Radio Golf
August Wilson has said that writing "is for me like walking down the landscape of the self...You find false trails, roads closed for repairs, impregnable fortresses, scouts, armies of memory, and impossible cartography." It is this landscape that is explored in Wilson’s Radio Golf, playing at the Studio Theatre under the capable direction of Ron Himes. Wilson’s cycle of ten plays, each from a decade in the 20th century and centering around the black experience, culminates in Radio Golf, finished just before his death in 2005.
Staged in a courtyard theatre, it makes the set, an office designed by Daniel L. Conway, intimate rather than angular and cramped. The play takes place in 1997 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Harmond Wilks (Walter Coppage) is campaigning to be the city’s first black mayor with the help of his wife Mame (Deidra LaWan Starnes) - who shares a prescient fist bump with her husband at one point in the play-and friend Roosevelt Hicks (Kim Sullivan). Much of the action takes place at 1025 Bedford Hills Redevelopment Corporation. A bundle of rolled papers in the corner of the office is a sly reference to the gentrification that will result from Wilks’ and Hicks’ plan to build a center with chain stores like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Barnes & Noble. The ceiling is made of embossed tin. Wilks thinks he has it made. Until he doesn’t.
Wilson used to keep a punching bag hanging from his ceiling. When his writing flowed, he would take a few swings before returning to work. I thought of this as the dialogue popped. Watching the fascinating Erik Kilpatrick (playing painter Sterling Johnson) and the excellent Frederick Strother (as "Elder" Joseph Barlow) volley back and forth was like watching a solid tennis rally in which the players are of equal skill.
Kilpatrick and Strother carry the play. The unconvincing Coppage’s smooth baritone, exaggerated gestures and forced laugh make him seem like a mere glad handing politician.
There are some clever, well-placed moments. Note the water cooler onstage and, in particular, Strother’s use of the prop as he makes his first entrance. Applause follows the riveting Strother as he exits for the first time, bowing low and taking off his hat in an exaggerated manner. The gesture is funny the first time but not the next. When Harmond Wilks converses with "Elder" Joseph Barlow, Wilks sits, back straight, in a chair that is higher than the couch on which Barlow sits. Colin K. Bills’ choice spotlight on Wilks in the same moment furthers the idea that they are not equal.
It can be said that Wilson writes about what Zora Neale Hurston called the "average struggling non-morbid Negro." His characters struggle to come to terms with what is right and wrong and never come to a conclusion easily. Harmond Wilks realizes, at a personal cost, what most of us realize at some point in our lives: that we must not act purely out of self-interest, but with regard for the rest of humanity as well.
Through July 5, 2009 at the Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. For further information visit the Studio Theatre website.
