August Wilson's Radio Golf Review

The AP's Kuchwara gives the world premiere at Yale Rep of the last play in Wilson's cycle a mixed review. He states that it's still very much a work-in-progress, which is typical of Wilson's work at such an early stage -- he'll continue to rewrite it as the play makes its way through a series of regional theatres around the country in the next year. The plot sounds intriguing:

"There's still work to be done on "Radio Golf," August Wilson's 10th and final chapter in his epic look at the black experience in 20th century America.

The drama, now having its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, is very much a work-in-progress. However, Wilson's potent gifts for storytelling and vividly etched characters -- with one major exception -- are already very present.

"Radio Golf," set in 1997, takes place in Pittsburgh, the setting for nine of the 10 plays that make up Wilson's impressive decade-by-decade cycle. We're now in the world of the black middle class, where the upwardly mobile are colliding with those who have not made similar gains.

Money is a big factor. And so is the past, a past that the play's ambitious, self-made protagonist, Harmond Wilks, can't escape. Harmond, played by Richard Brooks, is haunted by his family, particularly an uncaring father and a brother who died in Vietnam.

Yet despite Wilson placing him at the center of "Radio Golf," Harmond is the drama's least interesting character. He's an anguished hero, but at this point in the play's development, he serves more as a listener, one who reacts to others who are much more vibrantly drawn.

Chief among these talkers is Elder Joseph Barlow, a garrulous, mysterious figure portrayed by the fiercely funny Anthony Chisholm. Old Joe knows the history of the Hill, the rundown section of the city where "Radio Golf" takes place. His speeches, among Wilson's best, are peppered with history: tales of what has gone before, punctuated with exact dates -- day, month and year.

It's that past, found in a house at 1839 Wylie Ave., that figures prominently in "Radio Golf." The building, the setting for "Gem of the Ocean" (the first play in the cycle), is scheduled for demolition under the development of Harmond and his business partner. They purchased it from the city. Yet Old Joe claims to own the house, too.

On one side is Joe and an ex-convict, Sterling Johnson, who speaks with considerable disdain of those who forget where they came from. Despite his checkered past, Sterling (the excellent John Earl Jelks) is the voice of moral responsibility in the play.

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The man's financial dealings are fuzzily explained in the play's rushed, hurried opening, a problem director Timothy Douglas still has to solve. A jumble of facts, most involving Harmond's attempt to redevelop property on the Hill, tumble out in too much detail for the audience to absorb at once. More clarity is in order.


AP Review of Radio Golf

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Updated On: 4/28/05 at 10:54 PM

Do you think this show will come to Broadway? Hmmmm

Brantley:

"The surprising, antiseptic sting of much of the dialogue in "Radio Golf," the shaky, still inchoate new play by Mr. Wilson that opened Thursday at the Yale Repertory Theater, is deliberate. In the final work of his great 10-drama cycle about African-Americans in the 20th century, Mr. Wilson intends that at least three of his characters sound as out of place as they do.

They may be transacting business in that section of Pittsburgh known as the Hill, where most of Mr. Wilson's plays have been set. But they have forgotten its language, an organic poetry shaped by decades of hard living. They are people who have lost their natural voices. In Mr. Wilson's world, that's the same thing as losing their souls.

In his masterpiece, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (seen on Broadway in 1988 ), Mr. Wilson wrote of the black man who forgets the song that tells him "how he's supposed to mark down life," an individual melody forged from a vast chorus of history. The search for that lost song informs all of the plays in the cycle, each set in a different decade.

Mr. Wilson's characters have never seemed more in danger of being songless than they do in "Radio Golf," directed by Timothy Douglas, which runs at the Yale Repertory Theater through May 15. The doors to a bright white world of economic and political success have finally opened to blacks willing to play by the rules. In the final chapter of his theatrical epic about race and memory, Mr. Wilson boldly suggests that to step unheedingly through those doors is, in moral terms, simply to disappear.
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The outlines and the ideas are all in place for a play that could well be Mr. Wilson's most provocative. But he still needs to filter those ideas through characters who exist on their own. As he is famous for endlessly reworking his plays in their various productions (the next stop for this one is the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles), it is to be hoped that "Radio Golf" will have found its own transporting song by the time it reaches New York."





http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/04/30/theater/reviews/30golf.html?

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Updated On: 4/30/05 at 05:24 PM

I agree. Truly Wilson's masterpiece and one of the most haunting and electrifying nights I've ever spent in the theatre.

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Gem of the Ocean is the first play in the cycle in terms of when it takes place.

I think I'm correct that the Pittsburgh Public Theatre has also done each of Wilson's plays with GEM also included in their '06 schedule.

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Be sure to write a review.

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