King on the road

The Huntington hosts a Wilson work in progress

by Carolyn Clay

KING HEDLEY II, By August Wilson. Directed by Marion Isaac McClinton. Original music by Max Roach. Set design by David Gallo. Costumes by Toni-Leslie James. Lighting by Donald Holder. Sound by Rob Milburn. Waltz and movement staged by Dianne R. McIntyre. Fight direction by David Leong. With Mel Winkler, Tony Todd, Marlene Warfield, Russell Andrews, Ella Joyce, and Charles Brown. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through June 18.

August Wilson has moved into the 1980s, and it is not a nice neighborhood. Oh, it can be a regular Shaker Heights if you're well-connected and white. But given playwright Wilson's epic project, a dramatic recapitulation of the African-American experience in every decade of the 20th century, this is not prime real estate. Certainly the setting for King Hedley II is not -- in David Gallo's bleak rendering, Pittsburgh's Hill District, where so many Wilson works unfold, looks like Beirut. And it's close to the Holy Land in other ways as well, since this potentially powerful but rambling drama has blatant religious overtones.

In Wilson's 1995 play Seven Guitars, which is set in the Hill District in 1948, an addled chicken vendor named Hedley, mixing Marcus Garvey with the Bible, dreams of fathering a black Messiah. A pregnant young woman named Ruby, aware that Hedley hasn't long to live, allows him to believe her baby is his. She even gives the child Hedley's full name, though the moniker got Hedley in trouble, leading him to kill a man who refused to call him "King." King Hedley II takes place 37 years later, after the title character has done time in prison for an eerily parallel murder that he does not regret. King and his friend Mister (whose birth is also heralded in Seven Guitars) are hawking "hot" refrigerators, hoping to make enough money to open a video store. But Reaganomic prosperity has not trickled down to the Hill. Opportunity is nonexistent. The derelict brick houses are soon to fall to urban renewal. The yard is dirt (though King, in a desperate display of hope, has planted seeds whose small chutes he fiercely protects). And everybody's packing, whether it's a .38 or a dainty Derringer. Given the level of justifiable anger and the number of weapons on view, the fatal gunfire that ends the play seems inevitable. (Either that or Wilson's garrulous characters will talk one another to death.)

At 36, King Hedley II is struggling with issues of identity and responsibility -- Ruby compares him to Hedley I, who "wanted to be somebody and couldn't figure out how." In the course of the play, King's roiling frustration is exacerbated by wife Tonya's plan to abort their unborn child and the arrival in town of Ruby's cock-of-the-walk old boyfriend Elmore, who knows the truth of King's lineage. But is what transpires at the end just another mistaken act of violence or some sort of sacrifice? Is King Hedley II the black Prince of Peace? As in previous Wilson works, old-time religion battles old-time superstition, with dotty neighbor Stool Pigeon (also a carryover from Seven Guitars, where he was called Canewell) spouting from Revelation and performing elaborate rituals over the grave of a dead cat, all the while pronouncing God "a bad motherfucker."

King Hedley II bears many of the earmarks of previous colorful and poignant Wilson dramas, all of which boast memorable characters and the rich music of black speech. The best of Wilson's plays, the 1911-set Joe Turner's Come and Gone, blends naturalistic drama, rife with the smell of biscuits and the equally heady aroma of rich talk, with potent spiritual metaphor. Hedley, too, attempts to combine melodrama with metaphor, though the mix is not yet successful. The work boasts, in King, 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, aria-like monologues -- blue-plate specials for the production's fine actors. And the play, which jumbles tragedy with comedy, delivers a classic Wilson moment when one of those top-of-the-line if dubiously procured GE refrigerators King and Mister are hawking gets wheeled into the play's narrow, brick-backed yard, looking like some big, white, glistening Grail.

But King Hedley II, at this point in its development, is far from a crowning achievement. Two-time Pulitzer winner Wilson's plays take an unusual, simultaneous journey toward fullness and Broadway, being worked and reworked in a series of regional productions. Hedley has already been performed at Pittsburgh Public Theatre and Seattle Rep; its Huntington engagement will be followed by productions at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and the Kennedy Center before the new play hits New York. And wherever it goes, Wilson pitches his tent, watching and rewriting until the finished play emerges like a sculpture hacked out of characterful marble.

Well, he has his work cut out for him with King Hedley II, which at its present three-and-a-half-hour length is both over- and underwritten. The principal problem, I think, is that for the first time in his now-eight-play cycle Wilson has connected two works, and he tries to squeeze too much of Seven Guitars into the margins of King Hedley II. This leads to a lot of forced and talky exposition and several implausible confrontations -- the blow-by-blow rehash by Elmore and Ruby of how Elmore murdered King's biological father long ago would surely have taken place before now. If old wounds needs to be reopened as a spur to this drama, the operations should be shorter. And King Hedley II needs to be more firmly rooted in the drama of the title character, a proud black man trying to make his way through the 1980s, when "the wind don't blow my way" -- when money is manufactured by and for white people and manhood, indeed godhood, is determined by who shoots who.

Tonya, a 35-year-old grandmother who has seen both of her husbands go to jail, has a long, virtuoso monologue, an evocation of black mothers frying up chicken for boys dead on the street, the gist of which is, "I ain't raising no kid to have somebody shoot him." When Tonya rejects a wad of cash King has gotten by robbing a jewelry store, he replies, "Money is money. They make it with a machine. I ain't got no machine. I got to get mine the best way I can. It's legal." Then, poignantly, pointing to the writing on a bill: "That's what it says on there." This is the muscle of King Hedley II, Wilson's most pointedly political work. Sure, there's room for some toothsome fat, too, like Mister's dream that he has a halo around his head or the way Elmore outsmarts King and Mister in the refrigerator scam. But the play is too diffuse and too weighted down by the freight of Seven Guitars.

Of course, Wilson isn't a writer of purely sociopolitical drama. Like Joe Turner and The Piano Lesson, in particular, King Hedley II is haunted by spirits of history. And their presence in the play is not sufficiently clear. I would bite my tongue off before suggesting that Wilson make the work any longer. But the importance in the piece of Aunt Ester, the 350-year-old conjure woman who first turned up in the 1969-set Two Trains Running and who finally dies in King Hedley II, needs to be punched up. Ester, whom Wilson recently described in the New York Times as "the most significant persona of the cycle," is called upon, in the earlier play, by residents of the Hill who want to change their luck, cast off their "bad energy" and replace it with "good understanding." She would seem to represent, to Wilson, an old wisdom that the black community has moved away from in the second half of the 20th century. It is her black cat that Stool Pigeon buries in King Hedley II, in the hope of bringing Ester, through the animal, back to life, signifying (I think) some sort of new beginning. Throughout the second act, Stool Pigeon adds totems to the cat's grave, but for Aunt Ester to be revived, he keeps fretting, a blood sacrifice is necessary. The final violence here provides that; the play's last utterance is the dead cat's cry. But, at the Huntington on opening night, that meow evoked laughter. This element of the play just isn't sufficiently integrated or explained; it seems more connected to Stool Pigeon's craziness than to Wilson's theme.

But if King Hedley II requires more work by the gifted Wilson, it is not without a bright court at the Huntington. Jazz great Max Roach is in the midst of supplying the work with a score that ranges from percussive thunder to mellow slink. Gallo's set, with its crumbling facades above ramshackle back porches and a real-dirt garden, suggests a world in decay. And the acting, by a company well versed in Wilson, is both believable and bravura.

The imposing Tony Todd is a taut monolith of rage and touching ambition as King; when he isn't explaining murder as a rite of passage, he's boning up, for the video store to come, on how to run a franchise. As Elmore, Charles Brown is every inch the deadly dandy, spreading his pressed hankie on the porch boards when he deigns to sit, laying out the hustling rules by which he's lived, narrowing his eyes as bonhomie gives way to threat. Marlene Warfield brings a Lauren Bacall-esque alto and a wiry ease to Ruby. And Ella Joyce (first seen at the Huntington in Two Trains Running) has a husky, laid-back intensity that makes her watchful, sexy, ultimately undone Tonya more than a message machine. As Stool Pigeon, Mel Winkler is sometimes hard to understand, but his character -- trying to predict Armageddon from the headlines of the newspapers he hoards -- is a memorable mix of fire-and-brimstone and quirk. The short-term-goal-hugging Mister is actually the character most reminiscent of Seven Guitars' Canewell, and Russell Andrews makes him warm and breezy, whether he's chatting about his halo or his gun.

Like God, August Wilson works in mysterious ways, assiduously writing and rewriting in front of test audiences. In the case of his early works, he was abetted by the director Lloyd Richards, who more or less discovered Wilson in 1983 and went on to helm and help shape his first six plays. King Hedley II, like the revisited Jitney that played the Huntington in 1998 and recently won Wilson his seventh New York Drama Critics Circle Award, is directed by Marion Isaac McClinton, who has a fine sense of its rhythms, both casual and explosive, but can't corral it. King Hedley II may yet go from stage to stage to a proud place in Wilson's ambitious and important chronicle of the 20th-century African-American journey. Right now, though, the author needs to invoke his inner Lloyd Richards.