"1927."

Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson); the promises made and broken to those who served in World War II (Seven Guitars); the fraught adaptation to the bourgeois values of the fifties (Fences); the stagnancy in the midst of sixties militancy (Two Trains Running); the disenfranchisement during the boom of the seventies and eighties (Jitney and King Hedley II); and the assimilation into the mainstream and the accompanying spiritual alienation of the nineties (Radio Golf).