Del Norte Public Library

Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century-an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama's 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow,...

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);...

"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....