Week 1: Gem of
the Ocean The shock of freedom at
the beginning of the century.
Week 2: Joe
Turners Come and Gone Reassembling
of identity – 1910-1919
Week 3: Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom The struggle
for power in urban America in the Twenties.
Week 4: The
Piano Lesson The dilemma of
embracing their pasts as slaves in the Thirties.
Week 5: Seven
Guitars The promises made and broken
to those who served om World War II.
Week 6: Fences The fraught adaptation to the bourgeois
values of the Fifties.
Week 7: Two Trains Running – the stagnancy in the midst of the Sixties’
militancy.
Week 8: Jitney
– the disenfranchisement during the boom of the Seventies.
Week 9: King
Hedley II – continuing disenfranchisement in the Eighties.
Week 10 : Radio
Golf - the assimilation into the mainstream and the
accompanying spiritual alienation of the Nineties
My hope is to integrate the
biography of August Wilson into each presentation.
The ten plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, dealing with the African-American experience in a racial divided United States.
There is a collection of all 10 plays available, but all are available, individually, on Amazon and Samuel French. L A libraries have them as well.