January 16, 2003: Wilson, King Hedley II
Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, transfer from the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company
Apparently August Wilson made it big in London last year with the production of Jitney at the National Theatre. If it was the same production I saw (but probably it wasn’t) at the Union Square Theatre in New York in November 2000, it must have made quite an impact. Yet it is the Tricycle, a modest but well appointed 250-seat theatre in the major Irish enclave in London, Kilburn, that has been the venue for three or four of Wilson’s plays, part of the ten-part epic saga he is writing of the progress (if that’s the word) of Blacks in America “from property to people” (not sure I have that quotation right). If Kilburn, a district where the local news agent in the high street offers at least a dozen Irish newspapers, seems an odd place for such a play, be it also known that various plays originating in or taking as their subject matter life in the Caribbean, or for that matter ethnic community life in the Americas more generally, have found in the Tricycle with its interested audience a welcome outlet.
This play is three hours long, including the twenty-minute intermission; but though I might have preferred the elimination or at least the muting of a doomsday character, a white man with an anomalous southern accent who keeps quoting the Bible and reminding us that God is “a bad motherfucker,” who seems to be intended to add a vatic dimension but only manages to distract and irritate, I would not have wished it five minutes shorter than it was. Wilson’s great strong point is his ability to write for the solo voice, angry, impassioned, wise, or pig-headed and foolish, by turns. And his dramatic structures seem crafted to give his characters the opportunities they need to tell us who they are, where they came from, where they want to go, and where a harsh, unremittingly hostile life has prevented them from going. Wilson is at his best in capturing, at great length, the real tones, rhythms, syntax, and vocabulary of such people and making us — forcing us — to listen. He then proceeds to show us some climactic, usually physically violent, event that reaps the bitter promise built up over the course of the play.
So it is in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and so it is in this current play, whose central character, King Hedley II, is called such because the man he believes was his father was a self-crowned king and he aims to follow in his tracks. But his life has gone astray so far; he has served seven years for manslaughter after killing the man who cut him up badly and left a prominent scar from his scalp to his chin, and he is tempted into armed robbery to get the cash he needs to open a video store. Enter the con-man Elmore, who returns to sweet-talk King Hedley’s mother Ruby into taking him back and marrying him. One of the long stories told in the play is Elmore’s, of how he killed Ruby’s husband — and then follows it with the revelati