Synopses & Reviews
Frank Rich, chief drama critic for
The New York Times, has called playwright August Wilson "a major find for the American theater," a writer of "compassion, raucous humor, and penetrating wisdom." In these three plays published together for the first time, with a new introduction by the author the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize lights a dramatic fuse that winds through three anguished decades of the African-American experience.
In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom August Wilson depicts an imaginary incident a 1927 recording session in a run-down Chicago studio in the career of the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey. "The play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates," said The New York Times.
In Fences the setting shifts to Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Troy Maxson is a garbage collector, an embittered former baseball player in the Negro leagues, and a proud, dominating father. When college athletic recruiters court his teenage son, Troy struggles against his son, his wife, and his own frustrated ambitions.
Joe Turner's Come and Gone begins with the arrival of Herald Loomis, his eleven-year-old daughter in tow, at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911. The great migration of blacks from the agrarian South to the industrial North has just begun. After seven years of impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind.
Each of the plays in this volume has won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In addition, Fences won four Tony awards, including best play of the 198687 Broadway season, and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama. All three are part of August Wilson's ambitious project to write a play about black Americans in every decade of the twentieth century.
Review
“With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, one can posit that the maiden performance of "Ma Rainey" inaugurated the August Wilson era. As both an individual playwright and a hub of theatrical activity, he has defined his time in the way Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon and Edward Albee defined the three preceding generations.”
--New York Times on Ma Rainey
Review
“Few things in publishing can be called a coup. This is. . . . A handsome, must-have volume of August Wilson's first major plays."
—SRO
Synopsis
Three plays from Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright August Wilson: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone.
Synopsis
This collection features Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, voted Best Play of 1984-85 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle, Fences, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, voted Best Play of 1987-88 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle.
Table of Contents
Ma Rainey's black bottom -- Fences -- Joe Turner's come and gone.