A Dream Deferred

In a world lit by moral twilight, there’s a grim honor and directness in killing a man for the right reason, according to Elmore (Charles Brown). But no honor comes from “stealing somebody’s life from the back seat of a Toyota,” says this urban village elder--the village being a hollowed-out 1980s Pittsburgh in August Wilson’s newest play, “King Hedley II.”

“That’s why the black man’s gonna catch hell for the next hundred years,” he says. “These kids gonna grow up and get old and ain’t a man among them.”

Now at the Mark Taper Forum, “King Hedley II” finds playwright Wilson wrestling with a decade offering precious little hope for the disenfranchised. The play itself--which already has visited Pittsburgh, Seattle and Boston, and next goes to Chicago--ranks as Wilson’s grimmest work. The best of this unruly material sings. Downplaying the rhetorical grace and force of this particular playwright is crazy: When he’s on a roll, when he gets his characters reflecting on the past while butting up against the present, Wilson cannot be beat.

Still, it is not yet among his best. At this point its density (three hours, 15 minutes) tends to flatten rather than deepen the characters.

With “King Hedley II,” which would be worth seeing for director Marion McClinton’s superbly acted production alone, Wilson lets Fate guide the way, in the fashion of Greek tragedy. At present, his frustrated, rageful title character lacks dramatic heft. As was the case with Floyd Barton of “Seven Guitars,” the 1940s-set play in which two of Wilson’s six “Hedley” characters first appeared, Hedley should dominate the setting but doesn’t, somehow. His fate never becomes a terrible inevitability.

Hedley, portrayed by the excellent Harry Lennix (“Titus”), is a scarred man physically and metaphorically. (That’s why writers like scars; they work both ways.) In “Seven Guitars,” the elder Hedley was looking for a son to continue the line--a savior for his people, no less.

Hedley was birthed by thwarted singer Ruby (Juanita Jennings), whose backyard provides the setting. As was the case with Wilson’s “Jitney,” which recently played the Taper en route to New York, the contribution of scenic designer David Gallo counts for a lot. The look of “Jitney” was that of prosperity amid urban renewal; “Hedley,” with its crumbling brick tenements and war zone atmosphere, speaks of dreams deferred.

Hedley killed the man who cut his face, and for the killing did seven years’ prison time. Now he’s out. He is married to Tonya (Mone Walton). He has dreams of opening a video store with his friend Mister (Monte Russell). They’re selling hot refrigerators to raise cash. Then they rob a jewelry store.

The next-door neighbor, Stool Pigeon (Lou Myers), comes from “Seven Guitars,” where he was known as Canewell. He’s a familiar Wilson archetype: The half-mad visionary, peddling the word of a particularly wrathful and apocalyptic God. A secret plagues Ruby’s house. Long before Hedley discovers the truth (at a rather obvious juncture, late in Act 2), it’s revealed his father isn’t who he thinks it is.

Wilson really isn’t a plot man, any more than he is a historian. You don’t go to his plays for narrative complexity, no matter what the program notes say. You go to his plays for the sheer expressive beauty of his language. And as well as anyone writing for the stage today, he can set up an argument between two characters about things that truly matter--love, a life, the future, the past--and keep our sympathies richly off balance. As I say: This has nothing to do with plotting. Wilson is, in fact, pretty shameless and obvious when it comes to hauling out the guns to jack up the tension.

The climax of “King Hedley II” works in spite of itself: It’s telegraphed but effective all the same. It is, however, melodrama, as opposed to rich and troubling drama, or tragedy. It gives you that disappointing “Two Trains Running” feeling; at the climax of that play, Wilson’s ‘60s installment, the plot got wrapped up randomly and abruptly, by an offstage visit to City Hall. Here, Hedley’s offstage attempt to get some photos of his wife, the pregnant and doubting Tonya, from some dubious clerks at Sears becomes a focus for Hedley’s rage.

Perhaps the notion of the offstage inciting incident isn’t the most interesting thing to borrow from Greek tragedy.

Spiritually related to many previous Wilson protagonists, Hedley has had his spirit nearly crushed time and again by an explicitly or implicitly racist system. In “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the play that put Wilson on the map of the American theater, one man scuffing another man’s shoes becomes a reason for murderous retaliation. At this point, “King Hedley II” tends to lurch from big aria to big aria, from small indignity to large.

But all of it is beautifully acted. Lennix makes Hedley a man wrapped in barbed wire (at one point he ropes real barbed wire around his improbable flower garden). Brown has the juiciest role in Elmore, and he lends a remarkable musicality to Wilson’s words. Walton brings the audience to a hush with her straight-ahead eloquence.

There’s a sub-theme struggling to be heard in the writing, I think. In Act 1, the men talk a fair bit about the honor of the “right” kind of murder. In Act 2, the same characters (especially Elmore) in effect retract those statements--they acknowledge the shadow cast by such actions. At this point in the revisions, this plays not so much as ambiguous but as inconsistent.

Wilson can certainly find a larger role for Hedley if he chooses. With “Fences,” he set out to write a large, complex central character and succeeded brilliantly. This may be what “King Hedley II”--full of strong, painful words of harsh wisdom--needs to lay us low. You want that larger impact. The palpable despair in this unruly new work may yet find fuller expression.

If he can get tough with it, Wilson can achieve something rare indeed: A sad, potentially grand play that honors its predecessors while going its own way.

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* “King Hedley II,” Mark Taper Forum, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Additional performance, Oct. 18, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 22 (no evening performance Oct. 22). $30-$44. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes.

Lou Myers: Stool Pigeon

Harry Lennix: King Hedley II

Jerome Butler: King Hedley II (Oct. 17-22)

Juanita Jennings: Ruby

Monte Russell: Mister

Mone Walton: Tonya

Charles Brown: Elmore

Written by August Wilson. Directed by Marion McClinton. Scenic design by David Gallo. Costumes by Toni-Leslie James. Lighting by Donald Holder. Sound by Rob Milburn. Production stage manager Tami Toon.