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Tuesday, May 8, 2007
August Wilson’s ‘Radio Golf’ on Broadway
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B
New York — Old Glory hangs like an elegy over August Wilson’s final play, “Radio Golf,” which was to open Tuesday night on Broadway, the final chapter of an unprecedented 10-play chronicle of African-American life in the 20th century.
The flag hovers like a dream and a disappointment over the life of central character Harmond Wilks, a middle-class golden boy determined to become the first black mayor of Pittsburgh. Wilks tells his wife, Mame, that he wants the Stars and Stripes blazed across his campaign posters. But when he thinks about his twin brother, Raymond, who came home from Vietnam in a coffin, he sobs at the thought of the flag.
“Radio Golf” — the last word from playwright Wilson, who died of cancer in 2005 — sends a mixed signal about a democracy that promises everyone an equal chance, yet often fails to honor the bargain. As Wilks and his arrogant business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, forge ahead with plans to redevelop the blighted Hill District of Pittsburgh — and put a Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks and a Whole Foods over an ancient house at 1839 Wylie Ave. — their ill-considered scheme comes to a halt in a blaze of hubris, betrayal and last-minute redemption.
Directed by Atlanta’s Kenny Leon, this 1990s coda to Wilson’s decade-by-decade Century Cycle of plays may not have the fecund poetic sweep of his late masterpieces, the magnificent “Gem of the Ocean” and the Aeschylean “King Hedley II.” But it is a warm and vital celebration of the will of the common man to stare down the monolith of progress and honor the past.
Wilks (Harry Lennix) and Hicks (James A. Williams) might well have achieved their vision were it not for the arrival of Old Joe Barlow (Anthony Chisholm), who owns the mansion once occupied by Aunt Ester, and Sterling Johnson (John Earl Jelks), who has fond memories of sitting at her knee. Followers of Wilsonian mythology will recognize Aunt Ester as the 287-year-old matriarch and healer from “Gem of the Ocean,” which was set in her living room at 1839 Wylie.
As the past collides with the present, Wilks undergoes a reversal of fortune that is also a harbinger of his awakening. Mame (Tonya Pinkins) is trying to get a job as the governor’s press secretary, and Hicks, a bank vice president and ardent golfer, buys a radio station, which becomes the pulpit for his program, “Radio Golf.” While Wilks and Hicks make a Faustian bargain that will erase their old neighborhood, Old Joe and Sterling remember the Hill’s glory days, when folks used to line up for Miss Harriet’s fried chicken.
Lennix and Pinkins give smartly polished, almost effortless-looking performances, and Williams’ take on the smug, self-aggrandizing Hicks is virtually pitch-perfect. But the real blood and guts of this production are Chisholm’s gritty, spittle-spouting street prophet and Jelks’ fiercely eloquent house painter, who leads a kind of insurrection to stop the bulldozers.
“A perfect day is the saddest day,” Old Joe says. “You know why? ’Cause it has to come to an end. I’ve had many perfect days. I thought they were going to last forever. But they all come to an end.” When the hardscrabble philosopher utters those words, written by Wilson just before his death, you can almost hear a pin drop in the theater.
That said, “Radio Golf” is probably more important as a historic occasion than a work of art.
Though there are moments of Wilson’s majestic poetry, the deceptively simply drama is not flawless. Ebbing and flowing with humor and static, the loose ends feel hastily and self-consciously tied up — an easy out. The titular metaphors of golf and radio often seem more truncated and extraneous than organic, as when Roosevelt suddenly puts a Tiger Woods poster on the wall of Bedford Hills Redevelopment, the storefront setting of the play. Pinkins is a major Broadway star, but the character of Mame is slight and perfunctory, her journey never fully explored.
On the design side, David Gallo’s exploded set is a clue that this playwright is preoccupied with the accumulated strata of a vanishing culture and the battle scars of the soul. Adjoining the threadbare but functional real estate office are the burned-out remains of the community’s gathering spots: an old barbershop and a watering hole. Though Susan Hilferty’s unremarkable costumes are appropriate to the characters’ social standing, Donald Holder’s economical lighting never accentuates the scenery’s rough outer edges.
After 23 years, two Pulitzer Prizes (“Fences,” “The Piano Lesson”) and numerous other awards, the cycle that began with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is finally complete. An up-to-the-minute argument on race, class and the importance of remembering where you came from, “Radio Golf” ends with a loud, thumping offstage party and a message for the ages. The human heart is prone to error and corruption. Common sense is scarce. But in the final analysis, decency and goodness will prevail.
THE 411: Open-ended engagement. $31.25-$96.25. Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York City. 1-800-432-7250, telecharge.com.
THE VERDICT: Wilson issues a call to honor the past.
wbrock@ajc.com
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‘Violet Hour’ @ 7 Stages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B-
Now and always, for the living and the dead, time piles up like pages of some endless encyclopedia. But what if we had a chance to flip ahead and see how the story ended?
Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour” plays around with ideas about the dewy promise of youth, the meaning of friendship and the messy complications of history, all in the space of a single day in 1919.
A meditation on responsibility and regret, written in the effervescent prattle of Jazz Age cocktail hours, Greenberg’s play is a haunting evening of theater —- even in the uneven, bewilderingly cast new production directed by Joe Gfaller at 7 Stages.
Spun from gaiety and melancholy, this finely crafted conceit from the Tony Award-winning author of “Take Me Out” ponders the heart of a young publisher named John Pace Seavering as he decides whether to put out the voluminous first novel of his Princeton chum —- or the memoirs of his coy older mistress, a ululating peacock who seems modeled on Josephine Baker.
The stakes are raised for Seavering (Bobby Labartino) when a mysterious machine arrives at his office —- and proceeds to sputter reams of documents that are like telegrams from the future. As the century presses forward, it seems that Seavering’s circle will become grist for the mill of literary gossip and biography.
In describing the courtship of novelist Denis McCleary (Brian Crawford) and the beautiful and eccentric Rosamund Plinth (Heather Starkel), Greenberg appears inspired by the mythology of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife, Zelda. Seavering recalls Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who nurtured such dysfunctional writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
“The Violet Hour” draws its name from Denis’ first novel. As he explains to Seavering: “It’s that time —- that wonderful New York hour when the evening’s about to reward you for the day. The violet light you walk between that hastens you places.”
Crawford and Starkel make for a lovely Denis and Rosamund, so young and tender at first, so sad and tormented down the road. As Seavering’s ageless assistant, Gidger, Doyle Reynolds can’t seem to muster much in the way of laughter in those crucial opening moments, which are intended to run like the clockwork banter of Wilde and Coward. As written in uppercase bursts by Greenberg, Gidger’s dialogue has its own affected rhythm, but Reynolds’ pacing feels off, leaving you to wish he had formulated his own speed of attack.
As the moral center of the story, Labartino is a bland straight man who doesn’t have the vigor to carry the weight of this elegantly penned comedy. The performance grows on you, but it also makes you wonder what a better actor might have done with the role. As Seavering’s lover, the music doyenne Jessie Brewster, Yvonne Singh is an odd choice. Singh is a mature and commanding presence, yet she doesn’t exude the kind of smoldering sensuality that might have ignited the passion of a man half her age.
In the end, thanks to the exquisitely tailored handiwork of Crawford and Starkel, Denis and Rosamund become the shimmering and luminous core of the play.
“The Violet Hour” has been described as a time-travel story, which is not exactly accurate since characters and events don’t skip forward or backward through time. Instead, the future becomes a lens through which Seavering can see the folly and the futility of his choices. He can neither influence nor alter the outcome of providence, but in the course of an afternoon, he is forced to reckon with the turmoil and the falsehoods to come. It’s an odd puzzlement of a play, and one that gets richer in the afterglow.
Twilight, of course, is a metaphor for the consequences of youth. In the hourglass bloom of the play’s opening and closing, everyone twitters gaily while tragedy laps at the surface. As the paper-sputtering machine informs us, things will end badly. But for now, let there be cocktails and laughter and purple light and nights at the theater.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays; 2 p.m. Saturday; 6 p.m. May 9 and May 16. Through May 20. $20-$25. 7 Stages, 1005 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, 7stages.org.
THE VERDICT: A better play than a production, but haunting nonetheless.
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