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By Jack Kroll
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After the premiere of August Wilson's Seven Guitars at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago last week, a party took place at famed bluesman Buddy Guy's club, Legends. It was the perfect place for Wilson, who acknowledges the blues as his inspiration. No black playwright has entered the mainstream as strongly as Wilson, 49: of his five previous plays, twohave won Pulitzers, "Fences" (1987) and "The Piano Lesson" (1990). "Seven Guitars" is slated for Boston's Huntington Theatre next fall and later for Broadway.
In Wilson's ambitious decade-by-decade cycle of plays about the black experience, "Seven Guitars" falls in the 1940s, during the postwar boom, which hasn't reached his characters in a Pittsburgh (Wilson's hometown) backwater. Six of them gather in the backyard of a rooming house to mourn the death of Floyd (Schoolboy) Barton, a promising blues guitarist. The play then flashes back to cover Floyd's last week of life. "Seven Guitars" is a metaphor for the characters, seven people interlacing the bluetoned music of their lives.
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Floyd (Jerome Preston Bates) has had a hit record (for which he's been paid almost nothing). He's desperately trying to get back to Chicago to make another with harmonica player Canewell (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and drummer Red Carter (Tommy Hollis). With equal desperation, Floyd is trying to repair his relationship with Vera (Viola Davis), whom he had left for another woman. Completing the septet are Louise (Michele Shay), a whist-playing earth mother; her pregnant, seductive niece Ruby (Rosalyn Coleman), and Hedley (Albert Hall), who kills chickens for his sandwich business, utters apocalyptic prophecies and bewails his childless state.
Like Wilson's other plays, "Seven Guitars" is a kind of jazz cantata for actors. Wilson creates a gritty, lyrical polyphony of voices that evokes the character and destiny of these men and women who can't help singing the blues even when they're just talking. With the blues, black Americans fuse the hurt of their history with the exultation of their spirits: in the midst of mourning, Louise sings a sultry "Anybody here wanna try my cabbage . . ." Wilson's surface realism is like a business suit on a guerrilla fighter: "Seven Guitars" bristles with symbolism, with rituals of word and action that explode into anguished eloquence and finally into violence. Floyd's doom is shocking, unexpected, yet inevitable.
Replacing Wilson's longtime director and alter ego, Lloyd Richards, who fell ill just before rehearsals, Walter Dallas leads a superb cast in an ensemble performance that raises sincerity to a force of shattering power. Bates and Hall rescue Wilson from the brink of sentimentalism when Floyd sings the Lord's Prayer accompanied by Hedley's homemade one-string guitar. These are not victims, wallowing in voluptuous resentment. They are tragic figures,bursting with the balked music of life.
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