On stage at the Aurora Fox Arts Center sits the house at 1839 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s polyglot Hill District. The year is 1904. In that slat-wooden home, its front door opens on a wide room where guests plop down for food but also for talk. There, an old, old, old woman gently but firmly reigns.
Playwright August Wilson named the cultural matriarch in “Gem of the Ocean” Aunt Ester (and she will appear in three more of his plays). In a gesture that has a magical realist flourish but even more speaks to what Wilson called “the blood’s memory,” Ester is wise beyond measure and twice as old as the century that the playwright laid claim to in his titanic, 10-play homage to the Black experience in the 20th century.
Black Mary (Faith Goins-Simmons) and Eli (Chaz Grundy) unfurl a quilt that maps the City of Bones in Aurora Fox’s “Gem of the Ocean,” the first installment in its 10-year commitment to produce August Wilson’s Century Cycle in its entirety. (Gail Marie Bransteitter, provided by the Aurora Fox)
Often referred to as the Pittsburgh Cycle — because nine of the works are set in the area in which Wilson himself came of age — it is better known and appreciated as the Century Cycle. The works spanning 1900 to 2000 are: “Gem of the Ocean,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Seven Guitars,” “Fences,” “Two Trains Running,” “Jitney,” “King Hedley II” and “Radio Golf.”
In what is a bonanza for area audiences and theater makers, the Fox has begun its commitment to stage a show a season for the next decade. Here’s what you should know.
The ways in which bold endeavors launch matter. Under the direction of donnie l. betts, the Fox’s Century Cycle begins with a jewel of a show. A strong, dialed-in cast guarantees that “Gem of the Ocean” owns every bit of its three-hour length. It unfolds in 1904 and touches on the economic inequities of an industrial, smoke-churning Pittsburgh. But it also touches on the significance of the Underground Railroad and dives even further back into the middle passage of enslaved Africans on the way to a land that would provide outright cruelty and prolonged hardship. And yet, the parlor in Aunt Ester’s home, which she shares with her protégé Black Mary, is full of sly humor and canniness, too.
The right director for the journey. Betts has been an active multihyphenate on the scene in town for three decades. He’s a filmmaker (“Music is My Life, My Politics, My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr.” and “Dearfield: The Road Less Traveled”). He’s a podcaster (“Destination Freedom Black Radio Days”). He’s a social justice steward. He’s acted, although being a director has been his forte. His helming of “The Color Purple” at the Fox in 2013 transformed this critic’s assessment of the Broadway musical from “meh” to “color me moved!”) But betts’ relationship to Wilson’s work goes back to his time as a student at Yale School of Drama, where Lloyd Richards was cementing a culture-shifting relationship to Wilson and his work at the Yale Rep.
The ensemble of the Aurora Fox’s production of August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.” directed by donnie l betts. (Gail Marie Bransteitter, provided by the Aurora Fox)
Richards “was a director but he was a teacher as well,” said betts, whose first Broadway play as a rapt audience member was “Fences,” starring James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance.
“Being able to see that process was invaluable,” betts recalled. “Seeing that process of rehearsals, that process of August writing and rewriting, and also seeing the process of how Lloyd Richards worked as a director with these actors and his calm demeanor.
“But so was getting a chance to talk with August one-on-one, not just about the plays, but just about life and sports and different things like that.” If, that is, he could be around August long enough to carry on those conversations, because “he was a chain smoker, you know.”
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Too soon gone. Driven to complete the final two plays of his 10-play vision, Wilson completed “Gem” and “Radio Golf” shortly before being diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in October 2005 in Seattle, where he’d lived since 1990. During his eulogy, Marion McClinton, the director of many of his plays, said of his friend, “He loved his people and he would not let them not love themselves.” Wilson was 60. So immense remains the achievement of the Century Cycle — in its parts, in its whole — that one’s immediate response to his age at death might not be to rear up, appalled at what was too early an exit. Still, what if?
The illuminating power of going decade by decade. In its 1989-90 season, the Denver Center began mounting Wilson’s cycle in its entirety, starting with “Fences.” Israel Hicks directed the cycle. Although an endeavor worthy of the big kahuna of Denver theater, the productions weren’t mounted chronologically, nor did they take place in consecutive seasons. Proceeding chronologically makes Wilson’s American journey thrilling, angering, humbling. And that’s just the start of the list of its effects on the viewer.
Each play stands on its own (all 10 were nominated for a Tony; two received one). Yet cumulatively, the epic argues (and might have theatergoers squabbling afterward) about what has changed and what has stayed adamantly the same. Or, as James Baldwin’s observation in “Notes of a Native Son,” plus ça change (borrowed from the French), plus c’est le même chose (the more things change the more they stay the same) — which is not entirely true but in moments throughout the cycle feels true enough. The role of the law and its officers — here in the form of Caesar — might sting in familiar ways.
Black Mary (Faith Goins-Simmons, left), Citizen Barlow (Steffen Beal, center) and the living ancestor Aunt Ester (Lisa Young) in August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.” (Gail Marie Bransteitter, provided by the Aurora Fox)
Actors are to blame — and thank. Fox production manager Jennifer Orf credits actors with nudging her and interim artistic director Beau Bisson with nudging the Fox to commit to the Century Cycle. “One of our young actors said, ‘I really want to do ‘Fences’ someday,’” she recounted. “I had been hearing for a couple of years from some of my other actors that there was a strong interest in doing Joe Turner,’ and somebody really, really wanted to do ‘Ma Rainey.’ It seemed like it grew from that conversation. I knew that we had the talent to pull off any show in that series, and they’re always trying to find ways to reflect our community of artists and the community that this building is smack in the middle of.”
A boon for actors is a boon for audiences. Director betts remembers from his start as a drama student that something special happens when actors encounter Wilson’s words. “They speak of the respect that they have for August because he’s such an immense storyteller. They all said, ‘He has given us the tools that we’ve been waiting for years,” he said.
The August Wilson Stage and Screen Actors’ Guild. Here is a jaw-dropping list (abridged and ever-growing) of the actors whose careers and artistry have been shaped by being in a Wilson play onstage or onscreen: Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton, Samuel Jackson, Courtney B. Vance, Delroy Lindo, Mykelti Williamson, Alfre Woodard, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Laurence Fishburne, Colman Domingo, Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis and Denzel Washington. In 2015, Washington, who was about to direct and star in the screen adaptation of “Fences” with Davis, announced his intentions of bringing the other nine of the Century Cycle to the screen.
Why this “Gem” shines. Under betts’ direction and amid the ace efforts of the design team, the cast at the Fox rides the emotional swells and harrowing troughs in its story of a young man named Citizen Barlow (Steffen Beal), who arrives at Aunt Ester’s doorstep looking to have his cleaved soul set right. He’s sent away by Eli (Chaz Grundy), Aunt Ester’s gatekeeper. But he doesn’t go far.
Just before, a man accused of stealing a bucket of nails at the nearby tin mill had drowned while trying to escape the law. The local constable, Caesar, is played with boom and menace by Abner Genece. Caesar is the law, the muscle and often the landlord turning the screws of the Black locals of The Hill. His sister, Black Mary (Faith Goins-Simmons), is Ester’s protégé and has a soft heart. A touching counterweight to Caesar is Solly Two Kings (Cris Davenport), a former Underground Railroad conductor who fondly courts Aunt Ester (played with grace and knowingness by Lisa Young.) As the peripatetic peddler Rutherford Selig, Joshua Levy suggests the type of allyship that appears as merely transactional but may go deeper.
Donnie l. betts on Jan. 18, 2022. (Denver Post file)
Later in the show, Selig shares something he’s overheard on his travels: “I came past a general store … and they was talking about ‘Why can’t we have slavery again?’ One man said, ‘Cause of the law.’ And somebody said, ‘Change the law.’ The man asked him, ‘Would you fight another war?’ And he said, ‘Hell, yeah.’ ”
Building the sinew of the arts. Some days before rehearsal began, Genece would do something very unlike his character, Caesar: he would go courting the neighbors, specifically the local barbers and their regulars. He wanted to put up posters for the show. The welcome he received was always warm. He bent the ears of a few and listened to others and got some promises to attend. Did they? “Oh, yes, I have seen a few of those folks in the audience,” he said one night a week into the show.
Good for the community and good for its cultural institution. So how has it been going? “The Fox had its best opening weekend in years,” Orf said — not crowing, just celebrating — earlier in the week. There’s still time to begin your own commitment to the Century Cycle.
But hurry. The show closes on April 14.
IF YOU GO
“Gem of the Ocean”: Written by August Wilson. Directed by donnie betts. Featuring Chaz Grundy, Steffen Beal, Lisa Young, Faith Goins-Simmons, Joshua Levy, Cris Davenport and Abner Genece. At the Aurora Fox Arts Center, 9900 E. Colfax, Aurora. Through April 14. For tickets and info: aurorafoxcenter.org.