New Releases by August Wilson

August Wilson''s extraordinary memory play about his early life in Pittsburgh.

NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING SAMUEL L. JACKSON! Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, this modern American classic is about family, and the legacy of slavery in America. August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey''s Black Bottom, Joe Turner''s Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned perhaps his most haunting and dramatic work. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family''s prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles''s Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece''s exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes a “vivid and uplifting” (Time) play about unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary. August Wilson established himself as one of our most distinguished playwrights with his insightful, probing, and evocative portraits of Black America and the African American experience in the twentieth century. With the mesmerizing Two Trains Running, he crafted what Time magazine called “his most mature work to date.” It is Pittsburgh, 1969, and the regulars of Memphis Lee’s restaurant are struggling to cope with the turbulence of a world that is changing rapidly around them and fighting back when they can. The diner is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city’s renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. For just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these people of “loud voices and big hearts” continue to search, to father, to persevere, to hope. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events.

From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Now an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Viola Davis.

Peddling stolen refrigerators in the feeble hope of making enough money to open a video store, King Hedley, a man whose self worth is built on self delusion, is scraping in the dirt of an urban backyard trying to plant seeds where nothing will grow. Getting, spending, killing and dying in a world where getting is hard and killing is commonplace are threads woven into this 1980''s installment in the author''s renowned cycle of plays about the black experience in America. Drawing on characters established in Seven Guitars, King Hedley II shows the shadows of the past reaching into the present as King seeks retribution for a lie perpetrated by his mother regarding the identity of his father.

Set in 1904, August Wilson''s Gem of the Ocean begins on the eve of Aunt Esther''s 287th birthday. When Citizen Barlow comes to her Pittsburgh''s Hill District home seeking asylum, she sets him off on a spiritual journey to find a city in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Gem of the Ocean is the ninth work in Wilson''s ten-play cycle that has recorded the American Black experience and helped to define generations. The Broadway run starred Tony Award winner Phylicia Rashad as Aunt Esther.

It is 1936, and Boy Willie arrives in Pittsburgh from the South in a battered truck loaded with watermelons to sell. He has an opportunity to buy some land down home, but he has to come up with the money right quick. He wants to sell an old piano that has been in his family for generations, but he shares ownership with his sister and it sits in her living room. She has already rejected several offers because the antique piano is covered with incredible carvings detailing the family’s rise from slavery. Boy Willie tries to persuade his stubborn sister that the past is past, but she is more formidable than he anticipated.

A real-estate developer sets about trying to redevelop the ''blighted'' Hill District of Pittsburgh in the final part of August Wilson''s Century Cycle, his epic dramatisation of the African American experience in the twentieth century. Ivy League-educated Harmond Wilks has a plan to redevelop Pittsburgh''s Hill District, and hopes to become the town''s first black mayor. But an old mansion slated for demolition, 1839 Wylie Avenue, turns out to have a significant past. ''I would encourage people to rave in the nonlinearity of his well-made plots, to big up his quirky architecture, to honor guard the house at 1839 Wylie so that it will always remain standing'' Suzan-Lori Parks, from her Foreword

Set in the 1980s, King Hedley II is the story of an ex-con in post-Reagan Pittsburgh trying to rebuild his life. Part of August Wilson''s ten-play Century Cycle chronicling, decade by decade, the history of the African American experience in the 20th-century.

"Regular cabs will not travel to the Pittsburgh Hill District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to each other. Jitney dramatizes the lives of men hustling to make a living as jitneys--unofficial, unlicensed taxi cab drivers. When the boss Becker''s son returns from prison, violence threatens to erupt. What makes this play remarkable is not the plot; Jitney is Wilson at his most real--the words these men use and the stories they tell form a true slice of life."--The Wikipedia entry, accessed 5/22/2014.

Fierce and passionate, The Ground on Which I Stand is August Wilson''s eloquent and personal call for African American artists to seize the power over their own cultural identity and to establish permanent institutions that celebrate and preserve the singular achievements of African American dramatic art and reaffirm its equal importance in contemporary American culture. Delivered as the keynote address of Theatre Communications Group''s 11th biennial conference in June 1996, this speech refocused the agenda of that conference, and spurred months of debate about cultural diversity in the American theatre, culminating in a standing-room-only public debate at New York City''s Town Hall.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh''s Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there''s the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson''s Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in his continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING VIOLA DAVIS AND CHADWICK BOSEMAN From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes the extraordinary Ma Rainey''s Black Bottom—winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her Black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is more than music. It is a riveting portrayal of black rage, of racism, of the self-hate that racism breeds, and of racial exploitation.