Theater Review : Life, Death and the Blues in Pittsburgh Tenement

At the start of “Seven Guitars,” the seventh and latest in an extraordinary series of plays by August Wilson, a woman sings a blues song with the requisite double-entendre: “Anybody here want to try my cabbage?” She and the people sitting around her in the backyard of a tenement house have just been to a funeral. Immediately and almost imperceptibly, their sadness is layered over with the talk of life--just arguing and back-talking and teasing. They are used to losing their own, in this case a brash and promising blues musician named Floyd Barton (Keith David).

The rest of the play is a flashback. The year is 1948, and this is perfect August Wilson territory: a seamless reality of backyard chatter that, like the woman’s song, is both casual and significant at once. Despite a dramatic conclusion--the death of the character whose funeral starts the play--”Seven Guitars” is largely about the casual talk of the seven characters who hang out in this plain but teeming environment. They discuss everything from sex and love to the best way to boil greens to getting arrested for nothing--as common an occurrence as going to church. And each one of them has his or her own striking philosophy, told in polished street talk, which ranges from funny jive to a hushed elegy for a dead mother. And always, there is music.

The play opened Wednesday night at the Ahmanson Theatre on its way to Broadway, where it is scheduled to open in March. It is Wilson’s seventh play set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, each one chronicling a different period of African American life, each one a slice of human history in which the characters are not overtly concerned with the historical. “Guitars” sits in time between “The Piano Lesson,” which takes place in 1936, and “Fences,” set in 1957 (both of those plays earned Pulitzers). In personality “Seven Guitars” is something all its own, the sum total of its funny, ordinary and unique characters, acted with heart and careful truth by an impressive cast. Wilson’s longtime collaborator Lloyd Richards directs.

At the center is Floyd, a guitar-playing singer who followed his dream to Chicago and cut a record that took off. Trouble is, Floyd got a flat fee from the record company and no percentage. So, as his smart and smart-mouthed friend Canewell (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) puts it, he got a hit record but no hit-record money.

Floyd has come back to re-woo Vera (Viola Davis), whom he left for another woman, just before he was thrown in jail for talking back to a cop. Now he’s trying to get his guitar out of hock and take it and the skeptical Vera back to Chicago to make good on his dream. Their tug-of-war is watched over by Canewell, who has a thing for Vera too.

*

Also hanging out, variously, are the sassy neighbor Louise (Michele Shay), her sexy niece Ruby (Rosalyn Coleman), the boisterous Red (Tommy Hollis) and the off-kilter Hedley (Roger Robinson), a kind of cousin to the deranged Hambone in “Two Trains Running.” Like Hambone, Hedley’s derangement seems to stem from too much injustice. His rantings indicate he is waiting for the messiah in the form of trumpet player Buddy Bolden, and it’s unclear till the end whether his brain-spurts will be dangerous to him or anyone else. Hedley does his chicken farming right there in the backyard. A bit of country still clings to these city folk; a neighbor across the way keeps a crowing rooster in lieu of an alarm clock.

The fate of that crowing rooster foretells that of the cocky Floyd. In its denouement “Guitars” most closely resembles Wilson’s 1984 “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” to this viewer the most emotionally devastating of all of his plays. “Ma Rainey” focused on a group of musicians at a recording session and the inexorable forces that led one to kill another. In “Seven Guitars,” the cause and effect of Floyd’s death is more murky, almost arbitrary, no matter how Chekhovian the foreshadowing of the dead rooster. The play never achieves the terrible inevitability of “Ma Rainey.”

Scott Bradley’s set of the brick and stone tenement is both plain and mythical, as befits the play. Through an open window a calendar illustration of Jesus can be seen looking down on things. Christopher Akerlind’s lighting makes a painterly glow at night that is burnished and lovely. Of a thoroughly solid cast, Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Canewell stands out with a performance so steady and rich yet so unassuming you could miss it if you weren’t watching carefully. David delivers the slick and sometimes desperate Floyd but he perhaps misses something underneath; he seems incomplete.

Canewell describes Vera as a woman who makes her bed up high but turns her lamp down low. That mixture of sexuality and goodness is deliciously played by Davis with a quiet poetry that seems to light her face.

With its lack of a truly gripping denouement, “Seven Guitars” is long, at 3 1/2 hours. If you get caught up in the language, the time flows effortless along. Wilson is the rare writer who can keep actual historical facts at bay and still write the living, breathing history of a people.

* “Seven Guitars,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m.; Jan. 21, 28, Feb. 4, 11, 18, 7 p.m.; Feb. 22, 29, March 7, 2 p.m. Dark Feb. 13-16. Ends March 10. $15-$50. (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 3 hours, 30 minutes.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Michele Shay: Louise

Ruben Santiago-Hudson: Canewell

Tommy Hollis: Red Carter

Viola Davis: Vera

Roger Robinson: Hedley

Keith David: Floyd Barton

Rosalyn Coleman: Ruby

A Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre and Sageworks production. By August Wilson. Directed by Lloyd Richards. Set Scott Bradley. Costumes Constanza Romero. Lighting Christopher Akerlind. Musical direction Dwight D. Andrews. Sound Tom Clark. Production stage manager Jane E. Neufeld.