to go to a black college and ended up dying in Vietnam out of a sense of duty. He was an idealist. Harmond's plan for high-rise apartments and chain-store development on the Hill has a strain of idealism, too.

	Carol Rosegg, Associated Press Richard Brooks stars as Harmond Wilks and Anthony Chisholm as Elder Joseph Barlow (Old Joe) in the world premiere of August Wilson's "Radio Golf" at Yale Repertory Theatre. Click photo for larger image.

But the central conflict of "Radio Golf" is between his dreams of entrepreneurial and political success and the antithetical claims of the heritage represented by a newly discovered relative and the dilapidated but still grand 1839 Wylie Ave., vacant since the latest in a long line of Aunt Esters died in 1985.

Will Harmond jettison money, position and power for the arduous call to arms? The attractions of the former are well represented by his partner and wife. Roosevelt is a wonderful portrait of a capitalist freebooter on the make, played with slick zest by James A. Williams, and he makes a good case that it's time for blacks to develop their own millionaires by whatever means.

Mame, played by the persuasive Michele Shay (a CMU grad), wants all the good things money can buy, and she puts no truck in landmarks of past struggles. You couldn't pay her to move back to the Hill, no matter how redeveloped.

On the other side we have Elder Joseph Barlow, 79, one of Wilson's richly evocative embodiments of the black struggle. He's a living chronicle of apparently disconnected dates, a street-corner philosopher and guru, played with customary relish by Anthony Chisholm, a key member of the August Wilson theater family. Called Old Joe, he also turns out to be the son of the Citizen Barlow and Black Mary (aka Ester Tyler, aka Aunt Ester) of "Gem of the Ocean."

That makes him Harmond's first cousin, once removed, as they realize in a joyous moment halfway through Act 2. That's all very clear to the Pittsburgh Cycle aficionado, but I doubt the script makes it clear enough to others. Indeed, the name of Aunt Ester is never mentioned, probably because Wilson doesn't want to make the new play seem dependent on what went before.

But it is. That's part of its richness. You can't create an epic cycle without the audience wanting to savor the interconnections. The Pittsburgh Cycle becomes what it depicts. Just as it makes a prophetic claim for the active presence in black life of the living past, so it embodies that interweave.

Another connection with the past is the other voice of the ongoing struggle, Sterling Johnson, played with bright-eyed persistence by John Earl Jelks. Now in his 50s, Sterling is the ambitious young man we recall from "Two Trains Running" (set in 1969). At first he seems a wastrel, and he certainly appears that way to on-the-make Roosevelt, but he speaks with increasing authority as the play progresses, translating Old Joe's ramblings into a pointed challenge.

All this comes to bear on Harmond, played by Richard Brooks, a Wilson stage veteran who is best known as Paul Robinette on "Law and Order." There's a stiffness to Harmond, a predilection for press release prose. He gradually warms, but the play has him sitting around listening a lot -- I wish he could be stirred sooner. Also underdeveloped is Mame, so that we are unprepared for a late scene of marital crisis.

I suppose you could say we don't much know Roosevelt, either, but he is so vibrant we don't notice. It is his new passion for golf -- emblem of his mercenary values -- that justifies the play's comic title. His lyrical evocation of golf's joys is a lovely thing, but many of the later golf references need revision; these are details easily fixed.

A more central lack is the reticence about the connection to Aunt Ester and to the specific griot tradition she represents. It's odd, too, that Harmond and Mame say so little about their three children.

But, of course, the great flow of Wilson language continues, albeit chastened by the contemporary scene. Tellingly, Harmond starts to channel Wilson's persuasive voice only as he awakens to the past. Otherwise, the robust Wilsonian prose poetry is left to Old Joe and Sterling -- although Roosevelt, like Caesar in "Gem," shows that Wilson can also write with zest for someone we don't much like.

We can understand Roosevelt's point of view, though. The joy he shares with Harmond when their biggest deal comes through turns into an impromptu celebration in ironic counterpoint to the quasi-religious "juba" of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." On occasion, "Radio Golf" turns didactic about the values at stake, but the conflict is not simplistic.

Nor are the politics, with its off-stage manipulations and schemes of minority set-asides and black figureheads. Harmond plans to call his new development Bedford Hills, and the Yale Rep program includes a Teenie Harris picture of the bustling 1950 Hill as well as a 2005 Peter Diana picture of the New Crawford Square development. The story behind "Radio Golf" started in 1904 and before that with the 1619 arrival of black slaves in Virginia, but it also harks back to the ravaging of the Hill by the "urban renewal" of the 1950s. And staged right now in Pittsburgh, we would see indirect parallels in the careers of Robert Lavelle, Bob O'Connor, Sala Udin and various unnamed developers and city agencies.

Wilson leaves a bundle of questions. What happens to 1839 Wylie? What about Old Joe's daughter -- where might she fit in the succession of Aunt Esters? Did anyone succeed Aunt Ester when she died in 1985? If not, there's a theme for another play -- the loss of that prophetic voice that roots the present in the tragic past and projects it whole into the future.

But for that, there remains August Wilson.

"Radio Golf" runs through May 15. Call 1-203-432-1234 or go to www.yalerep.org.