Struck anew by those themes on Saturday night, I thought this "Gem" of 2015 to be just dazzlingly wise in its utterances, which should not have been so surprising, given all we know of Wilson in the city about which he cared so very much.Goodman Theatre kicks off the new year with a major revival of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean-nearly two decades after the play premiered on the same stage.
It is impossible to watch "Gem," with its emphasis on the relationship of African-Americans to police officers, without thinking about Ferguson, Mo., and the numerous other clashes that have raised questions of equality, morality, law-and-order and which lives matter the most. Of course, Wilson's plays now occupy a different moment. And the identity of this play as a work of culmination can only come to full fruition in the hands of actors ho have done so many of the other plays which came before, even if the years spin forward in the plays themselves.
Craftsman like Smith and Wilson are consummate interpreters of this great poet. Parson has a fire to him, and the flames flicker very provocatively throughout his very potent Court "Gem." Then again, Parson also can take advantage of Chicago's informal August Wilson Repertory Company, a group of actors who have worked on these plays in this town for many years. In general, Parson's takes on Wilson these last two or three years have been less referential and mellow than the work of other directors. Solly is the one offering Citizen a road map to love and happiness with Black Mary. Wilson), a guy who makes a living collecting dog waste to be sold as fuel, but whose prosaic occupation does not obscure his moral authority as a role model for Citizen.
In the middle are Black Mary (Tyla Abercrumbie), a wise young woman who maybe could love herself a Citizen, if he rights his personal ship and Solly Two Kings (Alfred H. On the other side of the Wilson moral gulf is Caesar Wilks (David Alan Anderson, who is terrifying in his sense of rectitude), a black police officer enforcing racist laws without regard for history. Wilson's themes are reflected through the protagonist, Citizen Barlow (Jerod Haynes, who is turning into one of the best darn actors in the city), a young drifter with a past who says he wants to cleanse his soul, but who really has to learn what makes a man feel right with himself. Not in 1904, when the South was desperate to stop its newly freed labor force from escaping to the North. The other is that moral rectitude and following the laws and common practices of white America are not always the same. As I wrote after Wilson's death, one is that salvation comes only to those who pay homage to the sacrifices of their ancestors and to those who are honest enough to admit they could have done nothing whatsoever all by themselves.
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