Completing a chronicle of the black experience

By Michael Kuchwara
Wire Service Correspondent

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – A more than 20-year journey is ending pretty much where it started.
The first full run-through of August Wilson's “Radio Golf” is about to get under way. It is the final chapter in Wilson's astonishing 10-play cycle chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America one play for each decade.
“It just feels like the right thing to do to come full circle,” Wilson says. Dapperly dressed in a dark sports coat, green shirt, checkered tie and his customary jaunty cap, the playwright sits drinking coffee and smoking Marlboro Lights in the outdoor patio of a nearby used bookstore.
“I had this baseball analogy,” he says, recalling a poem he wrote two decades ago on his 40th birthday (Wilson turned 60 on April 27). The subject of the poem was about finding your way home. “I've gone to first base, second base, third base, and now I've made it back here.”
“Here” is the Yale Repertory Theatre, where the world premiere of ``Radio Golf'' is now on view through May 14. The Rep has been the first professional home for five other Wilson plays in the cycle, including his initial Broadway production, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,” in 1984. The others have been “Fences,” “Joe Turner's Come and Gone,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Two Trains Running.” The cycle also includes “Jitney,” “Seven Guitars,” “King Hedley II” and “Gem of the Ocean.”
“It's a unique achievement in the history of American playwriting such sustained quality over such a long period of time,” James Bundy, artistic director of Yale Rep, says of Wilson's monumental 10-play effort. “It's the breath of August's ambition. It's the commitment to a structure that he stuck with by saying, ‘I'm going to write one for every decade’ and he actually did it.”
Wilson is more modest about the grand design.
“The goal was to get them down on paper,” he says with a laugh. “It was fortunate when I looked up and found I had the two bookends to go. I didn't plan it that way. I was able to connect the two plays.” Wilson is referring to “Gem of the Ocean,” chronologically the first play in the cycle, although the ninth to be written. It takes place in 1904 and is set in Pittsburgh's Hill District at 1839 Wylie Ave., a specific address that figures prominently, nearly 100 years later, in the last, “Radio Golf.”
Wilson says of the main characters in “Radio Golf.”
The plot concerns the grandson of one of the characters in “Gem of Ocean.” He is a successful real estate man named Harmond Wilks, an entrepreneur who is going to redevelop the Hill with the help of federal money and buy a radio station along the way. Among the properties scheduled for demolition is the house on Wylie Avenue. But a strange man shows up, claiming to own the building, and starts painting it.

“The house represents history and tradition,” Wilson says. “The black middle class now has education and resources. How do you return those resources to the community as opposed to benefiting only your individual, personal gain? That's what `Radio Golf' is about. The play actually begins where it should end: ‘We're black and we're successful in America. We have money. End of story.' Not quite.”
Actors often compare Wilson's language to Shakespeare's, particularly in the plays set in the early part of the century. Difficult, but worth the effort.
Wilson remembers the date he started writing “Radio Golf'’ Dec. 16, 2004 which was after “Gem of the Ocean” had opened on Broadway. The idea for the play had been percolating for a long time.
“I would go down to my basement and sit there for hours listening to music. Queen has a song called ‘The Show Must Go On,’ and I would listen to it,'' he recalls. “After my wife and kid would go to bed, I would go down to the basement, generally from midnight to about three in the morning, and write.”
The playwright favors imagination and memories of Pittsburgh, the setting for most but not all the plays in the cycle.
Wilson usually returns to Pittsburgh once a year to visit his mother's grave, but he says he couldn't live there. “Too many ghosts,” he explains. “But I love it. That's what gave birth to me.”