Early in August Wilson’s King Hedley II, the title character’s mother criticizes the dirt he’s using to plant a garden. It’s a recurring metaphor for the play’s financially and spiritually oppressed characters. Can they find a way to grow out of their difficult backgrounds with the odds stacked against them?
The gritty production by Soul Rep Theatre and Bishop Art Theatre Center of the ninth of Wilson’s 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle -- each representing a decade in 20th century African
American history as experienced in the city’s Hill District -- doesn’t provide easy answers.
Instead, it presents a landscape of tough yet vulnerable people mostly trying to do the right thing in President Ronald Reagan’s crack-torn America, circa 1985, never asking the audience to feel sorry for them or their struggles. Music from gospel to hip-hop serves as a historical connector.
What’s ultimately brilliant about King Hedley II is how it uses its specific setting and circumstances to uncover universal truths about human nature and the resilience it takes to cope with the mysteries of life, especially the question of what motivates our feelings and behavior. Secrets of the kind that can plague any family come spilling out at just the wrong time.
Seen at last Sunday’s matinee, these ideas were elevated by an accomplished cast, starting with Dennis Raveneau as Stool Pigeon, an older neighbor of the Hedleys given to the kind of religious philosophizing that can sound like the rants of an unhinged lunatic. As the play turns darker, his outsized musings ring more and more true.
King Hedley II is a kind of sequel to Wilson’s Seven Guitars, set in 1948. It featured younger versions of Stool Pigeon and King’s mother, Ruby, here played with understated matter-of-factness by Soul Rep co-founder Anyika McMillan-Herod. Ruby’s been around and seen it all.
Still, like everyone else, she’s trying to rise above her station even as she’s dealing with the latest indignity: the disconnection of her phone line for nonpayment. King (a seething Brian Gibson) has just arrived home from a seven-year prison sentence for killing a man who slashed his face with a razor. His wife, Tonya, (put-upon Olivia Lewis) is Ruby’s flip side. She’s seen too much.
King has dreams of opening a video store with his friend Mister (a confident Jamal Sterling). They’re selling likely hot refrigerators to raise the money. A quicker get-rich scheme proves just as futile. Enter huckster Elmore (gregarious Jerrold Trice) wielding a pair of loaded dice and history with Ruby.
It’s a combustible package that builds over the play’s three-hour, 20-minute length, including one intermission. Credit director Jamal McNeil, who grew up in Pittsburgh and was part of Wilson’s theater troupe as a child, for keeping the action moving at a pace that doesn’t allow the audience to get restless or bored.
Chekhov once famously said the appearance of a gun in the first act portends that it will go off in the second. King Hedley II contains three or four, including a supposedly concealable Derringer that creates some of the play’s gallows humor. You can just imagine how this tale of woe will end.
Details
Through Oct. 26 at Bishop Arts Theatre Center, 215 S. Tyler St. $20-$30. soulrep.org. bishopartstheatre.org.
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