REVIEW BY RICK PENDER

Photo By Michael Brosilow

Ester (Greta Oglesby) shares a quiet moment with Solly Two Kings (Anthony Chisholm) in this scene from the Goodman Theatre's world premiere production of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean.

Looked at one way, August Wilson is rounding third and heading home. From another perspective he's just getting started. For nearly two decades, one of America's greatest playwrights has been writing a cycle of plays about the lives of African Americans during the 20th century -- his goal is ten in all, one for each of the century's decades. His most recent, Gem of the Ocean, is the ninth in the series, almost completing the set. I traveled to Chicago on May 17 to see the script in its world premiere at The Goodman Theatre.

Since Gem of the Ocean is set in 1904, it's also the earliest -- in a sense the "first" -- of Wilson's stories. (The only remaining decade yet to be covered by a play is the 1990s, which will be his capstone, it appears.) Each play in Wilson's cycle -- which includes two Pulitzer Prize winners, Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990) -- explores issues of identity and responsibility, and Gem of the Ocean takes us back to the starting point for many of his subsequent stories.

Set in Pittsburgh's Hill District (as is each of Wilson's plays), Gem of the Ocean is played entirely on the ramshackle ground floor of a boarding house owned by Aunt Ester (Greta Oglesby), reputed to be 280 years old in 1904. That fact surely signifies her symbolic link to the time when the first slaves were brought to America's shores. Aunt Ester is a character of mythic proportion and power, referenced though never seen in several of Wilson's subsequent works. Characters turn to her for advice and to have their "souls washed" when they have committed egregious sins that weigh them down.

In Gem, Ester's task comes in the person of Citizen Barlow (Kenny Leon), a young man recently arrived in Pittsburgh from Alabama and already in hot water -- a minor theft he committed has inexorably led to an innocent man's death. Ester at first refuses to help, other than to give him work, but she eventually takes him on a spiritual voyage to the City of Bones, a resting place in the middle of the Atlantic built of ancestral bones. That voyage, aboard a vessel called the "Gem of the Ocean," happens early in the second act, in which the blue-green Victorian house evolves into a watery scene redolent with fearsome language and images (marvelous set design by David Gallo and lighting by Donald Holder). The journey helps Citizen -- who holds a tiny folded paper boat as his inward eye sees unimaginable scenes -- understand his duty to life.

Citizen has two paths he can follow, represented by the play's two most colorful characters: Caesar (Peter Jay Fernandez) has fought his way to respectability, but has become such a proponent of the law that his orientation is little different than the slave masters of a few decades earlier. His counterpoint is Solly Two Kings (Anthony Chisholm), a former conductor on the Underground Railroad (he claims he helped 62 slaves escape to freedom), a free spirit, challenging authority and making a strange living collecting dog shit for purposes of fertilization and witchcraft (Aunt Ester is one of his principal clients). Citizen is sorely tempted by each man to follow his model, and his choices are made only after much soul-searching.

The cast is rounded out by two retainers who serve Aunt Ester: stolid Eli (Paul Butler), who manages the house, and feisty Black Mary (Yvette Ganier), who cooks and cleans, and a white man, Rutherford Selig (Raynor Scheine), who aided runaway slaves in past years and who now sells pots and pans while quietly supporting oppressed African Americans.

Director Marion McClinton, Wilson's artistic partner in the premieres of most of his plays, treats Gem of the Ocean with an almost too reverential hand. Wilson's wonderful characters tend to speak at great length as their positions are elaborated: The play runs nearly three hours as a result of this stately pace. I suspect it would be improved by a faster clip and a modest tightening of certain scenes, although the elegiac quality in several moments is both lovely and powerful.

Wilson's eloquent characters in Gem of the Ocean are more iconic than real, but there are moments of genuine warmth, humor and humanity -- an exchange between domineering Aunt Ester and a frustrated Black Mary, for instance, or a tender moment when Solly expresses his willingness to leave his itinerant, rabble-rousing life to be with Aunt Ester.

Wilson is notorious for continuing to tinker with his scripts, and I suspect Gem of the Ocean will evolve further before it becomes a fixed script. Already it resonates with mythic elements, memorable characters and evocative story-telling: The final product, refined from this powerful Chicago production, will surely be a show that becomes an essential component of the American theater.

E-mail Rick Pender

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