The Goodman’s Willa Taylor explains why playwright August Wilson matters

I saw the Goodman’s main-stage production of Two Trains Running, the 1960s entry in the cycle. It was my first experience with Wilson. The play’s set in a diner in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1969. The neighborhood’s about to be obliterated so the city can build an expressway. Memphis, the diner’s owner, wants a fair price for his building. That’s the basic framework of the plot, and there are discussions of gentrification, black power, and the Great Migration, but mostly the play’s a portrait of a particular world, with its own particular language, that’s now been lost. Afterward, I felt a bit sad. How many other worlds have been completely lost because no one was ever able to put them on stage?

Bob Black
Bob Black

On election day, Willa Taylor, the Goodman’s director of education and community engagement, met me to talk about why Wilson’s work is still so important and necessary. Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

Willa Taylor: The Goodman has a unique relationship with August Wilson. We were the first theater in the country to do all ten of the Century Cycle plays. He loved Chicago. He did the dedication speech when we moved into the new theater. It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since he died. He’d just turned 60. What he could have said these last ten years. . .

Two Trains is my favorite, because of the time period. I’m a kid of the 60s. But there were three I hadn’t seen, Radio Golf, Gem of the Ocean, and King Hedley II. Last night I saw Radio Golf at the Court Theatre. That’s the one from the 90s. It was hard to believe he wrote the play 20-some years ago, in ’97. But it’s about what’s going on now, this election. Chuy’s a man of the people, he wants to be the mayor for the people. Rahm is from a very different kind of community. The rhetoric around them, that’s exactly what’s going on in Radio Golf.

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