![]() Wilson’s world, there’s hope for any man who can talk like that. Lennix’s Harmond is too passive a creature, a chalkboard for the diagramming of opposing arguments, for us to care much personally about what happens to him. They aren’t conflicted about what they believe in, any more than Mame and Harmond are. Wilson’s work, betray the too-clean edges of the cookie cutter. On the other hand, Sterling, a construction worker who is his very own union, and Joseph, one of those crazy old sages who show up throughout Mr. It feels appropriate that the anthem of Roosevelt’s and Harmond’s friendship is not some frisky blues number but “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” They converse in a sanitized language (even when the words are blue) flavored by corporate-speak and mainstream advertising. ![]() Roosevelt, Mame and Harmond are, by contrast, a bland breed. Wilson’s plays: individualists who stylishly improvise their way through the sweet-and-sour jazz of life on the Hill. These are the characters who have usually dominated Mr. In dramatic terms, Negroes, to use Sterling’s parlance, are certainly less interesting than their opposites, which the play describes with an unprintable word. Wilson appears to have felt an urgency about articulating what he saw as the clear and present danger of assimilation. But in a play that is closer than usual to the period in which he was writing, Mr. It’s rare that an August Wilson play can be parsed so neatly into a war of good versus evil, or into characters who are more notable for what they signify than who they are. The schism is manifest even in David Gallo’s astutely divided set, which pits the sterility of Harmond’s real estate office against the rich squalor of the abandoned businesses that surround it. To his surprise, Harmond feels the force of both sides, and “Radio Golf” unfolds as a battle for his soul. If the ambitious Mame and Roosevelt are the faces of the future, two men named Sterling Johnson (John Earl Jelks) and Elder Joseph Barlow (Anthony Chisholm) are the voices of the past, spiritual children of Aunt Ester. And if you know your August Wilson, you know this was the address of the ancient Aunt Ester, the former slave who lived for centuries on the Hill as the embodiment of a past that must never be forgotten. “This is the big time,” Roosevelt says to Harmond, “nothing but blue skies.”īut there’s a blot on those skies in the form of a house that must be torn down to make way for a new shopping and apartment complex (which will include Whole Foods, Barnes & Noble and Starbucks, of course). Williams) are on the verge of clinching a big redevelopment deal to revitalize the Hill, erasing its history in the process. And Harmond and his longtime friend Roosevelt Hicks (James A. Harmond’s wife, Mame (Tonya Pinkins), is in line to be head of the public relations office of the governor of Pennsylvania. “Radio Golf” centers on the Faustian figure of Harmond Wilks (Harry Lennix), a real estate developer poised to run for mayor of Pittsburgh. Though the plays, which have been staged during the past 25 years, were not written in chronological sequence, this one appropriately takes place in the twilight of the 20th century, in 1997.įrom left, John Earl Jelks, Anthony Chisholm and Harry Lennix in the Broadway production of August Wilson's play "Radio Golf." Credit. Wilson’s death in 2005, is the final, and in dramatic terms the thinnest, work in his magnificent 10-play cycle about the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century. “Radio Golf,” completed only months before Mr. Pittsburgh, it would seem, has been stripped of its poetry. Wilson’s work is set, can be heard only faintly now. The symphonically rich and idiosyncratic talk that once rang through the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the African-American neighborhood where most of Mr. The production that opened last night at the Cort Theater, directed by Kenny Leon, has the crackle of a bustling comedy crossed with an old-fashioned melodrama, in which scenes end with surprise revelations or personal declarations of war.īut a sadness runs through the liveliness: a throbbing lament for a lost time, a lost civilization, a lost language. An elegy whispers beneath the energy that animates “Radio Golf,” the last play by August Wilson.
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