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The Public stages an emotionally explosive `Seven Guitars' Originally published June 14, 1997 Thursday, December 16, 1999
August Wilson's sixth prize-winning Broadway play has come home to Pittsburgh in a crackling, explosive staging that strips painfully bare the tragedy at its heart.
Set in a 1948 Hill District back yard, "Seven Guitars" is robustly comic but with a tragic focus not matched in Wilson's work since he burst on the theater world in 1984 with "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." The subsequent torrent - "Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson," "Two Trains Running" and his work-in-progress, "Jitney" - has balanced frustration with hope, forging symbols of African-Americans struggling to reclaim lives broken by diaspora and rejection.
Wilson's constant project is to recover a fractured history, making it whole with the ample arts of language, story, prophecy and wisdom. His recurring theme is the loss of self and its tentative recovery through spiritual healing.
But not since Levee in "Ma Rainey" has there been a central character with such an overtly tragic arc as Floyd Barton of "Seven Guitars." Both are musicians, which is telling, because one of Wilson's most vivid metaphors for spiritual regeneration is the one "song" that tunes the individual to his world.
Both are also young men who refuse to take the marginal work allotted to blacks. They have dreams. They are Americans. Having fought in World War II, Floyd thinks it's time America gave him space. Wilson dramatizes this with the turbulent passion of O'Neill or Williams, his playwriting peers.
But while Levee's self-destructive tragedy emerges gradually, "Seven Guitars" declares itself from the start: In the first scene, six friends have just returned from Floyd's funeral. The 10 scenes that follow carry us chronologically through the previous week, tracing Floyd's spiral of hope, frustration, elation and despair. Threading its way through Wilson's largesse of personality and talk is the mystery: Who killed Floyd?
The answer has its bitter irony. Then the final scene returns to that elegiac, post-funeral moment, touched by a hint of transcendence, leaving us wiser, maybe; sadder, certainly; and astonished by the tumult of interwoven lives.
As Act 1 progresses with its vivid comedy, it's easy to lose touch with that central mystery. Wilson's title refers most obviously to the seven lives, each with its own riff, exploring common themes, branching off into discordance or solo.
To start, Floyd has just returned from 90 days in the workhouse for being penniless - vagrancy, it's called. A recording he made some time before is now a hit. He's determined to reunite with his former love Vera, get his guitar out of hock, gather his two side-men - Red and Canewell - and return to the Chicago recording studio to claim his share of fame and fortune. That he fails is his own fault as much as that of the society that hems him in, but that's true of every tragic hero, from Oedipus to Macbeth to Blanche Dubois.
Floyd's story is shadowed by the contrasting tragedy of the eccentric village elder, Hedley. The West Indian mumbles and rants a confused litany of history, biblical prophecy, ethnic fantasy, personal regret, sexual longing and apocalyptic vision. His is the wisdom of the tribe, twisted by pain.
Coming in just under three hours, the play brims over with fascinating lore and opinion - how to cook greens, say, the relative merits of guns and knives or all about roosters - a powerful image of frustrated sovereignty. Pittsburgh references abound. It has more to say about male-female relationships in five minutes than most whole plays on the subject.
Marion Isaac McClinton directs with a fresh hand and eye, not beholden to last year's Broadway production. He freely explores the lurid edges of the play, freezing moments in expressionistic tableau and underlining the potential for violence. This is Wilson in your face, but with his lavish poetry undiminished.
Neil Patel's detailed backyard set hints at cockpit, jungle, agora - all the forums of passion and debate - and Pat Dignan's lighting adds an otherworldly dimension. Richly supportive, Olu Dara's music can also go over the edge, as in the final scene.
LeLand Gantt is a bantam cock of a Floyd. He lacks the expansive charm of the other Floyds I've seen, Jerome Preston Bates and Keith David, but I feel his tragedy more intensely because he's wound tighter, seething with a conviction of destiny. Even while whipsawed from heights to depths, Gantt has a taut integrity that makes you care.
Lisa Louise Langford is a warm, spunky Vera, and Harriet Foy takes her friend, Louise, to comic extremes without losing her humanity. Russell Andrews' Red has bounce and lovable spirit, while Clayton LeBouef plays all Canewell's levels, the sensitive, watchful survivor within the garrulous exterior.
In the smallest role of a young woman oozing sexuality and embodying the strange hope of the future, Linda Powell is wonderful. Watch her confront Hedley as the audience is afraid even to breathe.
Ah, Hedley. He must be the most difficult character Wilson has written. His rant is both tiresome and mesmerizing, opaque and insightful. Keith Randolph Smith meets him head on with ritualistic flourish.
What an experience this is for Pittsburghers. Wilson drops us down in a strange, faraway place that turns out to be just around the corner - and not only because we live in the same town. Wilson's true world is that of complex humanity, a world he continues to help us explore.
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