An August Wilson year
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In reviewing the past year for the Top 10 and Performer of the Year articles, I was reminded how many August Wilson events there were.
In January, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in New York. In February, he gave me my best short road trip of the year, a 23-hour descent on Washington, D.C. with two vans full of Pitt students to see "Gem of the Ocean" at the Arena Stage and "Jitney" at Ford's Theater. To celebrate his April 27 birthday here, the August Wilson Center unveiled "The Ground on Which He Stood," a fine video introduction to him and his Pittsburgh Cycle plays.
May was particularly full. The final play in his cycle, "Radio Golf," opened on Broadway, and at the PG we responded with a map locating the plays in their appropriate Hill District sites. Later that month, Charles Dutton did his one-man "Goodnight Mr. Wilson" here as a benefit for the AW Center. The most hopeful event of the year was the May 30 installation of a historical marker at his childhood home at 1727 Bedford Ave. As Pat Lowry points out, a marker is no guarantee that a building will be preserved, but Wilson's nephew, Paul Ellis, is working hard to see that this one is both restored and then used as a center for the arts.
In October, the AW Center presented an evening of playwrights inspired by Wilson. In November, TCG published "August Wilson's Century Cycle," a handsome boxed set of all 10 plays. And during the year, Phylicia Rashad, Tamara Tunie and Benny Sato Ambush were among the national figures who toured the Wilson-related sites on the Hill.
We didn't have a local production of a Wilson play in 2007, but we will have two and perhaps three in 2008: CMU will do "The Piano Lesson' (their first Wilson play ever) in February, and Pittsburgh Playwrights will do "Two Trains Running" in the spring -- the fifth play in their journey through the 10 plays in the order in which they were written. And the Public Theater just might announce "Radio Golf" for the fall (I'm keeping my fingers crossed), thereby completing its own tour of the whole cycle.
Nationally, the big 2008 event will be the all-star staged readings of all 10 plays, in sequence, at the Kennedy Center over five weeks, March 4-April 6. If that interests you, inquire about tickets quickly: there are only four performances of each play in the Terrace Theatre, which has just 500 seats.
First Published January 3, 2008 12:00 am
