(Photo by Michael Brosilow)
RECOMMENDED
Playwright August Wilson, who sadly and prematurely passed away in 2005, was a master craftsman of both character and situation. Throughout his Pittsburgh Cycle, ten plays chronicling the black experience of the twentieth century, one encounters some of the most jovial, heart-wrenching, and frighteningly believable moments of the American theater.
Honestly, every single time I replay that gorgeous, aching scene in “Fences” in which husband Troy tells wife Rose, not only that he has been unfaithful to her, but that the woman he has been unfaithful with is pregnant, I close my eyes and exhale. It was during that same seismic scene in the Broadway revival that the enraged audience loudly and vocally condemned Denzel Washington’s Troy—an intense, binding feeling of community extending far offstage and into the balcony standing room where I was pleasantly engrossed. “Fences” is arguably the most popular and frequently performed part of the Pittsburgh Cycle, but a lesser-known and no-less-moving section is “Jitney,” which opened on Saturday evening at Court Theatre.
