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Gem in the rough
August Wilson takes a trip into history
BY CAROLYN CLAY

History hovers, the deeply mindful elephant in the room, in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, the latest — and, time-wise, the first — in his cycle of plays mapping, decade by decade, the African-American experience in the 20th century. And time is not the only elephantine thing about the play, which in the Broadway-bound production warming up at the Huntington Theatre Company runs three hours and is so discursive that its actual trajectory (as in all Wilson works, not the main point) from symbolical premise to revolutionary finale is muddied. As has been true of Wilson’s works following his second Pulitzer Prize winner, the 1990 The Piano Lesson, the play lumbers, bearing its not unworthy assets, among them a searing central metaphor and a compelling collection of actors, on its broad back. Gem’s other problem is that its ascent from Pittsburgh parlor to magical realism is less lyrical and piercing, as are Bynum Walker’s purgative encounter with the shiny man and Herald Loomis’s violent vision of bones walking on water in the magnificent Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, than it is prosaic.

The ninth play in the lauded Wilson opus, Gem of the Ocean is set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1904, seven years before Joe Turner, with which it shares an amalgam of African and Christian spirituality — though Gem, in which there bubbles more bitterness at the failed promise of Emancipation, is as incendiary as it is redemptive. The central figure is 285-year-old Aunt Ester, a repository of African-American memory dating back to the arrival of the first slave ships in Virginia in 1619. Mentioned in the 1969-set Two Trains Running and reported to have died at 366 in the 1985-set King Hedley II, Aunt Ester takes the stage for the first time in Gem of the Ocean, in the magisterial person of recent Tony winner Phylicia Rashad. As envisioned by Wilson, Ester is both bulwark of the neighborhood and spiritual guide to the fabled City of Bones, a richly described but clumsily invoked glistening burg at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean built from the "pearly white bones" of enslaved Africans who died on the Middle Passage.

The impetus for the play is Alabama newcomer Citizen Barlow’s need to have Aunt Ester guide him to the City of Bones so that he might have his soul "washed" of its burden of another man’s death. Bamboozled in various ways by the local tin mill at which he took a job upon hitting town, Citizen stole a bucket of nails by way of retribution. Another worker who was wrongly accused jumped in the river and drowned rather than be hauled off to jail.

The injustice of that outcome sparks insurrection in the black community of the Hill District — a boycott of the mill by the workers and a small riot provoked by police at the dead man’s funeral. Ester is a healing figure, but the play is not without conflict, on each side of which is a vividly drawn Wilsonian construct. The provocateur is hoary old Solly Two Kings (a grizzled Anthony Chisholm), friend and suitor to Aunt Ester and purveyor of dog shit that he calls "pure" and carries around in a basket. Solly has shed his original name and rechristened himself for "two kings," David and Solomon — though the latter moniker has proved the sticker. Like the wry but regal Ester, Solly was born into slavery, which is only 40 years gone. He escaped at 20 to Canada, then returned to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad. There are 62 notches in the big stick he carries, one for each slave he helped usher to freedom — a concept at which, given the still-rampant persecution and oppression of African-Americans, he scoffs. "All it means is you got a long row to hoe and ain’t got no plough."

Solly’s adversary is hustling African-American opportunist and neighborhood constable Caesar (the great Ruben Santiago-Hudson), who is half-brother to Aunt Ester’s cook, laundress, and protégée in the healing and supernatural arts, Black Mary. (This gives him privileges at the parlor/kitchen of the sanctuary house at 1839 Wylie Avenue that serves as the scene of this particular Wilson gabfest.) Full of schemes to make money off the needs of his fellow citizens when he isn’t threatening them with the white man’s jail, this enterprising "custodian of the law" is hell-bent on rendering unto Caesar what is his while rigidly adhering to his self-declared "Bible," the Pennsylvania Penal Code, even when it turns him into a regular Javert shooting a boy for a theft of bread.

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Issue Date: October 8 - 14, 2004
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