Weaving Blues of Trying Times and Lost Dreams

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: August 25, 2006
LIFE and death dance cheek to cheek, like impatient lovers waltzing toward bed, in the fine new revival of August Wilsons Seven Guitars, which opened last night at the Peter Norton Space of the Signature Theater Company.

For the characters in this rich, music-drenched drama, produced on Broadway in 1996, the thread of human existence is both bright and tenuous, liable to snap without warning at any moment. None of the seven African-Americans who share a neighborhood and shifting dreams of conquest in Seven Guitars, set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1948, denies or runs from the fact of their mortality.

Everybody got a time coming, one of them says. Nobody cant say they dont have a time coming. The play is packed with such observations, along with catalogs of the names of the dead, recollections of deathbed vigils, a spirited argument over whether Jesus was right to resurrect Lazarus, and gorgeous, physically detailed inventories of the pain of losing those you know. Fittingly, the play begins just after the funeral of its central character, a young jazz guitarist (played by Lance Reddick) who was murdered just as he approached the stardom he had always sought.

The scene sets off echoes that were absent when Seven Guitars was first performed. It has now been nearly a year since Wilson, one of the few great American playwrights of his generation, died at 60 of liver cancer.

Seven Guitars is the first of three Wilson productions from Signatures 15th anniversary season, plans for which had begun before he was known to be ill. So when Seven Guitars opens with a scene of mourning, built around the empty space left by a death, the moment feels like an overture to a stately, presumably somber wake.

The solemnity does not last long, or rather, it continues, but only as a whispered bass line in a song whose dominant strands blare, tickle, lilt and, above all, exhilarate.

Directed with the intimacy and warmth of a fraternal embrace by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and performed by seven ensemble members whose characters you come to know as if you had been seeing them every day for years this production could scarcely be bettered as a reminder of the life force that courses through every word Wilson wrote.

In the world Wilson created in his remarkable 10-play cycle about the African-American experience in the 20th century, living fully means knowing that death is always walking at your side. Mr. Santiago-Hudson appeared as an actor in (and won a Tony for) the original Broadway production of Seven Guitars, and he seems to feel the plays life-and-death rhythm as if it were his own heartbeat.

That rhythm is translated here into a natural flow, underscored by new music written by Bill Sims Jr. that makes this production an improvement on the Broadway version, which is saying something. Staged by Lloyd Richards, that earlier incarnation of Seven Guitars was excellent. But partly because of the scale of a Broadway house, it occasionally had a heavy, oracular air, with the plays mystical elements looming like luminous ghosts.

In the current Seven Guitars everything feels organic. Richard Hoovers urban backyard, with its hopeful gardens and makeshift lawn furniture, has such depth of detail that I was surprised when I looked up during a night scene and didnt see real stars. Karen Perrys costumes and Jane Coxs lighting match that spirit of immediacy.

And Mr. Santiago-Hudson and his cast take such a matter-of-fact approach to their material that even the plays resident mad prophet (always the most strained aspect of Wilsons work) becomes simply the loon next door instead of a fiery Elijah. Not that Mr. Santiago-Hudson in any way trivializes Wilsons ambitious exploration of one races history, with the economic oppression of a people and the myths that keep it afloat.

But those themes are all the stronger for being allowed to emerge, unforced, through an accumulation of quirks of character, snatches of song and reflections on daily existence in which losses of money, love and life are taken for granted. Even existential speechifying and theres a fair amount of that from the male characters, especially in the second act seems as natural a part of conversation as a discussion of the best way to cook collard greens.

This in-the-moment sensibility, which gives equal weight to events and perceptions big and small, is especially appropriate to the plot of Seven Guitars, which is built less as a rushing narrative than an artful arrangement of relationships in conflict, almost any of which could abruptly explode or defuse.

There is, first of all, Floyd Barton (Mr. Reddick), known as Schoolboy, freshly released from 90 days in a house of detention, who wants to jump-start both his temporarily abandoned recording career and his love affair with Vera (Roslyn Ruff). Floyd has plans to go to Chicago, and he wants Vera and his two friends and musical sidemen Canewell (Kevin T. Carroll) and Red Carter (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to go with him.

The ensemble is completed by Louise (Brenda Pressley), Veras chatty neighbor; Ruby (Cassandra Freeman), her mantrap of a niece; and Louises tenant, Hedley (Charles Weldon), the oldest of the characters, and a Bible-quoting ranter with apocalyptic theories about the ascendancy of the black man.

The marvel of Seven Guitars, which is always true of Wilson at his best, is how large a social portrait emerges from seeming small talk: from bickering, joking, gossiping and idle scheming. From such conversation emerges a sense of an entire economic and legal system, stacked unwinnably against the black man; a social structure in which home and relationships are rarely fixed; and a folklore of rhymes and superstitions and recipes that acquire another layer every time they are repeated.

And of course there is music, which here assumes an ineffable strength that rivals that of death. One day you be walking along, and the music jump on you, Floyd says. It just grab hold of you and hang on. And so it does, in a spontaneous jam session that bubbles up among the men, or a saucy dance (in celebration of a victory by the boxer Joe Louis) in which bubbly sensuality turns ominous.

This metabolic shift in mood of joy and geniality shading into violence is repeated throughout the production with subtle, skilled insistence. Seven Guitars is a mystery story, in that the identity of Floyds killer is unknown until near the end. But unlike most conventional mysteries, this one makes the point that its the culture thats the culprit.

Any of the characters or at least any of the men in Seven Guitars could have been the victim or the murderer.

Every member of the ensemble has soaring moments, but no one ever rends the plays larger fabric by grandstanding. Floyds charisma and his anger are all the more impressive for the quietness with which Mr. Reddick renders them. Ms. Ruffs extraordinary combination of serenity and intensity gives the production its center of sorrow and transcendence.

It is to the credit of both Mr. Carroll and Mr. Santiago-Hudson that Mr. Carroll unconditionally claims for himself a role first portrayed by his director. Both he and Mr. Henderson, a Wilson veteran, are excellent.

Mr. Weldons underplaying of Hedley, if ungainly at times, is a welcome relief from the usual barnstorming associated with such characters. Ms. Freeman is too pretty for her own good, which is just what her part requires here. And Ms. Pressley, as the garrulous Louise, presents a wonderfully entertaining case for gossip as living history.

At one point Louise, alone on the stage, sits down and wonderingly recaps the days event. They about to drive me crazy, she says. Who dont know where the other one is or went or aint going or is going and this ones dead and that ones dying and who shot who and who sung what song.

Thats about as good a summary as I can imagine of the plot of Seven Guitars. Wilsons very audacity in including such a speech shows that he knows how much more than plot Seven Guitars is. This play is life-size, which means it is big indeed.

By the way, you can experience all this for only $15, the price for all seats in the Signature Theater Companys August Wilson season. Even the characters in Seven Guitars, who could talk for hours about the cost and value of groceries and guns, would have to admit thats one mighty good bargain.