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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.54
EAN num: 9781559362603
ISBN number: 155936260X
Label: Theatre Communications Group
Manufacturer: Theatre Communications Group
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 128
Printing Date: May 01, 2005
Publishing house: Theatre Communications Group
Sale Popularity Level: 503628
Studio: Theatre Communications Group
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'Wilson's melody here is the mournful sound of what might have been, a blues-tinged tale about a driven, almost demonic man. He's a petty thief named King who will stop at nothing for a better life. . . . King Hedley is a big play, filled with big emotions and big speeches. These aria-like monologues are rich in humor, heartbreak and the astonishing details that go into creating real people. With his latest arrival on Broadway, Wilson only has the very first and last decades of the twentieth century to chronicle-it's been quite a journey. King Hedley will only add to that towering achievement.'-Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press
'What makes Wilson America's greatest living playwright-aside from his gift for dialogue, which blends searing poetry with uncompromising realism-is the bracing humanism with which he provides insight into the struggles and aspirations of all individuals.'-Elysa Gardner, USA Today
King Hedley II is the eighth work in playwright August Wilson's 10-play cycle chronicling the history of the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century. It's set in 1985 and tells the story of an ex-con in post-Reagan Pittsburgh trying to rebuild his life. Many critics have hailed the work as a haunting and challenging tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
August Wilson is the most influential and successful African American playwright writing today. He is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences, The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running and Jitney. His plays have been produced all over the world, as well as on Broadway.
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Wow, the god of small things must be glancing my way. The very first to write about an August Wilson play! I feel honored.
King Hedley II is Wilson's 8th play in his monumental 20th Century cycle, here reflecting the 1980's. Full of the pains and pressures to maintain one's dignity and relish a life constantly off-balance, the play focuses on King, who is in his 30's and living in Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1985. His face has a long scar from a razor cut by the man he later killed, ultimately doing 7 years. With him is his best friend Mister, with whom he plans to open a video store, operates as a middle man selling refrigerators and is otherwise a business partner. King's wife Tonya met him after his prison time, and can only stand so much of his anger and is not emotionally ready to take him getting arrested again, or the suggestion that he'll be in trouble again. King's mother Ruby lives with them, an ex-lounge singer, she is a hardened woman, not the woman Tonya wants to be, having been with and through men who abandoned her, were murdered or imprisoned. Her relationship with Hedley is tenuous at best. When Elmore, a longtime flame of Ruby's returns to Pittsburgh the pressures of these people's lives are boiled toward the inevitable but horrible ending. An ending that is infused with tradition and sacrifice, as the spiritual, either crazy or touched Stool Pigeon-the play's chorus-proudly observes.
What makes Wilson such a master is his potent characters all of whom make strong proclamations of themselves with remarkable language. He is able to define another world, an American culture I can experience very clearly. The difficulties of being grey in America are here as in his other plays, but in King Hedley II there is little joy. There is love and the need for affection, but the violence and anger of being taken advantage of, of staying true to oneself in a world where friends can be killers, or parents can abandon children takes over. There is tragedy in these people's stories. How can somebody survive and thrive in a community full of dangers and desperation in a country that is indifferent, contradictory and ever disappointing.
Through Stool Pigeon Wilson informs the superstitions, the connections to the Earth, the Black American spectrum that has held onto it's spirituality, "the world that the characters turn to when they are most in need." That spirituality, for example made out in the numbers 66 and 67, which appear frequently, intense personal stories of murder and loss, grey cats, hard dirt or his Falstaff like Aunt Ester's offstage presence.
King Hedley II is another fabulous Wilson work. Sad and maddening, it has many highlights, symbols and wisdom. His passionate visions of each decade are all the more amazing for his subsequent and premature death the same year his final play, Radio Golf was produced.
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