In “Fences,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” and “Gem of the Ocean,” what is seen and what is not seen coexist. That thread might be the blues (“The blues is the best literature Black Americans have,” Wilson once said), or the language, the flights of vernacular poetry that made him as much a bard as a playwright. (He completed the final play, “Radio Golf,” in 2005 he died that October, at sixty.) Nine of the Century plays take place in Wilson’s native Hill District, Pittsburgh’s storied center of Black culture, and, though they each stand alone, a faint, barely heard thread does connect them. Hints of the supernatural glimmer in Wilson’s magisterial American Century Cycle (also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle), his epic project to write ten landmark dramas, each addressing a decade of the twentieth century.
There are moments in her thrilling production (which again stars Jackson, this time as Boy Willie’s uncle) when she seems to have known it in some deeper, stranger way even before then. Jackson, created the character of Boy Willie. After all, she has known Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play since its première, in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theatre, when her husband, Samuel L. As an actor, Richardson Jackson has long been part of the countrywide, unofficial Wilson theatre company-she was part of the momentous 2008 Kennedy Center series of staged readings honouring his work and, in 2009, she played Bertha Holly in a Tony-nominated revival of the playwright’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” The production, now at the Ethel Barrymore, may be Richardson Jackson’s first time directing on Broadway-her 2013 directorial début, “Two Trains Running,” also by Wilson, at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre Company, is her only other professional directing credit-but her touch here is deft, sure, confident.
LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s star-studded Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” is, in a word, magnificent.
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