Product Description
"The concluding work in one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken . . . a play that could well be Mr. Wilson's most provocative."-Ben Brantley, The New York Times "Radio Golf is a rich, carefully wrought human tapestry that is colorful, playful, thoughtful and compelling."-Ed Kaufman, The Hollywood Reporter Radio Golf is August Wilson's final play. Set in 1990 Pittsburgh, it is the conclusion of his Century Cycle-Wilson's ten-play chronicle of the African American experience throughout the twentieth century-and is the last play he completed before his death. With Radio Golf Wilson's lifework comes full circle as Aunt Ester's onetime home at 1839 Wylie Avenue (the setting of the cycle's first play) is slated for demolition to make way for a slick new real estate venture aimed to boost both the depressed Hill District and Harmond Wilks' chance of becoming the city's first black mayor. A play in which history, memory, and legacy challenge notions of progress and country club ideals, Radio Golf has been produced throughout the country and will come to Broadway this season. August Wilson's plays include Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. They have been produced at theaters across the country, on Broadway, and throughout the world.
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 Hold Me to It ( horacekohanim )
Radio Golf concludes August Wilson's 20th Century decade play cycle with a tale of a business man whose ambitions for progress and success ultimately come face to face with his past and his identity.
Harmond Wilks was a child of privilege, growing up under the shadow of his successful father and his business in Pittsburgh. Now he is an ambitious mayoral candidate and head of a Hill District redevelopment organization planning to build an apartment and shopping complex featuring all the usual mall suspects; Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods, Starbucks, etc. With him is Roosevelt Hicks, an old friend and business partner, equally ambitious and unabashed in his drive to succeed, he is contemptuous of blacks stuck in poverty/anger/victim hood, and willing to get in bed with suspect real estate tycoons looking to take advantage of the government's minority ownership incentives.
Their plan is set to go, but for a rundown house at 1839 Wylie. The house at 1839 Wylie proves, through the personality and character of Old Joe Barlow to be a personal boom but professional bust for Harmond and his wife, Mame.
Radio Golf is a pretty quick read, and with five characters Wilson gets to the point quickly and with a subtle flavor, found mostly in Barlow and Roosevelt-both relative extremes in the 1990's Black American experience, with Harmond in the middle-and presents a question as to what progress really is. Full of the symbols and swift language of his other works, Radio Golf does focus for the first time on the middle class Black community and the according issues. Ambition or community, revitalization of desperate neighborhoods, the value of money versus community as well as the meanings of history within the interests of American Big Business.
Not as epic or traumatic as King Hedley II or Fences or The Piano Lesson, but ever timely, spot on and important.
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 The Human Value of August Wilson's Plays ( dcg@bgllaw.com )
Having read all these plays as they emerged in print, having seen many of them on stage over the past 23 years, and having just had the ecstatic experience of witnessing all ten plays in the cycle performed in chronological order at the Kennedy Center in Washington, I confess a strong bias in this review! I believe that every literate American should have this set on his or her bookshelf. It will provoke laughter and tears, stir the mystic chords that bind all people together regardless of race or status, and provide the satisfying recognition that -- while life is an inscrutable mystery -- it is also a rich and rewarding adventure.
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Radio Golf Presents an Ugly Truth
My students and I read Radio Golf in preparation for a video conferences in which professional actors were rehearsing a scene from the play for a show. The main character, Harmond Wilks, dreams of becoming the first black mayor of Pittsburgh, and it looks as if he has a good chance of doing so, but when he is confronted with evidence of an injustice that he can't ignore, and tries to right it, he stands to lose it all. A true, heroic figure, he soon realizes the ugly truth that "what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right."
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A sin and a shame... ( abu_plamu@aol.com )
5 stars for one of the most significant literary/theatrical endeavors of the last century, August Wilson's cycle of ten plays, a decade-by-decade chronicle of ordinary African-American family life from 1900-2000, elevated to the extraordinary by some of the most powerful poetic diction ever to grace the American stage; Wilson was the successor and peer of Eugene O'Neill and Tenessee Williams, refracted through the sensibility of James Baldwin. The bars, the churches, the backporch, the white-picket fence front yard, the crack-vial strewn alleys, the jails, the recording studios, the ballparks, this was the terrain Wilson took us through, no place was alien to him, every character, old , young, male, female, upwardly mobile, downwardly spiraling, or just holding on, saint and sinner had their gospel and blues-drenched monologue/moment in the spotlight. These ten linked plays are essential reading, and bear in mind Wilson kept himself alive while through sheer force of will while in the throes of a terminal illness to make sure he finished the cycle. And for the first time ever, all ten have been housed in one volume.
So why oh why has the tome been priced in the three figures, beyond the scope of the very people who would most benefit by reading it? A sin and a shame...one star to the publisher, Mr. Wilson's estate, whoever thought this gouging was necessary.
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Radio Gulf by August Wilson
This is a proper finale to Wilson's century cycle, I read this play and the nine others as part of a college class and it wraps up the saga with Wilson's usual brand of honesty that makes his work so compelling. It speaks with sharp tongue about the ills of the black community but it all has the cathartic ring of truth. It is a bit slow to start but is an engaging story of redemption that is as funny as it is thought provoking.
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