Joe Turner's Come and Gone by 
Gem of the Ocean by
"No one except perhaps Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater."--John Lahr, The New Yorker "A swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty. Theatergoers who have followed August Wilson's career will find in Gem a touchstone for everything else he has written."--Ben Brantley, The New York Times "Wilson's juiciest material. The play holds the stage and its characters hammer home, strongly, the notion of newfound freedom."--Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune Gem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. 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, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life. Gem of the Ocean recently played across the country and on Broadway, with Phylicia Rashad as Aunt Esther. Earlier in 2005, on the completion of the final work of his ten play cycle-surely the most ambitious American dramatic project undertaken in our history-August Wilson disclosed his bout with cancer, an illness of unusual ferocity that would eventually claim his life on October 2. Fittingly the Broadway theatre where his last play will be produced in 2006 has been renamed the August Wilson Theater in his honor. His legacy will animate the theatre and stir the human heart for decades to come.
The Piano Lesson by
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 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.
Fences by
Drama / 5m, 2f / 1 Set Winner of the New York Drama Critic's and Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize, this sensational drama starred James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, a former star of the Negro baseball leagues who now works as a garbage man in 1957 Pittsburgh. Excluded as a Negro from the major leagues during his prime, Troy's bitterness takes it's toll on his relationships with both his wife and son who now wants his own chance to play. "One of the great characters in American drama." - The New York Post "One of the richest experiences I have ever had in the theatre. I wasn't just moved. I was transfixed." - The New York Post "A blockbuster and a major American play." - New York Daily News
Jitney by
Urban renewal threatens the dingy office of Becker's gypsy cab company, just as his estranged son returns.
August Wilson by
Just prior to his death in 2005, August Wilson, arguably the most important American playwright of the last quarter-century, completed an ambitious cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century. Known as the Twentieth-Century Cycle or the Pittsburgh Cycle, the plays, which portrayed the struggles of African-Americans, won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, a Tony Award for Best Play, and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle is the first volume devoted to the last five plays of the cycle individuallyOCoJitney, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio GolfOCoand in the context of Wilson's entire body of work.
The Past As Present in the Drama of August Wilson by
Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press).
Understanding August Wilson by
2006 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! In this companion volume to The Saint John's Bible,Christopher Calderhead takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of this extraordinary project. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, this book tells the story of the makers of the Bible and the community at Saint John's Abbey and University. The day-to-day struggles of such a monumental undertaking included challenges such as the selection and preparation of more than 250 calf skins, as well as forming a team of calligraphers accustomed to working independently and communicating the concerns of the advisory council in Minnesota with the artists in Wales. Illuminating the Word: The Making of The Saint John's Bibleexplores a modern version of an age-old relationship between patron and sponsor, and the artistic director, scribes and artists producing this monumental artwork. It describes lectio divina, the unique method the Benedictine monks use to read the Bible, in which the Holy Scriptures come alive through the power of imagination. It explores the challenge of creating new images for ancient stories. It chronicles the artistic techniques, the tools and materials and the workshop practices Donald Jackson used to create his lifetime masterpiece. Illuminating the Word reveals the working process behind one of the greatest undertakings of our time and vividly brings to life its challenges and triumphs. Christopher Calderhead is a visual artist and graphic designer who has exhibited his letter-based works in the United States and Great Britain. He graduated from Princeton with a bachelor's degree in Art History. His early interest in the English Arts and Crafts movement and formal pen lettering led him to the Roehampton Institute in London, where he studied calligraphy under Ann Camp. In 1988 he was elected to Fellowship in the Society of Scribes and Illuminators. In 1998 he obtained a Master of Divinity degree from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Ordained the same year, he has served parishes in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church USA. He is editor of Alphabet, a journal of the lettering arts published by the Friends of Calligraphy. His series of short radio pieces, Looking for Spirituality at Tate Modern," was broadcast on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire in 2002. His book, One Hundred Miracles, a collection of miracle paintings by the great masters, was published in 2004. He lives and works in New York City. The Saint John's Bibleand Illuminating the Word were commissioned by Saint John's Abbey and University as an expression of the Benedictine monks' daily focus on scripture and commitment to books, art and religious culture.