![]() ![]() Fittingly the Broadway theatre where his last play will be produced in 2006 has been renamed the August Wilson Theater in his honor. Gem of the Oceanrecently played across the country and on Broadway, with Phylicia Rashad as Aunt Esther.Įarlier in 2005, on the completion of the final work of his ten play cycle-surely the most ambitious American dramatic project undertaken in our history- August Wilsondisclosed his bout with cancer, an illness of unusual ferocity that would eventually claim his life on October 2. Aunt Esther, the drama’s 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life. ![]() Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century-an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize–winning plays Fencesand The Piano Lesson. ![]() Gem of the Oceanis the play that begins it all. The play holds the stage and its characters hammer home, strongly, the notion of newfound freedom.”-Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune Theatergoers who have followed August Wilson’s career will find in Gem a touchstone for everything else he has written.”-Ben Brantley, The New York Times “A swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty. “No one except perhaps Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater.”-John Lahr, The New Yorker ![]()
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