Playwright: August Wilson At: Congo Square Theatre Company at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport Ave. Tickets: 773-935-6875; www.athenaeumtheatre.org; $35 Runs through: April 6
August Wilson’s 10-play cycle is best approached as you would a 19th-century novel— that is, a multigenerational saga written to be consumed, chapter by chapter, like a PBS miniseries. If this mandates increasing amounts of expository baggage for each successive episode, be assured that playgoers arriving with comprehensive recall of the characters’ histories are rare, so it’s perfectly acceptable to ignore allusions to past events and focus on the story under immediate scrutiny.
Our play, set in the 1980s, not only tracks the further adventures of the neighbors introduced by Wilson in his 1940s-era Seven Guitars, but shares that earlier work’s structure, its action focusing on two men—one with his destiny ahead of him and another with it behind him. Two secrets also play a part in their fates—the first concerning the lineage of ex-convict King Hedley, and the second turning on the murder of a husband whose widow aging-gambler Elmore vows to marry. Amid the violence and despair of the Pittsburgh ghetto, however, the only choices left to wives and mothers are whether to embrace the suffering of these social outcasts or to distance themselves from angry rebels doomed to untimely destruction. Audiences looking for another ripped-fromthe- headlines docudrama will not find it here, though. The woes of these disenfranchised citizens may be exacerbated by poverty and racism inviting extreme solutions, but Wilson’s overriding tone is that of classical tragedy— manifested most noticeably in the self-styled shaman named Canewell, but called “Stool Pigeon” by his peers, who erects a shrine to the community’s recently deceased matriarch in the alley next to King’s vain attempt at sowing a garden in the barren soil.
The language likewise resounds with operatic grandeur but—far from overwhelming us in the Athenaeum’s tiny third-floor studio—the close quarters serve to lend the dramatic action an urgency that propels us to our crisis at what feels like breathtaking haste, despite a running time of nearly three hours. Some of this may be credited to director Daniel Bryant’s deft utilization of overlapping dialogue, but more than mere orchestration is the Congo Square actors’ facility for creating spoken-word symphonies from the music of Wilson’s prose to render us spellbound right up to the final explosive ending.