Baltimore is producing August Wilson’s series of 10 plays in order
The cycle starts with ‘Gem of the Ocean,’ now running at Arena Players
By Michael O’Sullivan
Originally published in The Washington Post on April 18, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. EDT
When Lesley Malin graduated from Washington University in 1988 with a degree in English literature and drama, she received a compliment on her valedictory speech from playwright August Wilson, the recipient of an honorary degree that year. Wilson, whose “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” had just been awarded best new play by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, said, “Now that was a real commencement speech.” She couldn’t have known where this scrap of praise might lead, but it spurred her, she says, over the course of the next decade in New York, to catch every Broadway premiere she could by Wilson, including “The Piano Lesson,” “Two Trains Running” and “Seven Guitars.”
Those works, plus six others, constitute the playwright’s magnum opus: a sprawling series of 10 dramas — each one set in a different decade of the 20th century — known as the Century Cycle, or sometimes the Pittsburgh Cycle for the city and its Hill District in which most of these stories of Black American life are set.
Now, as co-founder and producing executive director of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, she is the driving force behind an initiative by several Baltimore theaters to present all 10 plays in chronological order over the next three years. In that way, Malin has found a way to return the compliment to Wilson, who died in 2005. He is, she says in a phone interview, our “American Shakespeare.”
Soon after Malin got the idea last fall, she approached Donald Owens, artistic director of the Arena Players — the oldest continually operating African American community theater in the country, founded in 1953. She asked: Would you like to participate in a Wilson festival? “We are already doing something,” Owens says he told her. “Gem of the Ocean,” Wilson’s 1904-set drama about the post-Civil War diaspora of former enslaved people, was on their calendar, and is now running through April 28.
That production started the ball rolling. In December, Malin sought, and ultimately received, permission from Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero, to do the whole cycle: “It is fitting to have various talents across all disciplines come together to put their craft forward for this city wide collaboration,” Romero writes in a statement posted on the festival website.
Chesapeake Shakespeare’s production of “Joe Turner,” set in 1911, opens Sept. 20, with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” opening in March at ArtsCentric, a company known for musicals and plays with a Black consciousness. Other partners include Baltimore’s theatrical mainstay, Center Stage, with “King Hedley II” scheduled for its 2026-2027 season. At press time, Everyman Theatre and Spotlighters Theatre had also signed on for slots, although neither company had settled on a play or dates. Additional partners and scheduling will be announced as the program moves forward.
Both Malin and Owens believe the Century Cycle’s themes of African American struggle and what Malin calls Wilson’s “universality, deep humanity and clear-eyed sympathy” make the plays a good fit for Baltimore. Like Pittsburgh, it’s a working-class port city with what she calls an inferiority complex and a powerful, vivid Black culture. Owens, a D.C. native, goes further: “The Hill District could easily be a neighborhood in Washington, Baltimore, Ohio or New Hampshire — I’ve lived in New Hampshire.”
The unprecedented partnership among arts organizations that are normally siloed — large and small companies, professional stages and unpaid community groups — is only part of Malin’s mission. In addition to mixing things up, she also wants to remind people of Wilson’s greatness. Some of his characters are “kind of terrible in many ways,” she says, “and yet, also in a Shakespearean way, we appreciate their dimensionality and their humanity.”
There has never been a dearth of Wilson’s work in the region’s theaters. D.C.’s Arena Stage has produced nearly all of the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright’s Century Cycle, as has Center Stage. Other theaters — including Round House, Studio, Ford’s, Olney and Signature — have picked up the slack. Arena Players alone has mounted productions of “Jitney,” “Radio Golf,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Fences.”
But there’s something to be said for a chronological presentation within a relatively short amount of time, Owens believes. “The power of doing them is magnified if you see them in order,” he says. “It’s one storyline. Collectively, these plays are about how a group of people, a race, was taken from their homes to another place — many of them died coming over — and how they have managed to survive, to adapt and yet still to remember who they are.”
Passport books, with stickers for each show, will be made available to theatergoers who want to try to see the whole cycle, but Malin emphasizes that “you can miss one and you’ll be just fine.”
“Fences,” Owens notes, ran for only one week at Arena Players in 2020 before the pandemic shut it down. Yet his scrappy theater never fully went dark due to covid-19, he says. Arena’s resilience resonates with Wilson’s overarching themes. “What we are, as a race of [Black] people, are survivors, and August Wilson put the pen to the paper on that. His work makes you think. And then it makes you act.”