It focuses on the house of Aunt Ester, “a very old, yet vital spiritual advisor for the community,” as Wilson calls her in the dramatis personae. This drama is set in the Hill District, Pittsburgh’s historic black neighborhood, in 1904. So I decided that I would proceed in the order of the Century Cycle, which brings me to the earliest play in the sequence, and the penultimate play Wilson wrote before his death, Gem of the Ocean. But I admired it enough that I decided I would read the whole Cycle eventually (an added motivation is that I, like Wilson, am from Pittsburgh-and, for that matter, that I moved from Pittsburgh to the Twin Cities as Wilson did, not to push the parallels too far!). I initially chose the latter option and read Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the second play of the Century Cycle, the fifth in order of the composition of Wilson’s published plays, and the author’s own favorite among his works. It is perhaps an open question as to the order in which one should read August Wilson’s plays-the chronological order of the Century Cycle, Wilson’s ten-play decade-by-decade portrayal of the African-American experience in the twentieth century, moving from Gem of the Ocean to Radio Golf? the order of composition, in which case you would be reading Gem of the Ocean toward the end? the order of general-consensus quality, in which case you would probably go for Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson first?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |