Congratulations to Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York! With this production of August Wilson's final play, Radio Golf, Geva Theatre Center becomes the first theater to present all ten plays of Wilson's cycle of African-American life in the sequence of their decades. Just before August Wilson's death in 2005, Geva's artistic director, Mark Cuddy, vowed to honor Wilson's unprecedented achievement by creating "August Wilson's American Century." Their productions, accompanied by elaborate programs of outreach to Rochester schools, have provided not only a landmark theatrical achievement, but also a remarkable education in and celebration.
Starting in 2007 with Gem of the Ocean, which takes place in 1904, Geva has performed the ten remarkable plays in five years. Wilson did not write them in historical order, but each play represents a different decade of the 20th century, so presenting them in decade order illuminates developments in the African-American community (mostly set in Wilson's native Hill-District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Eugene O'Neill had a similar plan to create a historical sequence of plays set in America, but he did not live to complete their sequence. Whatever one's estimation of these plays individually, their monumental conglomerate accomplishment is astonishing.
Radio Golf, set in 1997, culminates that history. But perhaps the most popularly appreciated of the plays are Fences (1983), set in 1957; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982), set in 1927; and The Piano Lesson (1986), set in 1936. I think those three to be unquestionably great American plays. Unfortunately, I find Radio Golf disappointing: it lacks the poetry and dynamic conflict of those earlier plays. Its significant addition to the canon is its emphasis on the privileged, rising upper-middle-class African-Americans and Wilson's eloquent condemnation of their false sense of accomplishment and "otherness" their removal from the struggles of the held-down lower working class.
Wilson seemed to realize that he had not dealt with that part of racial struggles in his earlier plays and wanted to include it in this final play. But historically, I remember encountering those ideas in the razor-sharp comedy of Godfrey Cambridge back in the 1960s. His targets were the "would-be white" African-Americans who carried watermelons in monogrammed leather bowling-ball cases and hid fried chicken in expensive attaché cases.
Radio Golf 's hero, Harmond Wilks turns on his business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, in an angry diatribe about hopes for acceptance and rise in class structure that are betrayed by an unchanging racism that deludes Hicks to work against his own people. It is a pleasing emotional moment, but it comes too late and without effective preparation.
I don't remember Radio Golf getting the tryouts and reshaping that earlier plays in this series received before their premieres on Broadway. Perhaps if Wilson had lived to work on it in that way, it would now seem more inevitably composed.
A number of questions arise from the modesty of most of its productions. For instance, if Wilks is truly a significant figure, trying to be the first black mayor of Pittsburgh, and the election is not that far off, why has he only a few small posters and a handful of visitors in his small headquarters?
This is a co-production with Syracuse Stage, and the direction, designs, technical support and casting are theirs, not Geva's. Richard Brooks created the lead role of Harmond Wilks in the play's premiere at Yale Rep and seems authoritative and appealing in it, though not always vocally dynamic. In the key role of the old man whose home is being demolished in order to build a multi-million-dollar development. Thomas Jefferson Byrd, an obviously accomplished actor, plays with bewildering mannerisms, a maddeningly slow delivery, and much inaudible mumbling. Whether directed that way or not, he should have been corrected by the director. Some unclear elements could be script, direction, or acting, and I'm not sure.
Pretty Crystal Fox makes Wilks' wife an appealing, independent but loving partner until toward the end she seems confusingly in disagreement with his moral position but somehow passively not opposed to it. Leland Gantt inhabits the unconfused Sterling Johnson, a kind of author's spokesperson working class, angry, physically forceful with convincing, audience-pleasing bravado. And the one character whom we are obviously intended to laugh at, rather than with, Wilks' longtime friend and indulged business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, who sells Wilks out, is played with clarity and a good deal of appealing animation by G. Valmont Thomas. His Hicks likes himself genuinely enough to work against the thrust of the drama and make us like him.
The play has enough complexity to make discussion of it necessary, and this is a decent production. But, although the overall achievement of concluding this whole series is laudable, Radio Golf is not its finest element.
