Draft chapters for my American Century Cycle study group workbook - Jitney

I am consolidating seven years of notes on each play in the cycle to create a workbook for new group members. I hope to post consolidated notes for each play, especially after discovering the "reach" of blogs via a.i. applications like X (GROK3), Perplexity, and Gemini. My goal is to complete a consolidation per week. It begins tonight with Jitney.

Session notes on Jitney

Syllabus

Week 1: Jitney (1979) Synopsis: Set in an unofficial taxi station threatened with demolition in 1977, Jitney explores the lives and relationships of drivers, highlighting conflicts between generations and different concepts of legacy and identity.

– Lahr Interview, 2001. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/16/been-here-and-gone

– Suzan Lori-Parks Interview, 2005. https://www.americantheatre.org/2005/11/01/the-light-in-august-wilson-a-career-a-century-a-lifetime/

– Harrison David Rivers. “Jitney: Wilson Becoming Wilson,” Penumbra study guide, pp. 12-44 provided.

– Racist Roots of Urban Renewal. https://www.fastcompany.com/90155955/the-racist-roots-of-urban-renewal-and-how-it-made-cities-less-equal

– Full play pdf: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/jitney.pdf

– YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXZapfkM43eU0KVt5QWBxdlK

– So long, jitneys — and farewell to our connective tissue, Brian Broome: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/08/jitneys-unlicensed-cabs-communities-brian-broome/

– NYTimes review: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/theater/jitney-review-august-wilson.html

We begin each discussion with mention of any dedication or epigram Wilson included. Jitney is dedicated to Azula Carmen Wilson, August Wilson’s youngest daughter. He writes:

“For Azula Carmen Wilson,

who burst upon the world clothed in the light of angelic grace,

you are more blessing than I deserve.”

Jitney is, in essence, two plays. I love to compare the two editions of Jitney to two paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks. See notes here from a previous session: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/jitney-notes-for-march-4-2021/

The first Jitney was written in 1979, the only play in the Cycle written in the decade in which it was set. Wilson had re-located to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978, where he worked part time as a short order cook for a religious non-profit, Little Brothers of the Poor. More on Wilson’s life in St. Paul here: https://saintpaulalmanac.org/2010/08/01/august-wilsons-early-days-in-saint-paul/.

During a return visit to Pittsburgh to visit relatives, he had occasions to catch jitneys going to and fro. Inspired by the experience, upon his return to St. Paul he wrote his first full length play, Jitney! Legend has it that he wrote it over several lunches and dinners at Arthur Treacher’s, a fish and chips restaurant, completing it in ten days. His first attempt at a full play, though he had written several shorter pieces, proved to be short on monologues and scarce on character development. Nonetheless, the play’s script won him a fellowship from the Playwrights Center in St. Paul.

Buoyed by its success with the Minnesota Playwrights Conference, Wilson submitted Jitney to the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut. It met with immediate rejection by the O’Neill group. Undeterred by that rejection, he was encouraged by a friend to submit Jitney to the Allegheny Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh. He had already started writing his next play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but went forward with the Pittsburgh submission. The young upstart group in Pittsburgh selected the play for performance. The 1982 performance by the Allegheny Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh won rave reviews and sold-out audiences. It was a hometown thing! Jitney, coming at the end of the theater season, was the first play performed by the Allegheny Rep that was written by a black playwright featuring an all black cast.

Unfortunately, there were no follow-up offers to perform Jitney and the script went into the file cabinet where it stay for the next three years. In the interim, Wilson wrote and produced the commercially successful plays, The Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, which later became known as Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Then, in 1985, three years later, Jitney was picked up by the Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, directed by Wilson’s old friend Claude Purdy. Wilson knew the play needed some work, but by that time he had two plays in production, Ma Rainey on Broadway and Fences at Yale Rep. So he left Jitney in its original form.

In 1996, eleven years and six plays later, fully cognizant that he was in the middle of producing a Cycle of plays, one for each decade, and armed with newly honed playwriting skills, Wilson returned to Jitney.

By this point, Wilson had developed an entirely new style of writing, listening more to the director and the characters in the play during rehearsals, and making pen and ink changes to the script on the fly as the play was rehearsed for performances at regional theaters on its way to Broadway. It was a process he developed for Seven Guitars that he would continue for the rest of the plays in the Cycle.

In revising the script, Wilson beefed up the dialog between Booster and Becker, the relationship that forms the central plot of the play. In the original, the Youngblood/Rena relationship was a bit flat and underdeveloped. In the revised version, Wilson added seven monologues, producing characters with more fully developed personalities. He relied on the characters in the play to assist him with fleshing out the roles they played in the play’s script. For example, Anthony Chisholm, who played Fielding (the former tailor), was in real life the son of a Pittsburgh tailor who made suits for Count Basie. Wilson listened to Chisholm’s stories about his father and incorporated them into the story line, in the process strengthening the character development of the Fielding role.

Many of the changes Wilson made to Jitney focused less on making the story understood by audiences and more on guaranteeing the fidelity and authenticity of the characters. Again, now cognizant that Jitney in its final form would “introduce” the Cycle of plays, Wilson was careful in the new version of Jitney to insert mention of characters who would reappear in subsequent plays, like Jim Bono (who later appeared in Fences), Pope (Two Trains Running), Stool Pigeon (Seven Guitars and King Hedley II), Mr. Rand (Fences), and Memphis Lee (Two Trains Running).

Jitney was produced Off-Broadway in 2000 and made it to Broadway in 2017, Wilson’s last play to reach Broadway, where it won the 2017 Tony for Best Revival.

* * * * *

In today’s post I want to focus on one central theme and two separate follow-on themes in Jitney. The central theme is the significant function/role of Jitney in the overall cycle of plays. The follow-on themes are (1) pride, envy and jealously in character and plot development, and (2) some notes from the “hidden transcript” model proposed by Professor Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon in her essay published in Alan Nadal’s August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth Century Cycle.

I’ve mentioned my participation in 100 Days of Dante, reading three cantos per week from September to Easter. The first Canto in the first book, Inferno, serves as an introduction or prologue to the whole of The Divine Comedy. The second Canto introduces Inferno itself. I want to apply a similar model to August Wilson’s American Century Cycle.

In Jitney, the first play in the American Century Cycle, it is fair to assign Act 1, Scene 1 as the “prologue” to the whole Cycle. The scene opens with a checkers game, a game that appears on the surface as subject to random chance, though beneath the surface, great skill may be required and developed. Many other plays in the Cycle are foreshadowed in the first scene, making it a prologue of sorts.

Then, Act 1, Scene 2, morning at the Jitney station, opens with a discussion of a pinup in Playboy magazine and serves, in this discussion, as the prologue to the play itself.

* * * * *

Can I make a case that the discussion between Turnbo and Doub comparing the beauty of Lena Horne to the beauty of Sarah Vaughan in the opening of Act 2 of Jitney transmits or mimics Platonic and Aristotelian differences on Metaphysics, Beauty and Truth? You know I’m gonna try.

What does Plato say about beauty?

If we were to ask Plato: what is beauty? he would answer: “Forms are beautiful, the perfect being is beautiful, and among these forms, the form of good is the most beautiful.” In Plato’s philosophy beauty has to do neither with art nor with nature. For Plato beauty is the object of love (Eros).

What did Aristotle say about beauty?

Aristotle defines beauty in Metaphysics as having order, symmetry and definiteness which the mathematical sciences exhibit to a special degree. He saw a relationship between the beautiful and virtue, arguing that “Virtue aims at the beautiful.”

The two “definitions” don’t necessarily have to be at odds with one another. But for the sake of argument, let’s tease out a couple of examples. Doub says that the prettiness of Lean Horne is not open to debate. But Turnbo responds that Sarah Vaughan has more “nature,” a prettier smile, more personality, and a better voice than Lena Horne. Let’s also add here that Lena Horne has a “fairer” complexion and is thus closer to the standard of beauty at the time, while darker Sarah Vaughan may not meet the same “universal” standard. It may follow that Doub’s description of Horne is more in keeping with the Aristotelian view of order, symmetry, and definiteness, while Turnbo’s description of Vaughan, beauty as the object neither of art or of nature, but of love, leans towards Plata.

Finally, Turnbo says “She (Lena Horne) ain’t as pretty as people think. People just think she’s pretty.” That statement opens up a whole new can of philosophical worms. At best, the debate is inconclusive. My father was a big fan of Lena Horne and had many of her albums. I have a decided preference for Sarah Vaughan, especially the stuff she did late in her life with Stevie Wonder and Milton Nascimento. Perhaps it’s one of those generational things.

How about a few words about pride, jealously and envy within and between the characters?

Turnbo’s envy of Youngblood is so pronounced that it goes without saying. On my first read, I saw similarities between Turnbo and Iago in the Shakespearean tragedy, Othello. At the height of a passionate exchange Turnbo tells Youngblood he has had some type of sexual involvement with Youngblood’s girlfriend, Rena, which we as readers all know is patently absurd, but Wilson let’s him say it anyway.

It is pride, coupled with a misplaced sense of honor, that results in Booster’s murder of Susan after she falsely accused him of rape. It’s even hard to put that in one sentence. Becker’s hurt pride causes him to not visit his son a single time throughout the twenty years of his incarceration. Becker says in Act 1 Scene 4, “What I ain’t got is a son that did me honor . . . . I ain’t got a son I can be proud of.” In all their father-son conversations, Becker and Booster seem to be speaking on infinitely parallel planes. Booster’s loss of pride in his father after the humiliation his father suffered in the altercation with Mr. Rand became a source of motivation for Booster. He says in Act 1 Scene 4, “That’s when I told myself if I ever got big I wouldn’t let nothing make me small.” Booster’s false sense of pride, coupled with his false sense of loss of pride was a double whammy that doomed him and his relationship with his father.

In our discussion several members spoke to the positive effects of pride, and to the motivational possibilities of having a prideful attitude. While I can see the existence of short term gains (and I am thinking black pride of the post-segregation 70’s and 80’s and gay pride of the post-HIVAIDS 90’s and beyond), I can also envision the long term deficiencies played out in identity politics.

We talked briefly about the pride thing between Youngblood and Rena that resulted in almost constant miscommunication. Youngblood hid important information about the household from Rena in order to preserve his “pride” as the man of the household. We are left with the idea that they are now speaking to each other, not past each other, and that their relationship may survive.

In Dante’s Purgatorio, Cantos 10-11, Dante and Virgil enter the ring of pride, the most serious of the forgivable sins, where souls, in contrapasso, are bent over from carrying huge stones on their backs, the stones representing the weight of whatever fueled their sense of pride in life. It is not hard to envision the Jitney station as a sort of 1st ring in Purgatory, where the proudest characters are bent over (and not able to look one another straight in the eye) from the tremendous weight of their sin of pride on their backs.

Now the hidden transcript. Part of my job as study group leader is to go through a large volume of material and curate those pieces that will be of immediate use to the group members. I think Williams-Witherspoon’s model of analysis is such a piece. I will hereafter refer to her as WW.

In essence, WW distinguishes between a public transcript that represents the dominant culture’s assumptions about a play or any piece of art (and in the case of Wilson, theater-goers are, for the most part, members of the dominant culture), and a hidden transcript operating between the lines and accessible only to those who can unpack the message through their interpretation of “musicality, call and response, and African American vernacular English” as well as understand the active and social rituals at work in the play.

In what one may consider a Marxian analysis (or critical theory analysis, at the least), James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990)

“describes the open, public interactions between dominators and oppressed as a “public transcript” and the critique of power that goes on offstage as a “hidden transcript.” Groups under domination—from bonded labor to sexual violence—thus cannot be understood merely by their public actions, which may appear acquiescent. In order to study the systems of domination, careful attention is paid to what lies beneath the surface of evident, public behavior. In public, those that are oppressed accept their domination, but they always question their domination offstage. On the event of a publicization of this “hidden transcript”, oppressed classes openly assume their speech, and become conscious of its common status.“

According to WW’s analysis, let’s propose that Fielding’s alcoholism and Turnbo’s hair-trigger temper are elements of that hidden transcript, personality traits that some theater goers might write off as bad behavior, while others reach an entirely different and unique observation as their survival skills in a hostile world. Further, WW analyzes the characters’ names as sending a hidden transcript message. Turnbo is a hyphenation of “turnabout,” a duplicitous character who adopts a double consciousness in order to survive. Fielding uses his alcoholism to “field off” pain about his loneliness. Shealy is a “shield” for his underground activity running numbers. Youngblood, freshly returned from Army service in Vietnam, represents the new energy needed to support the families and the community they return to.

* * * * *

It’s fairly obvious, then, why Jitney had to be re-written. Wilson wrote the first draft without any idea that he’d be doing a whole cycle of ten plays. Then, four to five plays into the cycle, Jitney had to be re-seeded and expanded, broadened to introduce and support the whole Cycle and not just itself. The unpacking that Jitney required to uncover the “hidden transcript” would be a useful exercise as it would repeat itself across all subsequent plays. Now, with Jitney under our belts, we as theatergoers and readers are now much better prepared to mine the depths of each new play as we plow through the Cycle.

* * * * *

After one run, Wilson submitted the play to the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. It was rejected, and Wilson stashed it away to work on new plays. In 1982, he submitted the play to the Allegheny Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh, where it experienced sell-out performances. But it only ran for one season. Then in 1985, the play was performed again in Minnesota. In 1996, eleven years later, the play was picked up for performance, again in Pittsburgh.

By that time, Wilson had completed some six plays in the cycle, and had developed a successful method of revising a play during its rehearsal. He applied that new revision technique to Jitney during rehearsals in 1996, adding significant monologues to a play he considered too short, among other defects.

Why is this important?

I want to make a point here, perhaps an esoteric point, draw a comparison, and promote a conclusion, all in one fell swoop, but in perhaps three parts.

Please bear with me.

Another famous artist did another famous work twice. The artist was Leonardo Da Vinci and the double work of art is Virgin of the Rocks. The Virgin of the Rocks, theologically, is invoked during periods of plague, so it is timely for us now as COVID 19 haunts us. The first ended up at the Louvre, the second, created because of a contract dispute, ended up in London.

Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre

Art experts can quibble over which one came first, and which one was entirely the hand of Leonardo, and which one may have been the work of Leonardo’s trusted assistants.

For our purposes, each one shows the Virgin Mary, the baby Jesus, the baby John the Baptist, and the angel Uriel (in some places referred to as Gabriel). The group allegedly met on the road during their flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of the first borns. They are seated in a pyramidal arrangement. John the Baptist points to the baby Jesus. Jesus acknowledges with a point or a wave. Mary holds her left hand protectively over the head of Jesus, while her right hand holds John’s shoulder. All four are depicted relating to each other, connected, but in the Louvre version, the angel is pointing to John but glancing out at the viewer.

Virgin of the Rocks, London

One expert concluded that because of Da Vinci’s use of various glazes and because of the water formation in the background, for the viewer, looking at the painting is more like looking into a mirror. We’ll return to that.

The Wilson work, Jitney, similarly exists in an original and a revised version. His characters are presented in relationship to each other, Becker to Booster, Youngblood to Rena, Youngblood to Turbo (in a hostile, not a loving way), Becker to all the drivers (boss to employees) and vice versa. A type of mutual discovery is constantly taking place in the play, for better or worse, but mostly for the better. Certainly, once you relax any existing assumptions, looking at the play Jitney is like looking into a mirror. You can see yourself (I hope) in the characters and relationships that make up the ensemble, though the glaze has long since lost its reflective power. And each participant is on a journey, literally as in a jitney ride, and figuratively in their own personal development, just as the figures in the painting were on a journey to Egypt. But who in the play is the angel glancing out into the audience?

Now, it’s possible but not likely, given Wilson’s halted formal education, that he knew anything about this work by Leonardo Da Vinci or its repetition. Nor did he consciously plan the repetition of Jitney. These are mere coincidences. What is not a coincidence, in my second, slightly esoteric point, is the similarity between the two artists, the tendency to project and portray humanity in a classical and humanist way.

It is said of Da Vinci that, “a wish to get to the heart of nature and know the secrets was perhaps Leonardo da Vinci’s main impetus in everything he did; and such interest as he had in the painting might almost have been to set up rivals to nature, fusing all his knowledge of her into the creation of things super-natural.” https://www.leonardodavinci.net/the-virgin-of-the-rocks.jsp. That certainly sounds like August Wilson to me.

A quote by the turn of the century painter Kenyon Cox is pertinent here:

“The Classic Spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is, above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or emotion but to express disciplined emotion and individuality restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the noble and lovely works of the past, bringing them to his memory and making their beauty and charm part of the beauty and charm of the work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality – they are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.“(Murray, Richard N.  The American Renaissance. The Brooklyn Museum. 1979. p. 189)

My final point. We rush, perhaps, to compare August Wilson to other playwrights, to Eugene O’Neill, to Tennessee Williams. We even call him the American Bard in homage to Shakespeare. But his focus on his 4B sources of inspiration, Bearden, Baraka, Borges, and the Blues, and his adoption of their styles, across genres, to his plays, makes him more of a Renaissance man that just a playwright. And as a Renaissance man, a more apt comparison is to other Renaissance men, like Da Vinci.

We can discuss over the course of the cycle whether Wilson was a classicist, a neo-classicist, or a modernist (or even a post-modernist). I know I wear my feelings on my sleeve, as they say. No poker face here, much to my regret.

Some post-session notes.

There are no soliloquies in Jitney. Every word spoken is an exchange between two or more characters. There is no angel in the mix casting an inquisitive glance at the audience like in Virgin of the Rocks. We are on our own here and many of us are able to relate to those we see on the stage.

On Becker and Booster, my personal belief is that Booster’s adolescent acting up, including his dalliance with Susan McKnight leading to his incarceration, was all less a function of the trauma of seeing his dad made small by Mr. Rand the landlord in his formative years, and more a function of his rejection of the image and future Becker sought to consciously and subconsciously impose on him through out his youth. That sentence was too long, but you catch my drift.

The information that came out about the death penalty in Pennsylvania and the way Wilson wove it into Jitney was so interesting it sent me to the internet for more research. “In 1913, the state’s capital punishment statute was amended to bring executions under the administration of the state rather than individual counties, and also changed the method of execution to electrocution. Between 1915 and 1962, there were 350 executions in Pennsylvania, including two women. The last prisoner executed by means of the electric chair was Elmo Smith in 1962.” So if Booster did twenty years incarcerated and the play was set in 1979, he would have been tried in 1959, just in time for an electric chair execution. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/pennsylvania

One member noted that there are two veterans in the play, Youngblood (Darnell) and Doub. Youngblood served in Vietnam and Doub served in Korea. Only on one occasion do they “commiserate” regarding their common military experiences, early in Act 2, Scene 1. Also, no other play in the series has more than one military veteran.

Women very influential to the play’s action never show up on stage to speak for themselves. Booster’s mother Coreen died of grief after he was given the death penalty and before his sentences was commuted to 20 years. Susan McKnight was Booster’s girlfriend at Pitt who cried rape when they were discovered and later was murdered. Cigar Annie, who was evicted, stands in the middle of the street raising her dress. Shealy’s wife, Rosie, put a curse on his future ability to have another woman in his life. Becker’s new wife is Lucille. Fielding has been separated from his wife for 22 years, but he knows she loves him. Philmore’s wife put him out, but she’s gonna beg him to come back, similar to the story of Wilson’s first wife.

In the future I want to explore the comparison between Booster and Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Both murdered women in a rage. Both were tried and found guilty. One was executed and one was incarcerated.

Shealy runs numbers and many drivers play. Turnbo and Youngblood play checkers. This game playing seems to be a recurring theme throughout the play. Also, along those lines, Booster hits the number just before he learns of his father’s passing, so he is in possession of some cash to perhaps help him fix up the place after he has taken over.

* * * * *

Let’s start by defining the term. A jitney is an illegal taxi service, operated outside the rules and fee structure of the city where it exists. Usually, there has been some problem with cabs picking up black riders, for whatever reason. So jitney systems arose to meet the unmet demand for transportation among black residents. Also referred to as gypsy taxis, though gypsy taxis normally operate as independent units while jitney services operated as a group or network of cars and drivers from a central location with a standardized billing structure. A precursor, if you will, a forerunner to Uber and Lyft.

Jitney is distinguished from all other plays in the cycle in that it is the only play written in the decade in which it was set.

It helps to review notes from previous sessions. I can focus on things that were not emphasized earlier.

Jitney is the only play in the cycle that has two military veterans, Doub and Youngblood. We see a bit of resulting bonding between them early in Act 2 Scene 1, brothers-at-arms. Everyone else exits and they have the space to themselves to talk about their experiences in the military. It is a beautiful father-son type chat and Doub gives Youngblood some useful advice, life hacks.

There are not that many military veterans in Wilson’s plays, even though Wilson himself spent a year in the military. If we stretch the definition, we can say Solly Two Kings served in the Civil War, but certainly Gabriel Maxsom (Fences) and Floyd Barton (Seven Guitars) served in World War II, Doub in Korea, and Youngblood in Vietnam.

Youngblood is the big beneficiary in this male-dominated work environment. We don’t get any information about Youngblood’s actual father, but he gets “fathered” by all the other members of the group at various times. Lucky him. Even in his often strained relationship with Turnbo, he receives fathering and mentoring. I imagine Wilson was consciously or subconsciously replicating his own experience with father figures, whether his own absentee father, Frederick Kittel, or men in the neighborhood who took an interest in him, or David Bedford, the man who married his mother after his father’s death, all of whom, it may be argued, find expression among the older male characters in his plays.

Three characters in Jitney are old men who either “survived” failed marriages or were unlucky in love in general. Shealy, the numbers running and hustling driver, was “cursed” by Rosie and sees her face in every woman he meets. Fielding, the alcoholic former tailor driver who is still in love with his wife, had been separated from her for twenty-two years (who counts years of separation?). He tells us that three times over the course of the play. Philmore, the gainfully employed elevator operator, has been “put out” by his wife.

Doub refuses to speak about women or money, though we find out in conversation he has a railroad pension, like Doaker (Piano Lesson). Finally, Turnbo, who knows everybody’s business, chapter and verse, makes no mention of a love life, and some observers have said he may be a closet homosexual, though I never got the full story. Something about his obsession with other people’s lives may have sent that signal. There is also something strange about the name, Turnbo, that may suggest he “turns about” from what might have been considered “normal” behavior in a heterosexually normalized 70’s environment.

We will talk at length when we meet about the Becker-Booster father-son relationship in the play and how it all plays out. All other things being equal (of course they are not; they never are), while I understand Becker almost intuitively, my deepest sympathy lies with Booster.

Jitney is the second play in the cycle’s chronological order where we get to take a cold hard look at urban renewal, the first being the loss of Memphis’s diner in Two Trains Running, set in the 60’s. The jitney station is about to be boarded up under the guise of improving the city. In most cases, in fact, urban renewal destroyed the black business community by building big highways and large scale building projects that destroyed business-to-business revenue and black business concentration in cities wherever it was applied. Accompanying the destruction of the black business community like a one-two punch came the resettling of black neighborhoods out of the city center and into sometimes far flung suburban locations. Ultimately, black families were broken up, although that was only a side effect. Certainly, communities and neighborhoods lost their cohesiveness, their physical unity. A good read is the spatial deconstruction stuff you can still find (https://www.abcnorio.org/about/history/spatial_d.html) by and about young Howard student, housing and rape awareness activist Yolanda Ward, who was mysteriously murdered before reaching her prime as a social activist. Here is her obituary.

Characters as individuals. Jim Becker, called, “Becker,” manages the jitney station, which he has run for several years. He is a community pillar-type guy, retired from the mill, a homeowner, and deacon at his church. He settles squabbles between the other drivers. Doub, one of the drivers, even-tempered, is a Korean War veteran. Fielding, another driver, is an alcoholic, and was formerly a tailor who clothed Count Basie and Billy Eckstine. Turnbo, yet another driver, gets involved in everybody’s business and also has a hot temper when he feels he has been disrespected (which is most of the time). YoungBlood (Darnell Williams), is the youngest driver on the staff. He is a Vietnam veteran in his late 20’s. He works several jobs to support his young family. Rena is YoungBlood’s girlfriend and the mother of his young son, Jesse. Shealy uses the jitney station payphone to run his numbers operation. Philmore is a frequent jitney customer and a doorman at a local hotel. Booster (Clarence Becker), Becker’s son, is in his early 40’s. An outstanding scholar athlete in high school, he has just completed a 20-year prison sentence for murder.

Characters as groups and relationships. A key relationship in the play is the father-son relationship between Becker and his son, Booster. Booster showed great promise in his youth and earned a scholarship to Pitt. But in his first year he gets tangled up with a young coed and when they are caught in a compromising position, she claims rape. Long story short, he ends up murdering her and spending 20 years in prison. Pops is extremely disappointed and never visits Booster in the 20 years of his incarceration. When Booster is released, they attempt in a staccato way to rebuild their relationship.

Rena and YoungBlood are learning to be a couple and their relationship in the play floods and ebbs. Doub and Youngblood, both military veterans but of different generations, have an interesting almost father-son relationship. Becker and Youngblood have a similar father-son relationship. Fielding has an on and off relationship with Becker, his employer basically. In that light, Becker has an ongoing relationship with each driver. Turnbo has a very toxic relationship with YoungBlood. Shealy and Becker are pretty much polar opposites.

Compressed space considerations (play setting compared to others in the series). Each play in the series is set in a compressed space where characters sort of bounce off each other. The Jitney Station is no exception and if anything, breaks new ground for starkness and sterility for a Wilson play setting, in my opinion. That starkness and sterility adds to the plot flow as much as anything. The payphone is a handy device for pushing the action along. Jitney orders come in, as do numbers orders, as do phone calls from a variety of callers, family members, potential employees, outside contacts. Today, of course, Jitney operations would exist exclusively online (like Uber and Lyft) without the requirement for a station, much less a physical payphone.

Current events of the time, i.e., urban renewal and gentrification, incarceration, returning Vietnam Veterans, informal economy, fratricidal arguments. Urban renewal is a primary motive force in the play. The prospective boarding up and eventual destruction of the jitney station has everybody on edge as it may mean a potential end of employment and an end to an essential community service that has become a means of production. Mention is made of other business getting boarded up in the community. Eventually, whole communities are lost to urban renewal, with the promise, of course, that substitutes, especially for housing, will be forthcoming. In retrospect, we can see the beginning, not only of lost of business communities, but also of the problem of homelessness that plagues many American cities today. Spatial deconcentration, a by-product of urban renewal, resulted in the break-up of communities, of economies, of families.

It was also a time of returning Vietnam War veterans, many looking for a reward for their service overseas. We see that representation in YoungBlood, but we also see it in Booster, returning the world, as the vets used to say, trying to figure things out after 20 years of incarceration.

Returning vets, returning prisoners, looking for jobs where there were none, resorted to making ends meet in the informal economy, some called it the black or gray economy, outside the rules and regulations of regular business. Jitney companies emerged, providing rides and jobs for drivers in a place where there were few transportation options. August Wilson said, “The important thing was for me to show five guys working and creating something out of nothing.” This was one aspect of the informal economy, and perhaps a positive one. There were negative ones: selling drugs, prostitution and the beginning of human trafficking all emerged during this same period.

The repetition of fratricidal arguments in the struggling community, conflicting egos, some actually trying to do right, is represented in Jitney in the big argument between YoungBlood and Turnbo that almost ends in catastrophe. In Scene 3 of Act One, murder and tragedy are avoided but we have a good model for how normal differences coupled with misunderstandings can get escalated into chaos.

Central ethical theme of responsibility, even when options for exploration are limited. We will discuss this at length in our group meeting. Wilson, through Becker, Youngblood, Doub, and Booster (and others) dedicates lengthy sections of monologue to the theme of responsibility, moral and ethical.

Checkers vs. chess and other games of strategy. Just a short mention of checkers is in the play, but it made me consider some of the ramifications of game-playing in the series and how it evolves over the decades, from the hambone of Joe Turner, to the card-playing in Seven Guitars, to sports in Fences, to checkers in Jitney, to golf later in Radio Golf.

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Seeing Jitney @ Arena Stage week was an unforgettable experience. It was my first time seeing Jitney on the stage, after reading it at least a half dozen times for several sessions of the OLLI study group.

The stage/set was astounding. Multidimensional, it reflected the passage of time through highlighting and darkening the skyline through the windows and on the background scene. The music opening each scene took the play to a new audio level, a nice blend of old blues and 70’s period jazz tunes. The ensemble cast had such a chemistry, with their well-rehearsed lines and with their spontaneous and improvised gestures between the lines. Finally August Wilson’s poetry wove it all together and made it into a total work of art. Might sneak back for a repeat!

I have to mention here an amazing thing the cast did at the end of Act 2 Scene 3. Booster comes into the station not knowing that his father is dead. When Doub tells him, Booster hits Doub in the face, then the folks in the station wrestle Booster down to the floor. In a bit of director’s license (I later discovered in conversation with the cast that it was Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s idea and they worked on it for nearly an hour in rehearsal), all the folks in the station did a laying of the hands on Booster. It was a very powerful and a very spiritual gesture, a transference and a healing, something Toledo in Ma Rainey might have called an African conceptualization. While the play directions say “the lights fade to black,” in actuality the lights were trained on Booster and the hands of the station guys spread about Booster on the floor, in a way that only their hands and Booster were illuminated. Then the lights stayed there for a few moments before fading to black.

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Some themes to consider as the plot(s) develops:

1. urban renewal/re-development. Cities that were the destination in the Great Migration being deconstructed, economic concentrations dissolved.

2. “black market” entrepreneurism. Unemployment high, services not being provided to black communities open door to off-the-books businesses.

3. relationships (men/women, men/men, father/son). Youngblood and Rena learning how to cope with each other. Becker and Booster, same. Youngblood and Turnbo conflict.

4. conflict resolution/manhood

5. incarceration/prison reform. Booster released. Counterpart to Youngblood in a sense.

6. rituals that punctuate daily life at the station. Checkers, the phone ringing, chats about relationships/women, blaming or not blaming whites for failures.

Cast of characters (from Professor Sandra Shannon):

1. The Hopefuls (Youngblood)

2. The Defeated (Fielding, Turnbo, Becker)

3. The Warriors (Booster)

4. The Survivors (Doub, Shealy, Philmore)

There had never been a series of plays written detailing/examining life and society in each decade of a century until August Wilson’s Century Cycle. All the plays except one are set in Pittsburgh (week two’s play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is set in Chicago), but the setting could easily have been any city that served as a destination city in the Great Migration.

No single city or place “owns” August Wilson. He sought to capture the spirit of a diaspora, of a movement of people and their adaptations to the new world they found themselves in. We will explore that idea in greater depth next week in Ma Rainey.

Only three theaters on Broadway are named for playwrights: Eugene O’Neill; Neil Simon; and August Wilson. We know from interviews that August Wilson said he never saw a play performed on stage before he started writing them, but I think it is safe to assume he had read plays during that autodidactic period (several years) he spent skipping school and making daily visits to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh.

Discussion:

We talked at length about the relationship between Becker and his son, Booster. Had time been available, we could have talked about Youngblood and Rena, or about the tender father/son relationship Becker built with Youngblood while Booster was incarcerated, or about the relationship mentioned briefly in our discussion between Becker and any single member of the cast/ensemble/community that “hung out” and was employed in one way or another at the jitney station. Those relationships were dynamic things, evolving and enriching the humans involved as well as reinforcing the knitted structure of the otherwise fractured community.

We spoke particularly about how the characters of Becker and Booster changed over time, with respect to each other and with respect to their own, individual development. We hypothesized Booster’s inability to process events that happened in his childhood, his arrested development while incarcerated, and his return to a development path after serving his prison term and returning home. We speculated that perhaps, given sufficient time, or perhaps it was even imminent, Booster and Becker would reconcile and get their relationship back on a solid developmental path. But Becker died in the factory, and, we anticipate, Booster took over the jitney operation.

Let’s focus for a moment on Turnbo’s passing mention of the Sputnik and its impact:

Booster he liked science….won first place three years in a row (in the science fair)…. had his picture in the paper…. They let him into the University of Pittsburgh. You know back then they didn’t have too many colored out there, but they was trying to catch up to the Russians and they didn’t care if he was colored or not. Gave him a scholarship and everything.

After zeroing in on that passage at the beginning of Act 1 scene 3, I understood that not only was Becker extremely disappointed in Booster’s outcome, Turnbo was also disappointed. It may help explain the conflict we see between Turnbo and Youngblood, perhaps misplaced (or displaced), but reflective of Turnbo’s disappointment and disgust with the next generation, who, perhaps he felt, had opportunities that his generation did not. The same passage also provides a glimpse into the relationship between Booster and Susan, barely a glimpse, but enough to fuel our speculations.

We talked about the authenticity and poetic nature of the language of the play. And we talked about the exclusion, or the explicit absence of whites in the play’s action, in the scenes as portrayed, but of their presence behind the scenes, their implicit presence, a sort of second order existence throughout.

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First, here is a link to the episode of Theater Talk that featured the Tony-award winning cast of Jitney in 2017:

It was interesting the way we focused our discussion on relationships, the peripheral relationship between Turnbo and Rena, the complex and layered relationship between Becker and Booster, and the evolving, dynamic, almost dance-like relationship between Rena and Youngblood.

Relationships are such an essential, human thing, always transforming, always reflecting the environment that surrounds them, for good or ill.

We could have easily spent the whole class period on Becker and Booster’s father-son relationship, Becker’s deep disappointment in the mistakes that his son made and the consequences of those mistakes, the hopes that Becker placed in Boomer, and the energy he attempted to transfer to the future where Boomer might have more and better opportunities than he had. But I also think that at some level, Boomer’s “acting up” and the decisions he took that incarcerated him were a rejection of the pressure he felt from his father, and a not so subtle decision that he was going to live his own life, not the one Becker tried to transfer over to him. At the play’s end, Boomer starts toward the door to leave the jitney office, but the phone rings, and after a negligible hesitation, Boomer goes over and answers the phone, “Car service” as the light fades to black. I think that motion and action symbolize that there is hope for Boomer and there is hope for the jitney operation.

There is of course a lot to be said about Youngblood and Rena. One thing we didn’t discuss was the tenderness of emotion Becker displayed in his conversation with Rena and Youngblood. Becker says towards the end of Act 2 Scene 1,

When you look around you’ll see that all you got is each other. There ain’t much more. Even when it look like there is…you come one day to find out there ain’t much more worth having.

Here we see that despite the gruff Becker displayed towards his own son, he never stopped developing as a father, never gave up on his own emotional development, and we are left wondering if one day he might have overcome his great disappointment and been able to show a similar level of affection for Boomer that he clearly has for Youngblood. Alas, Becker’s potential for development is arrested on the factory floor so we will never know. As Vonnegut would say, “so it goes.”

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Here is the link to the whole website from Minnesota Public Radio: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/12/23/archives-august-wilson-fences-film-lou-bellamy

postscript.

Week 1 of the August Wilson study group is behind us! I thought 8-10 people would be an optimal size, but 18 signed up! We started off with an introduction to the methodology, focusing on the collaborative close read, and two concepts I borrowed from #Rhizo15, learning subjectives (vs objectives) coupled to the idea that “the community is the curriculum.”

August Wilson considered himself a poet before he became a successful playwright and that comes through as we unpack the various sections of text (lines?, lyrics?).