In many cities, if you live in a neighborhood where Checker and Yellow rarely go, or if you need help transporting packages home, or if you desire any of a number of personal services that conventional taxicab companies don't provide, you can still hire yourself a jitney. And if you lived in Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1977 -- the setting for this latest chapter in August Wilson's history of the African-American experience -- your mobility would rely heavily on the independent chauffeurs whose dispatch station is about to be razed for a nebulous urban-renewal project. Jitney displays Wilson's characteristically intelligent storytelling, deftly sidestepping facile stereotypes and easy resolutions: thus, Booster, emerging from prison after a twenty-year sentence for a crime committed in the hot blood of youth, is a man fully forty and weary of violence. And when Youngblood proposes to surprise his wife by buying a house, instead of being pleased, she berates him for not including her in his plans -- this is a new and complex world in 1977, after all, where once-obvious decisions must be carefully considered.
Under Marion McClinton's deft direction, the cast of this Goodman Theater production -- which will likely, as with Wilson's other dramas, accompany the play to Broadway -- deliver uniformly well-crafted performances (with Paul Butler particularly charismatic as the patriarchal Becker), maneuvering easily through Wilson's leisurely narrative right up to an ending as satisfying as it is unexpected.
