August Wilson

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences . In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...

The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilsons ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can,...

It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is...

Presents the play Ma Rainey's black bottom performed by the original Broadway cast. Includes several blues songs.

A black garbage collector named Troy Maxson in 1950s Pittsburgh is bitter that baseball's color barrier was only broken after his own heyday in the Negro Leagues, Maxson is prone to taking out his frustrations on his loved ones.

August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of a family caught between their heritage and a dream for the future. The Charles family clashes over the fate of a magnificent, carved piano that carries their family's story from their days as slaves. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy a farm--the same fields their family worked as slaves. But his sister, Berniece, refuses to part with it. For her, the piano is their very soul, a legacy of pride...