Until two weeks ago, I had seen eight of August Wilson’s ten
Century Cycle plays. Up till then, I’d
missed the last one he wrote, Radio Golf,
the play that covers the last decade in the century and was completed in 2005,
the year it premièred at the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the first cycle play
the dramatist composed, 1982’s Jitney,
the play that covers the 1970’s and the only one of the decalogue that hadn’t
been presented on Broadway before now.
But on Friday night, 10 February, I met my frequent theater companion,
Diana, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in the Theatre District to see the
Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Wilson’s play.
Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who’s staged or appeared
in many of Wilson’s Pittsburgh plays, MTC’s Jitney
began previews at the company’s Broadway, and Tony-eligible, house on West 47th
Street on 28 December 2016 and opened on 19 January 2017.
The run is scheduled to close on 12 March. According to his introduction to the special
edition of the play text published this year (Overlook Press) to mark the
Broadway première, Santiago-Hudson explained that two weeks before the
playwright died in October 2005, he asked the director “to bring Jitney to Broadway.” The director proclaimed:
There had been nine jewels placed
in August Wilson’s formidable crown, each had changed the landscape of Broadway
in their respective seasons. Until now,
only one gem was missing. With the
production of Jitney at the Manhattan
Theatre Club’s Samuel Friedman Theatre the final gem is in place.
Wilson (1945-2005) wrote Jitney
in 1979 and it received its first production at the small Allegheny Repertory
Theatre in Pittsburgh, the playwright’s hometown, in 1982. (The story is that Wilson and his mother
arrived at the opening performance in an actual jitney.) The Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota,
presented a one-act version in 1984 independently of the earlier mounting. In 1996, Wilson rewrote the play extensively
for what was essentially its second première at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, directed
by Marion McClinton—the first major Century Cycle première that wasn’t directed
by the late Lloyd Richards, Wilson’s principal collaborator. During the next four years, Jitney was produced nationwide in dozens
of theaters, such as the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1997),
and Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company (1998).
Wilson continued to revise the play occasionally and it came to New York
City, opening Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre on 25 April 2000, winning
the 2000-2001 Outer Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. It closed on 10 September and moved to the
Union Square Theater on 19 September 2000 for a commercial run until 28 January
2001 (2000 Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play for August Wilson; 2001
Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding Play). The play opened in London at the National
Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre, running from 16 October through 21 November 2001, winning
the Olivier Award for best play of the year.
After the Crossroads and Huntington Theatre presentations, CenterStage
in Baltimore, the Studio Arena in Buffalo, the GeVa Theatre in Rochester, New
York, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago staged the play in 1999; Los Angeles’s
Mark Taper Forum presented it in 2000; the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., presented
it in 2001; the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 2002; Ford’s Theatre,
Washington, D.C., in 2007; and the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., in 2008—among
many others around the world. Ruben
Santiago-Hudson, director of the MTC Broadway première, staged a production in
2012 at the Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, New Jersey; the cast
included Anthony Chisholm, who also appears, in the same role, in this mounting.
When Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel, Jr., in the Hill
District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wrote Jitney,
he hadn’t conceived of the Century Cycle
of the African-American experience in the United States through the 20th
century. He always knew he wanted to be
a writer, and educated himself at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library after dropping
out of high school in 10th grade. He
particularly favored the works of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston
Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black authors.
He went on to add Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, playwright Amiri
Baraka, and writers Ed Bullins and James Baldwin to his reading repertoire and
he discovered the music of the blues, especially Bessie Smith, jazz, spurred by
hearing John Coltrane in his home neighborhood, and hip-hop, which Wilson
called “the spiritual fist of the [black] culture”; the art of Romare Bearden;
and the political ideas of Malcolm X.
After the 1965 death of his father, a German immigrant from
Czechoslovakia, the nascent writer adopted his mother’s maiden name,
Wilson.
After years of working in menial jobs, including janitor, porter,
short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher, Wilson started writing, sitting in
bars and other public spaces where he observed the people of his neighborhood
who would become his characters and absorbed their language. But he was writing poetry at this time. He helped found the Black Horizon Theater in
the Hill District in 1968 and wrote his first play, Recycling, in
1973. Other plays followed in the ’70s
and early ’80s, one of which was Jitney. Then he conceived of his magnum opus (though, I suspect he didn’t think of it that way at
the time), the cycle of plays recounting the black American experience in the
20th century, one play dedicated to each decade of the period.
After Wilson began what became known as his Century Cycle or
Pittsburgh Cycle (a misnomer since one play isn’t set in Pittsburgh), starting
in 1982 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
(the only one of the 10 not to be set in the Hill District), Wilson extensively
revised Jitney for its 1996 second
première and fit it into the cycle as the eighth play in the series. (It’s the only play of the 10 that was
actually written in the decade it covers.)
The playwright continued to compose work outside the cycle, including
his last piece, the autobiographical How I Learned What I Learned (2002),
a solo performance piece he planned to perform for the Signature Theatre
Company’s season devoted to Wilson’s work in 2006-07. (Signature’s Wilson season, the only one it’s
devoted to a non-living playwright, came to fruition after the dramatist’s
death, but without the monologue; Ruben Santiago-Hudson, director of the
Broadway staging of Jitney, stood in
for Wilson in How I Learned at
Signature’s mounting of that monodrama in 2013.)
Wilson, who died of liver cancer on 2 October 2005 (age 60), finished
the last play he wrote for his decalogue, Radio
Golf, in 2005 and saw it premièred at the Yale Repertory Theatre but didn’t
survive to see it open on Broadway in 2007.
Fourteen days after his death, on 16 October 2005, the Virginia Theatre on
Broadway, owned by Jujamcyn Theaters, was renamed in his honor, one of the few
Broadway houses named for a writer and the first to be named for an
African-American.
Overall, August Wilson’s a magnificent prose poet, with
rhythms redolent of his influence from blues, which the writer calls, “My
greatest influence . . . because I think the blues is the best literature that
we as black Americans have,” and jazz, which gave Wilson the improvisational
quality of his scripts. He makes his characters street poets and he takes
from collagist Bearden “the fullness and richness of everyday ritual . . . rendered
without compromise or sentimentality.” He’s not good with plot, however,
and he needs an editor: Wilson’s said he tries “to make my plays the equal of [Bearden’s]
canvases.”
In creating plays I often use the
image of a stewing pot in which I toss various things that I’m going to make
use of—a black cat, a garden, a bicycle, a man with a scar on his face,
a pregnant woman, a man with a gun. Then
I assemble the pieces into a cohesive whole guided by history and anthropology
and architecture and my own sense of aesthetic statement.
In a quotation I jotted down from a wall panel at an exhibit
of his work back in 2011, Bearden said: “The function of the artist
is to organize the facts of life according to his imagination.” This seems particularly applicable to August
Wilson’s dramaturgy, especially in light of the assessment of the Village Voice’s Michael Feingold: “He
just didn’t bother to contrive and manipulate as a way of narrating those
destinies. His sense of life was too
powerful—perhaps too overpowering—for him to bother with that.” His
characters, nonetheless, are actors’ dreams and his language is delicious.
The decalogue is truly a magnificent achievement by any measure. In a New York Times column
about Wilson’s cycle, Ben Brantley pronounced that the series “will be
remembered as one of the great achievements of the American theater, a work
unrivaled by any contemporary in its expansive scale and richness of voice.” Nine of Wilson’s cycle plays were mounted on
Broadway over 23 years, an accomplishment neither David Mamet nor Tom Stoppard
matched, according to the Times’ Jason
Zinoman. Critical acclaim was nearly
unanimous for every staging—though there was also common criticism for the
author’s haphazard and overburdened plotting, wordiness, and digressions. All of the nine Broadway productions were nominated
for Tony Award, though Fences is the
only one that won (twice: both in 1987 for the première and in 2010 for the
revival).
The 10 plays aren’t strictly
connected like, say, Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman
Conquests or Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays, but some characters or
their descendents appear in more than one; Seven
Guitars, set in 1948, and King Hedley
II, set in 1985, are the only two plays that are specifically linked. Nonetheless, Wilson’s plays have “many
storytelling elements in common,” according to Erik Piepenburg, senior staff
editor on the New York Times:
[T]they almost
all took place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the playwright’s hometown;
they bracingly examined issues of racism, friendship, romance and memory; the
shadow of slavery was ever-present, if sparingly depicted; and they were also
vibrantly distinct in their settings, ambitions and theatrical destinations.
Remarkably, Wilson creates the
world of all this life in microcosmic places: the backyard of a Hill District
house, a living room, the musicians’ band room of a recording studio, a luncheonette, a car-service station.
Regular taxi cabs won’t travel to the Pittsburgh Hill
District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to jitneys—unofficial,
unlicensed taxi cabs (which we know as “gypsy cabs” in New York City)—that
operate in the community. Jitney, set in 1977 during a period of
“urban renewal” in Pittsburgh, depicts the lives of the car-service drivers at
the run-down jitney station, complete with junk cars outside, owned by Becker
(John Douglas Thompson) as the city shuts down businesses and tears down whole
blocks, including the car-service dispatch office, to make way for new
buildings. There are five jitney drivers
struggling to survive out of Becker’s station: the boss, Youngblood (André
Holland, who gives a highly praised performance in the current film Moonlight), Turnbo (Michael Potts),
Fielding (Anthony Chisholm, a veteran of the 2000 Second Stage production), and
Doub (Keith Randolph Smith). The
impending gentrification will put all of them, as well as many of their
neighboring business-owners and their employees, out of work.
Youngblood, a veteran of Vietnam, and
his girlfriend Rena (Carra Patterson), have a two-year-old son named Jesse. In the past, Youngblood—the name almost feels
too on-the-nose, but it seems that this was a nickname the playwright himself
acquired in his youth—has cheated on Rena, and now Rena thinks Youngblood is
again being unfaithful—this time with her sister, because he disappears at
times during the day and night, and also because, without explanation, he’s
been taking the money they were saving for food. Finally, when Rena confronts him angrily, he
reveals that he’s been going around with Rena’s sister to shop for a new house
for himself, Rena, and Jesse. Rena,
however, remains angry at Youngblood because he bought the house without
getting her approval.
Becker’s son, Booster (Brandon J. Dirden), is released from
prison, where he’s been incarcerated 20 years for murdering his girlfriend, who’d
falsely claimed that he’d raped her. (Just
to put this in fuller context: the woman was white and her father wouldn’t have
tolerated the relationship. Let’s also recall
that this would have been in the mid-’50s, about the time that Mildred and
Richard Loving were arrested in Virginia for miscegenation and 10 years before Loving v. Virginia.) When he shows up at the jitney dispatch office,
he finds that his father, who never visited him in prison, is deeply disappointed
not just that his son is a murderer, but that Booster doesn’t see what he did
as wrong. He and his father argue, and
his father turns his back on him and walks out.
Turnbo is older than the other drivers and is aggravated by
the behavior of younger folks, especially hotheaded Youngblood, whom Turnbo—who keeps a
pistol in his car—delights in antagonizing. Fielding, who used to be a tailor (he made
suits for Billy Ekstine and Count Basie), is a drunk unsuccessfully fighting
against his urge to swig from the pint he always has in his pocket—even though
Becker has threatened to fire him if he continues. Doub, the man of reason and wisdom, is a
Korean War vet—the former warrior who keeps the peace. When he gets tired of hearing his fellow drivers
blame the white man for all their bad fortunes, he instructs them, “That white
man ain’t paying you no mind. . . .
Hell, they don’t even know you alive.”
Under Becker’s leadership, the drivers and the other
business-owners in the neighborhood decide to organize in the face of the
threatened demolition. They plan to stay
put and defy the evictors; Becker calls a meeting for the evening. But he’s been called to the mill where he
used to work to help fill in when they came up short-handed. When an accident at the mill kills him (off
stage, between scenes), the drivers all assemble at the station to mourn their
friend and employer, and Booster, who hadn’t heard the news, shows up looking
for his father. After the funeral, they
all return to the station as if they didn’t know where else to go, and Booster
instinctively answers the ringing phone: “Car service!” he says—as if he were
taking over where his father left off.
MTC’s production of Jitney is terrific.
It’s August Wilson’s first play in the cycle (and his fourth script
overall), so it’s a tyro effort and it shows all his faults very clearly—a
diffuse plot that meanders and never congeals; scenes and moments that, while
wonderful little vignettes, are digressions; characters that don’t really
become part of the ensemble. It’s also 2½ hours long. The poetry of
his dialogue isn’t fully developed yet, so the language doesn’t quite soar
the way it does in later plays in the decalogue. (It’s still pretty damn “actable.”)
But the characters are magnificent portraits, each distinct and fully
drawn. (Brantley of the Times
noted of the characters that “it is remarkable how much we learn about each of
them within two and a half hours.”) Aaron Frankel, one of my
acting teachers, would call them “juicy” roles—the kind actors really love to
play.
As you can probably tell from my synopsis above, there
really isn’t a plot in Jitney. The events of the play are beads, and the
string, as tenuous as it is, is the coming demolishment of the block of
buildings that includes the cab station, reminiscent of Madame Ranevskaya’s
cherry trees in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. When Booster comes into the station to
reunite with Becker at the end of act one, it looks as if a narrative is about
to be initiated, but when act two begins, it’s clear that was a false
impression. Even the proposed action to
fight the demolition and impending gentrification peters out as a through-line
since it comes so near the end of the play and then Becker, the motivating
force for the demonstration, dies precipitously. Maybe Booster, who signals he’s ready to
assume his father’s mantle when he answers the dispatch office’s pay phone,
will take up this fight—but we don’t know that and the play ends long before
Booster or anybody else can be anointed Becker’s successor. So we’re left with a string of pearls, lustrous
and intriguing though they are, vibrant with Wilson’s depiction of life in the
Hill District that does recall a series of Bearden collages brought to life,
but they’re snapshots, not stories.
The characters, too, are tenuously held together. They’re connected, aside from their common residence
in the Hill District, by their association with the jitney service and, in the
physical sense, their attachment to the station, which in David Gallo’s set is
a sort of island of life isolated from the outside world which is only glimpsed
through sooty widows and the quickly opened door as someone enters or
leaves. (The backdrop is composed of blown-up
photos, some historical and some taken by the designer, to create a collage of
Hill District buildings, inspired by Romare Bearden. Gallo, who also designed the 2000
Off-Broadway production of Jitney,
developed his concept of the set from conversations then with Wilson, in which
the two “spent a lot of time talking about what this place is, and what it
was.”) Not only is the streetscape
outside the station barely visible, as if seen through etched glass, there’s no
life going on out there except the occasional arrival or departure of one of
the characters from the station. Within
the station, though, the life of the play is so magnificently limned, so
palpably drawn, that it brings the theatrical portrait to life for a nearly
sublime two hours and thirty minutes that never lags.
The characters who aren’t drivers are least tied to the
action, particularly Shealy (Harvy Blanks, who’s played in all 10 of Wilson’s
cycle plays), the numbers runner who uses the dispatch office’s phone to take
bets, and Booster, whose significance to the play is telegraphed but never
develops. Shealy’s appearances seem to
do little more than affirm that folks in the Hill District play the numbers and
Booster exists as a flesh-and-blood character pretty much only so he can pick
up the phone at the end of the play; otherwise both characters could be implied
by dialogue. If Wilson weren’t such a
fabulous creator of characters for the stage (meaning, for actors to inhabit),
they’d be throw-aways. They are,
however, like the other denizens of the Hill District, of part of that Beardenian
view of the blues-infused world Wilson saw.
The acting in Santiago-Hudson’s Jitney
is so good that there needs to be a “best ensemble” Tony for this cast.
(The Obies have one and the Drama Desks have one as a
special award; the Screen Actors Guild Awards also have ensemble categories for
both film and TV. The Tonys don’t.)
There’s no star role in Jitney,
a dominant figure like Troy Maxson in Fences. The closest Jitney comes to such a unifying character is John Douglas
Thompson’s Becker, who holds the ensemble together not just because he employs
most of them, but because he, alone, has some kind of relationship—sometimes
tenuous, granted—with each of the others.
(Diana and I saw Thompson, who has a reputation as a top-flight
classical actor, as Thorwald Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Captain Adolf in Strindberg’s The Father at Theatre for a New Audience
last June. My report, “TFANA’s
Scandinavian Rep,” was posted on 13 June 2016.)
Though Becker runs the car service according to specific rules and
policies he’s laid down for the drivers, Thompson plays him as something of a
soft touch—he can be gotten ’round.
Except, it seems, by his ex-con son, for whom Becker shows no
sympathy—as far as we can know, since Becker dies before much can change in
that relationship.
Two other roles stand out in the Jitney ensemble, Doub, played by
Keith Randolph Smith, and Michael Potts’s Turnbo. It’s not so much the quality of Smith’s and
Potts’s performances that make these characters salient here—all the actors do
equally terrific turns—but the prominence of their characters. Thompson is the man of compassion, as
compared to Doub as the man of reason, but sterner than Thompson’s Becker. Still Smith, a big man who looks like he
could crush any of the rest of the men without a lot of effort, gives the air
of a giant who’s not so much gentle as one who very carefully picks his
fights. Potts, a much less likeable
person as Turnbo, behaves like a man who just can’t help sticking his nose in
other people’s affairs. (Turnbo provokes
Youngblood until the younger driver turns on him in rage and then Turnbo runs
to grab the gun he keeps in his car.
Turnbo’s also the one who informs Rena that her sister’s been riding
around in her boyfriend’s car, deliberately implying that Youngblood’s being
unfaithful again.) “I just talk what I
know,” he insists, and Potts made me believe Turnbo believes it. I should also make mention of the strong,
passionate connections actors Thompson and Dirden, Potts and Holland, and Holland
and Patterson create between their characters.
For the rest, Wilson, Santiago-Hudson, and the actors give
each character a serious flaw—short-tempered Youngblood, alcoholic Fielding,
hard-hearted Rena—but imbue them all with such sympathy and even warmth that I
rooted for each of them to come through the deprivations being visited on Jimmy
Carter-era Pittsburgh. The actors never
let me feel any of them was beyond hope, not even unrepentant Booster, who may
have come around in the end to realize what he’d done. As Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review, the 2017 Broadway première of this
1979 play now seems to be “not only saying that black lives matter; but also
that black life matters.” In large part, that Trump-era resonance is
due to Santiago-Hudson’s directing and the cast’s performances.
Santiago-Hudson, a dab hand at Wilson’s work now (as an
actor—Seven Guitars, Gem of the Ocean, How I Learned What I Learned—and director—Seven Guitars, The Piano
Lesson—and even a little as a writer: a playwright in his own right, he’s
been working on the screenplay for Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom in actor-director-producer Denzel Washington’s plan
to adapt all 10 of the cycle plays for HBO following the success of Fences, released last year), did a
terrific job staging this Jitney and David
Gallo’s set, lit by Jane Cox, is a beautiful jumble of street junk and cast-offs.
(Scott Laule is the show’s properties supervisor.) Starting with a superb cast of actors, Santiago-Hudson
tuned them into an integrated jazz-like ensemble so interwoven, each character
and actor riffing on his or her own theme, that none of Wilson’s dramaturgical
deficiencies has a lasting effect. Like
Bearden’s collages, made up of bits cut from diverse sources and fused with the
artist’s own additions, a viewer can step back and just let the whole
experience flow. Santiago-Hudson
understands this dynamic and mostly keeps out of the way enough to let the
actors and Wilson’s writing carry the play.
The physical production is of the same vein. In Gallo’s cluttered storefront, looking like
a squatter’s nest of salvaged odds and ends, the outside world only intrudes in
small bursts: the constantly ringing telephone—almost another character in the
play—bringing in Hill District residents in need of a ride; noises and sounds
(created by Darron L. West) from the street; the hazy view through the
station’s windows of the rest of the block; the incursions now and then by
outsiders to the car service like Shealy, Rena, and Philmore (Ray Anthony
Thomas), a neighborhood doorman who uses the jitneys frequently; and the
conversations of the drivers about goings-on and people in the
neighborhood. This corner of the
universe is enhanced beautifully by the jazz-colored music composed by Bill
Sims, Jr., the period-perfect costumes (in all their 1970s kitchiness) of Toni-Leslie
James, and the hair and make-up styles of Robert-Charles Vallance. Cox’s lighting scheme not only evokes the
time of day, but the designer alternately illuminates corners of the room and
hides them in shadows. (Some reviewers
complained about an expressionistic effect Cox uses at the end as inconsistent
with the tone of Santiago-Hudson’s production, but it went by me so fast, I
didn’t even catch it so it couldn’t have been that intrusive.)
On the basis of 51 published reviews, Show-Score gave MTC’s Jitney an average rating of 87
(including some out-of-town sources) with 98% of the notices positive, 2%
mixed, and none negative. Show-Score’s
tally included 11 95’s (including the New York Times),
the highest rating, and 15 90’s; the lowest score was 65, the sole mixed
notice. My survey will comprise 32
outlets, including the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, the hometown paper of the Hill District.
“Conversation sings and swings, bends and bounces and hits
heaven smack in the clouds,” wrote Brantley in his Times
review of Jitney, which he dubbed a
“glorious new production” at MTC.
Brantley added, “In Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s vital revival . . ., words
take on the shimmer of molten-gold notes from the trumpets of Louis and
Miles.” The Timesman fairly raved about the show: “How sweet the sound. And how sorrowful and jubilant, as life in a
storefront taxi company . . . comes to feel like a free-form urban concerto,
shaped by the quick-witted, improvisatory spirit that makes jazz soar.” (No wonder the notice scored a 95!) Linking the play’s Broadway opening (the
evening before the inauguration) to the political atmosphere of the new Trump
administration and linking Wilson’s dramaturgy to “another great American
dramatist, Arthur Miller,” the Times
reviewer praised the “impeccably tuned ensemble” and singled out John Douglas Thompson for special notice, and
Brantley remarked that Gallo’s set “exudes an aura of both contingency and
vibrancy.” (The Times published a fascinating article, “Picturing Pittsburgh, Iron
City Beer Included” by Erik Piepenburg, that discusses in detail Gallo’s stage
design for Jitney. It ran in the print edition on 12 February in
the “Arts & Leisure” section and is on the Times website at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/theater/jitney-august-wilson-pittsburgh-set-design-david-gallo.html. Both versions are illustrated with photos of
details of the set. ROTters who are interested in—or even just curious about—scenic
design should take a look.)
In the Wall Street Journal,
Edward Rothstein said of the play: “Everything feels thoroughly authentic . . .
. Wilson’s play . . . is so disciplined,
so full of distinctive voices with their own pungent passions and fears, and so
meticulously brought to life by a taut ensemble feelingly directed
by Ruben Santiago-Hudson that we fully accept this world as it is
given to us . . . (with excellent scenic design by David Gallo).” Rothstein affirmed, as I expect Wilson
intended, that theatergoers don’t just see a performance: “We are
eavesdropping; we are witnessing.” Calling
the play a “vibrant group portrait,” Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News declared that Jitney “delivers a gripping ride.” Dziemianowicz dubbed Santiago-Hudson’s
production “atmospheric” and characterized the cast as a “fine-tuned ensemble.”
In amNew York, Matt
Windman labeled MTC’s Jitney “a
focused and penetrating production . . . featuring an outstanding ensemble cast”
who “excel at delivering Wilson’s colloquial but lyrical language.” Windman observed that the play provides “bits
and pieces of plot, . . . but ‘Jitney’ functions primarily as a detailed study
of the characters and their rough environment.”
Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday
called MTC’s Jitney a “[l]oving,
authoritative Broadway premiere” in her “Bottom Line” and went on to
characterize the play as a “rich, chatty, eerily mature work” in “a
meticulously cast” production. In the
U.S. edition of The Guardian, Alexis
Soloski pronounced that Jitney “is
that very rare thing—a play that ought to be longer.” Even at 2½ hours, Soloski explained, “the
immersion in these characters and their world is so closely woven and complete
that when the final line peals out, it’s hard not to wish for another act,
another scene, another ride.” The Guardian reviewer affirmed, “Much of the
acting is extraordinary,” especially noting the confrontation scene between
Thompson’s Becker and Dirden’s Booster, and praised Santiago-Hudson’s “fine ear
for the play’s musicality.”
“Directed with nuance by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and featuring
a stellar ensemble,” asserted Patrick Maley for the Newark Star-Ledger (on nj.com) of MTC’s Jitney, “the show finds real nobility in the everyday lives of a
downtrodden community . . . .” The
review-writer added, “‘Jitney’ is full of rich, flawed human characters whom
Wilson treats with compassion and empathy.” The physical design, Maley stated, made the
show seem “not a museum piece, but a dynamic visit from the past” and the
director “finds the soul of ‘Jitney’ and guides his team toward it with a
steady hand” while “capturing the profound human drama of ‘Jitney’ with
palpable grace.” On NorthJersey.com, Robert
Feldberg of the Bergen County Record warned
that the 1979 Jitney script “bears
the imprint of a young playwright who hadn’t fully found his voice. There are moments of melodrama and
sentimentality that seem borrowed from a common dramatic shelf.” Still, Feldberg affirmed, it has the
Wilsonian quality of “a vibrant awareness of the community he was writing about.” Though the Record reviewer noted that Jitney
is “a vivid signpost to the more significant plays that followed,” he noted
that it “is not a great work,” with “story elements . . . wanting dramatically
in various ways.”
Just to get the perspective of someone who lives in the
milieu of Wilsoniana, I checked the notice of Christopher Rawson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (Apparently a paper of more neighborhood interest
in the day would have been the afternoon Pittsburgh
Press, pages from which appear on the set, but it stopped publishing in
1992.) Rawson called the Broadway début
of Jitney “a splendid, feisty
production” of “one of the most robustly comic and audience-friendly of the
Cycle plays.” The MTC mounting, he said,
“is a full-blooded August Wilson play, realized with professional skill and
heartfelt zest.” Rawson, who’s seen many
a production of Jitney (which,
remember, started in Pittsburgh with two premières), has developed some “presumptions”
about casting. Nonetheless, he praised
nearly all the New York actors—some, like Dirden as Booster, he even found as
good as any he’d seen in the roles. One
or two even surprised him with fresh interpretations or nuances by actors with
different stage presences. Rawson
concluded that in MTC’s Jitney, “the
result is a rich seam of emotion within a lively tragicomedy that speaks to us
all.”
Complaining only about “the minor drag” of “a little too much blues music to mark the
transitions,” the New Yorker reviewer
for “Goings On About Town” reported that Santiago-Hudson “keeps the story
moving” while he “handles the large cast . . . with verve.” The actors, an ensemble of “uniformly good
work,” all demonstrate “great skill and humor,” with particular notice for
Michael Potts and André Holland. In New York magazine, Jesse Green called Jitney “not only a worthy evening of
theater but a fascinating archeological artifact,” but complained, “There is no
central spine to the story, only—. . . as in some jazz—a round robin of
variations.” Santiago-Hudson, said
Green, tries to integrate the pieces “but is limited by the patchwork text.” The man from New York concluded, “If in Jitney we see the marks
of Wilson’s ambition but not yet the payoff, that only makes it more
valuable. Jitney was the way he got there.” The Village
Voice’s Michael Feingold gave a lengthy and detailed analysis of Wilson’s
play and his dramaturgy, then acknowledged that director Santiago-Hudson staged
the MTC revival so that the “depth and density comes out vividly” and “[e]very
role is fulfilled handsomely and inventively.” The Voice review-writer concluded, “Far better than following the rules
of playwriting, Jitney follows the unruly, unpredictable,
inexplicable patterns of life.”
In Time Out New York,
David Cote compared Jitney, “a
soul-sustaining, symphonic piece,” to the cars the characters drive and decided
it “is built to last and moves like a dream.”
Santiago-Hudson “steers a powerhouse cast through” performances
that are a “deliverance for audiences hungry for soaring language and tough
truths.” The man from TONY concluded that MTC’s Jitney is “a thrilling journey.” Maya Stanton of Entertainment Weekly dubbed Jitney
an “intelligent, thought-provoking piece” and “an emotionally bruising gem of a
play” that is “[b]y turns hilarious and devastating.” Stanton further reported, “The talented cast
soars under the confident direction of Tony-winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson,” who
“offers a straightforward interpretation of the material.” The EW
reviewer ends by stating, “From the stellar performances to the sharp
script, Jitney is a substantial piece, and a breath of fresh
air to boot.”
Marilyn Stasio characterized MTC’s production as a “pitch-perfect
revival” with a “fine cast” in Variety. The review-writer’s take on the Broadway Jitney was that director Santiago-Hudson
“dances to the rhythms of ensemble directing, which assures that these actors
live for and through their characters.” David
Rooney’s “Bottom Line” on the play in the Hollywood
Reporter was: “A bustling microcosm of boundless scope and texture.” Labeling it “superb” and “gorgeous,” the HR review-writer declared the production
is “shaped with imperceptible skill into a hypnotic blues symphony” conducted
with “fluidity.” Of the cast, Rooney wrote,
“There’s not an actor on the stage who doesn’t thoroughly inhabit his or her
flavorful character,” and he singled out several for special mention.
In the cyber press, Steven Suskin declared of MTC’s Jitney in the first of two Huffington Post reviews, “Given that . .
. director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has filled his cast with grand performers
giving grand performances, theatergoers can head to the Samuel Friedman
prepared to be entranced and entertained.”
With praise for the cast, especially Thompson and Dirden, the HP reviewer reported, “Santiago-Hudson
helps his cast . . . bring out the richness in the characters.” Suskin characterized the revival as an “excellent
production of an intriguing play, overflowing with that incomparable language
of the master.” He found, however, that
“the script itself, as rich as it is in performance, is not quite an American
classic and not quite up to the other nine plays. Jitney,” he explained, “is built in fits
and starts.” Suskin concluded, though: “That
said, the cast and the production make this Jitney a must-see
for those who appreciate the voice of August Wilson.” In Huffington
Post’s second notice, Regina Weinreich also pronounced the show “a must-see,”
especially given Santiago-Hudson’s “superb direction.” In her last comment, Weinreich admonished, “By
play’s end, with the wrecking ball of gentrification looming large over this
fine-tuned ensemble, you are no more ready to leave the station than Jitney’s
drivers are. RRRRring! It must go on.”
Elyse Sommer congratulated MTC on CurtainUp for “giving Jitney the production it
deserves,” in a “well-paced, sensitive” mounting with the “top to bottom
excellence of this ensemble.” Sommer
spotlighted the work of designers Gallo and James and composer Sims. The CU
reviewer concluded that the evening comes “together for . . . an uplifting and
bracing moment.” On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell described the MTC production as
“superbly acted and directed,” reporting that Santiago-Hudson “makes the play
as lively and funny as it should be.”
Each of the cast members gets due praise from Mandell, as do the
contributions of scenarist Gallo, costumer James, and composer Sims. The New
York Theater reviewer concluded that “for the moment at least, ‘Jitney’
feels not just rewarding, but necessary.”
Jitney “has a
rougher, more contrived quality than later works . . .,” asserted Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania, “but it crackles with the energy of
a writer eager to wrestle with difficult questions.” The TM
review-writer continued: “The result is a deeply satisfying drama that leaves
us grappling with these issues as they pertain to the present day.” Calling the “excellent” production, “directed
with loving attention to detail,” a “stellar revival,” Stewart noted that “great
performances outnumber mediocre ones,” though he is unenthusiastic about “miscast”
Dirden as Booster. The cyber reviewer
praised the rest of the cast as well as James’s costumes, Cox’s lighting,
Sims’s music, and Gallo’s set, and summed up by stating that “Jitney tells
[Wilson’s African-American] story beautifully in two and a half hours. Samuel
L. Leiter, blogging on Theatre’s Leiter
Side, dubbed Santiago-Hudson’s staging of the play “revved-up,” comparing
it to “a boxing ring for champion actors” who engage here in “a slugfest of
performance give and take” under the director’s “coaching.” He warned, however, that “there’s so much
high-octane acting one wishes the actors could now and then step on the brakes.” Leiter offered praise for Gallo’s set,
James’s costumes, Cox’s lighting, and West’s sound design, and in the end, he
quipped, “There may be no jitneys in New York but there are plenty of other
ways to get to the MTC. It’ll be well
worth the ride.”
Michele Willens, calling the direction and the ensemble
acting in Jitney “pitch perfect” on Theatre Reviews Limited, confessed that
she “thoroughly enjoyed spending two and a half hours with this working-class
gang, so touchingly and honestly just trying to make a living.” The TRL
reviewer concluded, “This is Pittsburgh poetry, August Wilson style, and it is
very fine indeed.” On Broadway World, Michael Dale reported
that Santiago-Hudson “delivers a superb production filled with funk, grit,
humor and some positively thrilling acting.”
Dale summed up by asserting, “While Jitney’s impact may not reach the
magnitude of Wilson’s zenith, . . . this compelling production is continually
engaging and thick with humor and emotion.”
Matthew Murray wrote on Talkin’
Broadway of the production that the characters
form a magnetic bond you can feel
emanating from the stage, and, under the capable direction of Ruben
Santiago-Hudson, have the properly melodic way with Wilson’s epically musical
downscale dialogue, which bestows an added respectability and sense of size to
the street patois so many of these people speak.
Murray complained, however, about “the externals”:
David Gallo’s set does not sit
comfortably in the space, and has a too-sweeping look that mutes some of the
sense of claustrophobic dread. (The costumes by Toni-Leslie James, the original
music by Bill Sims Jr., and the sound design by Darron L. West more accurately
capture the mood.) And though Santiago-Hudson scarcely falters in his work with
the actors, his staging of the scene transitions and one critical second-act
moment come across as too self-involved, more about the unexpected effects of
Jane Cox’s lights (which are otherwise strong) than giving these moments the
stark clarity they really require.
On Theater Scene, Victor Gluck dubbed MTC’s Jitney “a magnificent revival” that, in
the current environment, “is timely once again.” Gluck asserted, “a better staging could not
be imagined of this involving and engrossing play,” for which Santiago-Hudson
has assembled a “true ensemble.” The TS reviewer paid compliments to the
designs of Gallo and James, and the music of Sims. He compared the current production with its
2000 Off-Broadway predecessor, which “made Jitney seem like a
series of vignettes, bits and pieces, that didn’t actually cohere.” Director Santiago-Hudson makes it “a great
American story of men struggling to make ends meet and live their disparate
lives side by side.” Gluck concluded, “Not
only is the play absorbing, it is both wise and compassionate.” The review-writer closed by admonishing that
“this is a play that must be seen.”
Calling the Broadway début of Jitney a “sterling revival,” Mich[a]el Bracken reported on Theater Pizzazz that Santiago-Hudson “capitalizes
on [the] flow [of the natural comings and goings], ensuring smooth and seamless
transitions.” The director has assembled
a “remarkable ensemble cast “ among whom “[n]o one stands out because
they’re all outstanding. They play off
each other beautifully.” Though Bracken
noted the long journey Jitney took to
get to Broadway, he closed by asserting, “This splendid production gives it the
wholehearted welcome it deserves.” On NY Theatre Guide (not to be confused
with New York Theatre Guide below), Jeff
Myhre declared, “Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs my choice for best play of the
year.” Wilson’s “words allow mediocre
actors to give good performances, and good actors to give great ones. In this
production, we get a glimpse of what lies beyond great, and it is a gift to the
audience, the cast, and the crew.” He
included praise not only for Gallo’s set, Cox’s lighting, James’s costumes,
West’s soundscape, and Sims’s music, but also Robert-Charles Vallance’s make-up
and hair and Thomas Schall’s fight choreography. The NY
Theatre Guide review-writer concluded, “This is theatre at its most serious
and at its most useful.”
On Front Row Center,
Show-Score’s
only low (mixed) rating at 65, Tulis McCall (who also posted on New York Theatre Guide) commented,
“Sometimes I think of August Wilson as a composer. The text of his plays comes through as
music.” She then asserted, “Jitney has
moments that are transcendent.” McCall,
however, caviled that the pay was “a bit disjoint[ed] on the one hand and
predictable on the other” and held “no real surprises for me.” The FRC
reviewer, though, thought she was in a minority because the audience around her
“was vocal in their response”: “It was as if the music of the piece swept off
the stage and grabbed them up.”
On the air, declaring the Century Cycle “a masterpiece,” Jennifer
Vanasco said on WNYC, an outlet of National Public Radio in New York City, that
after its many revisions, Jitney is “now
close to perfect.” The radio reviewer
asserted that “as directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, this is a magnificent
production, one of the best shows to be staged this year,” reporting, “The
ensemble conveys authenticity and a sparkling vibrancy.” Venasco concluded, “The drivers in Jitney
have a deep respect for one another and we have a deep respect for them. To generate this kind of empathy is art’s
highest purpose.” Roma Torre of
NY1, the news
channel of the Spectrum cable system (formerly Time Warner Cable), affirmed that Jitney
“speaks with an eloquence that transcends time and place.” The characters are “portrayed by an excellent
ensemble” and director Santiago-Hudson “recognizes, more than almost anyone
else, the universal themes in Wilson’s plays that sing to us all.” At WNBC, the New York City outlet of the TV network,
Robert Kahn characterized Broadway’s Jitney
as “an artful and melodic staging” by Santiago-Hudson and praised each member
of the cast. He explained, “The MTC’s
ensemble does a glorious job bringing home [the play’s] message.”
* *
* *
[The ten plays in August
Wilson’s Century Cycle, in the order of their setting, are:
· 1904 – Gem
of the Ocean (premièred 2003, Goodman
Theatre, Chicago; Broadway 2004)
· 1911 – Joe
Turner’s Come and Gone (1986, Yale Rep,
New Haven, CT; 1988; Broadway revival, 2009, Lincoln Center Theater)
· 1927 – Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984, Yale; 1984;
Broadway revival, 2003)
· 1936 – The
Piano Lesson (1987, Yale; 1990; Drama
Desk Award, Pulitzer Prize; Lucille
Lortel Award [Revival], 2013)
· 1948 – Seven
Guitars (1995, Goodman; 1996’; Pulitzer
nomination)
· 1957 – Fences (1985, Yale; 1987; Broadway revival, 2010’
Tony, Drama Desk, Pulitzer; Tony [Revival], Drama Desk [Revival])
· 1969 – Two
Trains Running (1990, Yale; 1992; Lucille Lortel [Revival],2007)
· 1977 – Jitney (1982, Allegheny Rep, Pittsburgh/1996,
Pittsburgh Public Theater; 2017)
· 1985 – King
Hedley II (1999, Pittsburgh Public; 2001;
Pulitzer nomination)
· 1997 – Radio
Golf (2005, Yale; 2007)
[In addition to this
production of Jitney, I
saw Fences on Broadway (with James
Earl Jones and Mary Alice, directed by Lloyd Richards; all won Tonys, as did
the play) in July 1987 (I haven’t seen the movie yet), Two Trains (one of only two plays in the cycle I’ve
seen twice on stage) on Broadway (with Larry Fishburne, who won a Tony, and
Roscoe Lee Browne, directed by Lloyd Richards) in May 1992 and at the Signature
Theatre Company in December 2006, Seven Guitars (the other double-tap) on Broadway (with Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who
won a Tony, Keith David, and Viola Davis, directed by Richards) in May 1996 and at Signature
(with Lance Reddick, directed by Santiago-Hudson) in September 2006, Joe
Turner by the New Federal Theatre at the
Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in late fall, 1996, Ma
Rainey at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in
late fall, 2002, Gem at Arena in
February 2007, King Hedley at
Signature in March 2007, and Piano Lesson at Signature (directed by Santiago-Hudson) in December 2012 (and on
television with Charles Dutton and Alfre Woodard and directed by Lloyd Richards
in February 1995). I also saw
Santiago-Hudson perform How I Learned What I Learned at Signature in December 2013.
(I’ve posted reports on ROT of
Piano Lesson on 14 December 2012 and How
I Learned on 20 December 2014. Earlier Wilson performances—Seven
Guitars, Two Trains, Gem, and King Hedley—predated this blog, but I’ll consider posting the archival reports at
some near-future date. Unfortunately,
there are no write-ups of Fences, 1992 Two Trains, 1996 Seven Guitars, Joe Turner, or Ma
Rainey.)]
