Del Norte Public Library

Pittsburgh corporate lawyer Nick Fallin's high life has gotten the best of him. Arrested for drug use, he is sentenced to 1,500 hours of community service. He must now squeeze those hours into his 24/7 cutthroat world of mergers, acquisitions, and board meetings. Reluctantly, he is now a part-time child advocate at Legal Aid Services, where one case after another is an eye-opening instance of kids caught up in difficult circumstances. As the show...

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);...

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);...

"August Wilson liked to say that his plays were "fat with substance." And he was right: his ten-play cycle - Wilson wrote one for every roiling decade of the African-American experience in the twentieth century - transforms historical tragedy into imaginative triumph. The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically; so are Wilson's plays, which swing with the pulse of the African-American people, as they moved, over the decades, from property to personhood....