3 Plays You Might Not Know by August Wilson
It’s August Wilson’s birthday -let’s deep dive into some plays you might not know!
Radio Golf
Radio Golf is a bittersweet drama of assimilation and alienation set in 1997 in a storefront redevelopment office in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. It traces the forces of change on a neighbourhood and its people caught between history and the twenty-first century. Boasting chain stores and luxury, Harmond Wilks’ revitalization project will make him Pittsburgh’s first black mayor. And his radio host partner advocates golf as deliverance in the era of Tiger Woods. But a hold-out on their real estate deal forces them to question their pathways to success.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Set in 1911 in a black boardinghouse in Pittsburgh, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone chronicles the experience of a man who has escaped from a chain-gang to search for the wife he lost many years earlier. August Wilson gives haunting voice to the souls of this dispossessed group of Americans at the beginning of the century. It is his epic vision, power and poetic sense that lift their stories to strange and compelling heights.
Gem of the Ocean
Aunt Esther, the drama’s 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life. Gem of the Ocean is the ninth work in August Wilson‘s ten-play cycle that has recorded the American Black experience and helped to define generations.
Want more August Wilson plays? Check out our entire selection!
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