Arts & Events

"Look up one day and all you got left is what you ain't spending."

The scene is the station office of a jitney outfit in Pittsburgh's Hill District, 1977, where the drivers sit around waiting for a call to pick-up, talking, arguing, playing checkers ... The rhythm of mostly street speech is cut only by the ringing of the phone, the invariable answer: "Car service"and— an occasional message for Shealy, the neighborhood numbers runner, who comes and goes ...

It's 'Jitney,' the eighth of August Wilson's 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, a century of African American life, decade by decade, as performed by the Lower Bottom Playaz of West Oakland, directed by their founder, Ayodele Nzinga, in what was a good two-weekend run at the end of the holidays at the Flight Deck on Broadway in Uptown Oakland. 

There are several layers of story: urban "redevelopment" has arrived on the jitney service's block, threatening to close down the office. One of the drivers, Darnell ("Youngblood"), a Vietnam vet who returned to the neighborhood, gets accused by Turnbo, a folksy but busybody driver, of running around with the sister of Rena, Darnell's girlfriend since high school and mother of his child. And Becker, the jitney service's boss, finds out in a phone call that his son Booster is getting out of prison after 20 years' time for killing his white girlfriend, who had accused him of rape. 

I first saw the Lower Bottom Playaz in 2009, when they were performing plays by Marvin X, Opal Palmer Adisa and Nzinga in a little amphitheater, the Sister Thea Bowman Theater, a stage in the backyard of an old Victorian, a former convent, housing the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement. They had that authentic feel of real community theater, individuals of various backgrounds from the same place, coming together to perform the kind of dramatic material that reflected and expanded on their common experience. 

The Playaz certainly brought that to Nzinga's staging of 'Jitney.' I've seen productions of other Wilson plays from the Cycle, some featuring actors or directors who worked with Wilson, but none had the sense of immersion, of the actors inhabiting and projecting the sense of place, of language and living Wilson loads his plays with. By comparison, no matter how professional, how successful in the sense of production values those other shows had been, they often seemed stagey—and "bitty"—by comparison to the earnest job of ensemble work Nzinga's crew has put into 'Jitney,' giving it an immediate yet integral feel—the finest sensitivity to what Wilson was after in his Cycle I've seen so far. 

The Playaz are just a couple of productions away from being the first company anywhere to perform all the Cycle plays in order. Nzinga points out that even Wilson never saw all of his historical—and historic—creation. She's said she had an epiphany with her first contact with Wilson's work years ago, realizing it spoke directly to her concerns today, and to those of West Oakland, though the plays are set over a century of time in Pittsburgh, and that her players immediately responded to what would seem like older styles of expression in the characters. 

The cast—Luchan Baker, III; Lorraine Nico Buchanan; Tony Butler; Adimu Madyan; Tory Scoggins; Pierre Scott; Koran Streets (who I remember seeing in "The Yard," the amphitheater in West Oakland, playing a young writer in Nzinga's play 'Mama At Twilight'); Tyler Thompson and Reginald Wilkins—unite to form an ensemble, a community representing a community. Wilkins, Madyan and Baker in particular represent their higher-profile characters well, Wilkins with humor, Madyan with a sense of stolid endurance and Baker an acute self-awareness amid desolation. 

Wilson is formidable at getting the place, the milieu, the language across, at setting up dramatic situations bristling with potential, especially here the almost Biblical scenes of a father denying his errant son, who hopes for rapprochement, but ends up revealing the shame that alienated him from his parent. What's delivered from them doesn't always meet up in power to that potential. The misunderstanding between Darnell and Rena is explained away too facilely, with good sentiment, but no theatrical probity. And the stand-off between long-suffering father and son influences Becker's decision to stand off the closure of the jitney station and keep his men working as long as he can, but doesn't completely pan out in his—once more, dramatically facile—disappearance from the action, leaving the men and especially his son—never fulfilled by acceptance or through real opposition, just pushed off by rejection—to eulogize the "old man" and try to pick up the reins he dropped. 

But where Wilson's at his best, building on what other African American dramatists have accomplished—and here Ed Bullins of, say, 'Goin' A Buffalo' comes to mind—the Playaz really shine, make the most of it in a way the more obviously professional, far better-funded productions I've seen have only approached or occasionally succeeded at. Nzinga and her collaborators' long, hard work has paid off—and—as Nzinga says, since Wilson's plays all foreshadow the next one in the Cycle—their future productions of the final two of the Pittsburgh Cycle, 'King Hedley II' and 'Radio Golf,' bringing the chronicle to completion in the 1990s, are something to be looked forward to, wherever they're staged, hopefully from sometime this summer. 

lowerbottomplayaz.com (also on Facebook) and anzinga.com