![]() How to bring everyone to the table-all races, classes, genders-fairly and proportionately, without favor or disfavor, is a question he leaves to his audience. He knows this is a tough world to negotiate, and would he deny a little success to those with the pluck and smarts to seize it? It’s the essential, genetic criminality of the system itself that besmirches and destroys any notion that “despised” minority members can enter it unscathed as anything more than tokens.Īnd therein lies Wilson’s warning and last message to the world. Not without understanding and a certain sympathy, though. It becomes clear soon enough, however, that Roosevelt is himself the one being played, by bigger social and financial sectors represented by the invisible white investor Bernie Smith, who will receive a federal subsidy because of his minority partnership.īetween these two pals, with their ridiculous old college rah-rah, Wilson depicts the very model of the modern ethnic sellout. If he didn’t have his business card, he says, the folks he wants to play golf with would think he was the caddy. Golf, needless to say, is itself a marker of upward mobility, an expensive pastime not that accessible to large numbers of Black players. But if this project gets underway, it will be Wilks’s calling card in his campaign to become the first Black mayor of Pittsburgh.Īs for his pal Roosevelt, he is now the possessor of a new calling card himself-more than one, in fact, as a vice president of Mellon Bank and as a co-owner of radio station WBTZ, where he hosts a regular golf program with his suave, hip, confident vocal mannerisms. There’s just one old house at 1839 Wylie at the edge of the prospective project that’s standing in the way with conflicting property claims and a history of possible fraud over unpaid taxes. This is what gentrification looks like: Preserve a few names and symbols, but move a whole new class of people in. His project will tear down all the decrepit housing stock and replace it with an upscale, mixed-use property complete with Whole Foods and Starbucks. Wilks is anxiously awaiting the city’s official designation of it as a “blighted” neighborhood, for he has grand plans for redevelopment. Mason) is also on a rising professional career path in the governor’s office and seeking to become his press representative.īy 1997, the Hill District is long past its prime. Both of them are enamored of their golf game, partly out of love for the sport and partly because the golf course provides entrée to a tonier class of people who could play critical parts in their social advancement. Set in 1997, the play centers on Harmond Wilks (Christian Telesmar), inheritor of a real estate firm and a Black mayoral candidate on the verge of the business breakthrough of a lifetime, and his business partner and fellow Cornell classmate Roosevelt Hicks (DeJuan Christopher). The two characters who at first come across as nuisances, fools and maladroits-“Old Joe” Barlow (Alex Morris) and the self-employed contractor Sterling Johnson (Matt Orduña)-turn out to have bigger hearts and more integrity than the three highly educated and ambitious up-and-comers who represent the emerging Black entrepreneurial and professional class. But in the end we have no doubt where he stands: with the African-American community’s knocked-down, abused and exploited working class. Daniel’s direction, and on an elegantly creative, evocative stage set.įilled with love for his five-member cast of characters, who all have their stories and points of view that sometimes converge and sometimes don’t, Wilson visits upon them the kind of tough love only an intimate family member could deliver. You could not ask for any better theater than this, thanks to great acting and Gregg T. ![]() Performances of this play take place at A Noise Within through November 13. It was not just the last in his phenomenal decade of plays, it was his final work he succumbed to liver cancer that same year at the age of 60. Completed and premiered in early 2005 and, like all but one of the other plays, set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where he grew up, Radio Golf serves as Wilson’s epitaph. –– In Radio Golf, the final chapter in August Wilson’s extraordinary 10-play “American Century Cycle” exploring the Black experience in 20th-century America, the playwright completes his saga of the continuing struggle between history and progress. From left, Christian Telesmar, Matt Orduña, Alex Morris / Craig Schwartz
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