Turner Goodrum
by Barry Friedman
Bridgette Clark, Garnet Burkhalter, Kenneth Page, Andre Grayson and Robert Lee
IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE PART OF A PANOPLY. THERE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE A PANOPLY.
B
ut after writing three of the plays that would ultimately be part of The Pittsburgh Cycle, playwright August Wilson decided to chronicle the African-American experience, decade by decade (though not written or presented sequentially), through the 20th century. The ten plays that resulted were a literary census, if you will, of progress and paralysis through the past 100 years and all set in an area where Wilson was raised, The Hill — Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District. Radio Golf, written in 1997 and first performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005, was the last snapshot, the last field poll. (It was also August Wilson’s last play, as he died from liver cancer a few months later.) The cycle, including Pulitzer Prize winners The Piano Lesson and Fences, was more personal than political, more intramural than polemical. As director Rodney Clark says, “The threads that tie the plays together are the individual struggles the characters must
face and how those struggles are colored by racism.” As for the 1990s of Radio Golf (the golf reference having to do with Tiger Woods’ impact on both white and black America), Ben Brantley of the New York Times called it “an arid, soul-sapping time for the black man,” for it culminated in a war between the past and present, between assimilation and identity, a thought with which Clark takes issue. “Only for those who sold out for personal gain.” Harmond Wilks is a real estate developer about to run for mayor; his wife, Mame, is in line to be the public relations director for the governor of Pennsylvania. Additionally, Harmond and his longtime friend, Roosevelt Hicks, are about to sell a tract of land in The Hill that will fully cement them in the mainstream — and make them rich. They are at the precipice of full membership in America. But there’s a problem. To sell that property, Hicks and Wilks must raze the house at 1839 Wiley Avenue, the home belonging to Aunt Ester,
the former spirit/slave who lived at the address and a character from the first play in the cycle, Gems of the Ocean. So, the question: How much history, memory and identity do you move out so Starbucks, Whole Foods, and an apartment complex can move in? And will it even matter? “Negroes got blindeyetis,” says Hicks. “A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.” In Avalon, a movie about Jews in Baltimore by Barry Levinson, a grandfather in a nursing home tells his grandson about not being able to find the past until he sees his old place of business. “Good thing it was there,” the old man says of the building, “because otherwise I would have thought I never was.” In Radio Golf, there is too much past. And it is a light sleeper, not always welcome — for Hicks and Wilks, it is an unkempt, often unwelcome visitor. How they accommodate it is what happens in Radio Golf. It’s a theme that preoccupied Wilson. As he wrote in the epigraph for Fences, the sixth play in the series: “When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness…”
Radio Golf
Presented by Theatre North February 23, March 1-2 at 8 p.m. February 24 at 3 p.m. CH A RL E S E . NORM A N T HE AT RE Tickets are $15; $12.50 for students and seniors. MyTicketOffice.com and 918-596-7111
IN TERMISSION Februar y 2013
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