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August Wilson’s King Hedley II reveals the heights of tragedy and mysticism in the life of the common black man. Set in the mid-1980s in the African-American neighborhood of Pittsburgh known as The Hill, everyday life embraces assault, murder, robbery, broken families and an enduring fear of homelessness that is as much spiritual as literal.
As a Jeremiah-like character called Stool Pigeon proclaims, "The people wandering all over the place. They got lost. They don’t even know the story of how they got from tit to tat."
This is Wilson’s darkest play so far. A tragedy without the final uplift of Fences or Jitney, it is grimmer even than Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which has more humor, or Seven Guitars, which bookends tragedy with hopeful apotheosis. This reality play is centered on the search for identity, responsibility and guilt in the most painful place — the family.
On one hand, it cleverly evokes the sense of possibility in this decade when a black middle class began to emerge. But in the end, we also see the truth of poor people everywhere: that things never change much for the better, that to get ahead means stealing from others as poor as you, and that pride is an expensive thing to have.
The play is dominated by ex- and future convicts who tote a variety of guns, rage at the thinnest slights, sell hot merchandise and hold up a jewelry store.
But thanks to some of the wisest, most passionate writing of his career, Wilson draws you in by presenting a deeply human context with sociological underpinnings that neither excuse nor apologize, but explain a great deal.
The show’s set — a dilapidated urban area scorched by decades of mercantile depression — is the sad native environment of the title character (Brian Anthony Wilson), a facially scarred ex-convict who is light years away from the social status implied by his name. If he has a birthright, it’s centuries of accumulated rage. We’ve seen that before, but Wilson deftly shows how anger turns on itself and poisons a community whose foundation is built on Old Testament ideas of revenge and a punitive God.
There are glimmers of hope with other characters, including Hedley’s unhappily pregnant wife Tonya (Sandra Daley), hesitating to bring a child into a drive-by world; his partner in crime Mister (Bryan Hick), who conjures up get-rich schemes; and con man Elmore (Al White), whose dapper clothes clash with his roach-like survival skills.
Wilson’s play is a heady mix of rich talk and potent spiritual metaphor. Hedley, too, attempts to combine melodrama with metaphor. The play portrays King as a tower of an angry man trying to forge a personal code in a world where morality has been shot up like some victim of a drive-by killing. The gambler Elmore is fascinating, too, with his self-invented philosophy of empowerment. All the characters are granted their Wilson signature of aria-like monologues — blue-plate specials for the production’s generally fine actors.
As King, Wilson is a simmering volcano ready to explode. His antagonist is White’s masterful Elmore, a stout fashion plate all the more steely for his dapper surface.
Johnnie Hobbs Jr.’s Stool Pigeon grows on you as you catch the keening passion beneath his eccentricity, and Hicks’ feckless Mister provides rich accompaniment without an ounce of caricature.
Though engaging, Ruby is no true mother, as King says several times. (They never touch until the climactic scene.) Linda Gravatt realizes Ruby’s charm easily but Daley does little to make her character sexy or otherwise appealing.
Any drama that consistently aims as high as Hedley does, inviting comparison to everything from Aeschylus’ House of Atreus to the Book of Job, is sometimes going to miss its target.
The play’s monologues couldn’t be more long-winded, but the original running time of three hours has been pruned to two hours and 40 minutes.
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King Hedley II
Plays & Players Theater
1714 Delancey St.
Through Sunday
Tickets: $30-$45
215-569-9700
