Radio Golf

A house is crumbling. In August Wilson’s RADIO GOLF Aunt Ester’s old home represents the play’s central conflict, the rift between the force of history, African American history that is, and the power of redevelopment.

Rarely has the groundbreaking playwright, Wilson, written such a literal play. In fact,  RADIO is didactic to the point of proselytizing. Maybe that’s a reflection of the period in which it’s set, Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the 1990’s. Now money is what it’s all about. And Harmond Wilks, played by Harry Lennix and Roosevelt Hicks, played by Jones A. Williams, are two successful businessmen with a multi-million dollar redevelopment plan that will bring the likes of Whole Foods and Starbucks to the urban ghetto. Meanwhile Wilks, who shares a name with President Lincoln’s assassin, is the Democratic Party’s prize candidate for Mayor. When he gets shot down, he learns to stand up.

Clearly, the nature of this material is about a transaction – the sale of Aunt Ester’s old home and the human politics versus the beaurocratic measures that will determine its outcome. Unfortunately, transaction is also at the heart of every relationship. When we first meet Wilks’ wife Mame, portrayed by the persuasive Tonya Pinkins, it’s to discuss his campaign speech and the job she’s vying for in the governor’s office. It’s not until she threatens to divorce him that the conversation turns to anything more than business as usual.  And when it does, it only reinforces how clearly their emotional attachment is dictated by political necessity.

For Wilson, who has chronicled African American life in the 20th century decade by decade, this is a significant, albeit disappointing departure from the psychological realism of his earlier works. The author of such fundamentally tragic characters as the monarch of King Hedley II or the fallen baseball star in FENCES, creates here mere stereotypes. Most obviously, Roosevelt Hicks, an Uncle Tom and more subtly, the cantankerous Joseph Barlow, an old man who shuffles when he walks, yet maintains the audacious and vexing agenda of holding on to his dilapidated property. In this, he finds an ally in Sterling Johnson played by John Earl Jelks with a comedic edge. That Wilson finds a way to join them all at the hip, brothers beneath the skin so to speak, is a manipulation of the plot more than a revelation of the characters and their human relationships.

In spite of this, director Kenny Leon, brings the story to a rousing cry for battle, one which is more than mere flag waving, and which evokes the spirit of human victory in a delightfully Wilsonian way.

That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.