Word: tenements
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SEVEN GUITARS August Wilson sets his latest play in the backyard of a ramshackle tenement in 1948 Pittsburgh, where a gifted young blues singer schemes and dreams through his last desperate days. The Pulitzer prizewinner's new work, which has played in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, is a rich ragout of melodrama and mysticism that should be cooking by the time it reaches Broadway this spring...
...with both theatricality and honesty by Walter Dallas, an experienced interpreter of Wilson who was brought in when Lloyd Richards, who has directed the premiere of every other Wilson play, had to bow out because of a health problem. Scott Bradley's soaring set--the backyard of a ramshackle tenement building, complete with earnest little garden and the tallest, steepest stairway since Jacob's ladder--is abundant in telling detail. Along with Constanza Romero's flamboyant costumes, it brings to vivid life the 1948 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is the locale of the play...
Prominent in the goings on is Hedley, a fierce old man who sells sandwiches made from the chickens he slaughters in the tenement backyard. Wilson's style is down-to-earth realism, but his plays often have a mystical element or character, and almost as often that is where they go wrong. That's the case here. The misanthropic and mysterious Hedley becomes increasingly important to the plot and increasingly difficult to understand, undercutting the narrative drive and distracting the audience's attention from Floyd. At the same time, Floyd's money problems begin to involve several unseen characters. Instead...
...might see a virtual reality and interactive television show that will allow us to crouch down under a tenement with Dan Rather and watch an amazing shot of a soldier being hit by a , again and again. Or feel the heat of a airborne missile as it screams down and blows up a pier a few feet away. The possibilities for exploitation are endless...
...unfashionable fact is that Ellison's writing was too refined, elaborate, to be spray painted on a tenement wall. He was a celebrator as much as a denouncer of the nation that bred him. In his multicolored vision, America was not just a violent jungle but a vibrant jumble of many cultures and temperaments; it mingled melody, harmony, dissonance and ad-lib genius, like the jazz that Ellison played, wrote about and loved...