Finding Drama in Life, and Vice Versa

by Ben Brantley on August 26, 2000

A lot of advice gets handed out in the thoroughly engrossing new staging of August Wilson’s ”Jitney,” a play written two decades ago but never before seen in Manhattan. Some of that counsel, on subjects from how to treat a woman to how to get ahead in a white man’s world, is sensible; some of it is crazy. But there’s one bit of wisdom that you’re especially glad the play’s characters don’t heed: ”Don’t put your business in the street.”

As if that were remotely possible in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the setting of Mr. Wilson’s cycle of plays on the black American experience in the 20th century and a place where personal business is always on public parade. In this splendidly acted production, which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater under Marion McClinton’s direction, the storefront window of the gypsy cab company that gives ”Jitney” its title seems to stretch right up to heaven.

A lot of advice gets handed out in the thoroughly engrossing new staging of August Wilson’s ”Jitney,” a play written two decades ago but never before seen in Manhattan. Some of that counsel, on subjects from how to treat a woman to how to get ahead in a white man’s world, is sensible; some of it is crazy. But there’s one bit of wisdom that you’re especially glad the play’s characters don’t heed: ”Don’t put your business in the street.”

As if that were remotely possible in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the setting of Mr. Wilson’s cycle of plays on the black American experience in the 20th century and a place where personal business is always on public parade. In this splendidly acted production, which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater under Marion McClinton’s direction, the storefront window of the gypsy cab company that gives ”Jitney” its title seems to stretch right up to heaven.

You feel as if any conversation, no matter how confidential, has got to include the scarred streetscape that pushes intrusively against the glass with tall-tale vividness in David Gallo’s wonderful set. The breath of the city fills the room whenever the office’s rotary pay phone rings, which it does with jangling frequency, and whenever a driver comes back from a job.

Real life, whether comic or tragic, is the best show in town in the Hill District. Mr. Wilson’s characters get as much of a thrill from sitting in the audience of observers, kibbitzing and criticizing and retelling local dramas, as they do from being the major players. Set in the 1970’s, ”Jitney” could be described as just a lot of men sitting around talking. But the talk has such varied range and musicality, and it is rendered with such stylish detail, that a complete urban symphony emerges.

”Jitney,” which Mr. Wilson has described as the work in which he discovered his dramatist’s voice, has been much rewritten since it was first produced in Pittsburgh in 1982. (This latest revision has been seen, with some variations, throughout the country over the past several years.) It still hasn’t found its perfect shape. Its sentimental ending feels hammered on, with the nails showing, and a couple of the work’s pivotal confrontations have a whiff of assembly-line melodrama.

Yet under Mr. McClinton’s sensitive and democratic direction, which treats all the performers equally as both soloists and members of a chorus, ”Jitney” holds its audience in charmed captivity for its two and a half hours. And for those unfamiliar with Mr. Wilson, the author of masterworks like ”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and ”Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” it offers a perfect introduction to a writer who never created a character who (to borrow an image from ”Joe Turner”) didn’t have his own individual song to sing.

By Wilson standards ”Jitney” is slim on plot. It is a rare work from this author that introduces a loaded gun, as this one does, and then doesn’t use it. The principal sources of tension come from the threat that the makeshift taxi company may be shut down by the city, and from the implosive relationship between Becker (Paul Butler), who runs the company, and his son, Booster (Carl Lumbly), who has just finished serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The reciprocal guilt and needs of father and son, which Mr. Wilson has explored more subtly in subsequent works, are among the less persuasive aspects of ”Jitney.” What gives the play its extraordinary verve is how the characters define themselves — and by extension, the hardscrabble world in which they exist — through bristling dialogue and tasty anecdote.

In the first scene alone, two drivers return from jobs with stories that summon an entire ethos. Turnbo (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the company yenta, describes having driven a passenger who has just stolen his grandmother’s television set; Youngblood (Russell Hornsby), the youngest of the drivers, speaks of having seen a woman known as Cigar Annie, who has just been evicted from her house, standing in the middle of the street cursing everyone from God to the gas man while holding up her skirt.

Doub (Barry Shabaka Henley), the quietest member of the group, offers an explanation for Annie’s behavior that cuts through the lewd joking of the other men: ”She was raising up her dress ’cause that’s all anybody ever wanted from her since she was 12 years old.”

These two stories, and the varied reactions to them, establish what twirls the world of ”Jitney”: economic anxiety and sexual attraction, both of which breed endless complications. The issue of whether anyone is fool enough to lend the alcoholic Fielding (Anthony Chisholm) the grand sum of $4 creates the play’s first moments of conflict.

And the war, or alternately the armed truce, between men and women is manifested in everything from the usual lover’s quarrels (which also involve money) between Youngblood and Rena (Michole Briana White), the mother of his child, to the story of the crime of passion that sent Booster to jail. The variations on the theme, which include a glorious monologue about a girlfriend’s hex, delivered by Willis Burks II as a numbers runner, are delicious, always sparked by some skewed detail that turns the familiar into the memorable.

Mr. Wilson brings the same open-ended eloquence to both meandering monologues and terse chains of phrases. (Booster on his first day out of prison: ”I don’t know what to think. People going everywhere. All up and down. Dogs and cats.”) The performers individualize that language with the personal rifflike deliveries of jazz artists.

These are all performances to savor, from the mannered rasp and baroque gestures of Mr. Chisholm’s hard-drinking, slow-moving Fielding to the bass-voiced, anchoring authority of Mr. Butler’s superb Becker. The ensemble members, who also include Leo V. Finnie III as a hotel doorman, have developed a feeling for one another’s rhythms that usually comes only with long acquaintance.

The respect for both personal idiosyncrasy and a harmonic whole is confirmed in the production’s every detail: from Susan Hilferty’s expertly varied costumes to Donald Holder’s emotion-enhancing lighting. And in the play’s final scene, every time you think the dialogue is heading toward a foregone conclusion, Mr. Wilson spins it in another, perspective-changing direction.

Whether debating the subject of who is prettier, Lena Horne or Sarah Vaughan, or erupting into a fistfight, the inhabitants of ”Jitney” nearly always act in exactly the way they speak. You seldom think of one of them, ”Well, he wouldn’t do that,” which is less often true in theater than you might imagine.

If this is a play in which a significant artist was just learning how to make his characters talk, you rarely sense any corresponding uncertainty of tone in the current version. Mr. Wilson, Mr. McClinton and their excellent band of actors make us feel that we have known these people — with whom we have spent only a couple of hours, after all — for most of our lives.

JITNEY
By August Wilson; directed by Marion McClinton; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Rob Milburn; fight director, David S. Leong; production stage manager, Narda Alcorn; stage manager, Mike Schleifer. Associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; general manager, C. Barrack Evans; production manager, Peter J. Davis. Presented by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Carol Fishman, managing director; Alexander Fraser, executive director, and Center Theater Group/Mark Taper Forum, in association with Sageworks, Benjamin Mordecai, producer. At 307 West 43rd Street, Clinton.

WITH: Russell Hornsby (Youngblood), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Turnbo), Anthony Chisholm (Fielding), Barry Shabaka Henley (Doub), Willis Burks II (Shealy), Leo V. Finnie III (Philmore), Paul Butler (Becker), Michole Briana White (Rena) and Carl Lumbly (Booster).