Tue 5/5 & Wed 5/6 @ 7PM
Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) was one of the towering greats of American theater. His crowning achievement was his so-called Pittsburgh cycle, ten plays each set in a different decade of the 20th century that depicted the lives of ordinary people struggling to survive in Pittsburgh’s Black community. (One play is anomalously set in Chicago.) Jitney, set in the 1970s, is the eighth play in the cycle. It follows the lives of group of men who run an underground “jitney” taxi service (since licensed cabs wouldn’t go to “those neighborhoods”) and their friends and family, and the challenges they face from alcoholism to gambling, from returning from Vietnam to returning from prison to dealing with the eviction of the business from its building to a tragedy that turns lives around. “Car service!”
Jitney, like all of Wilson’s plays, is often performed, but now Cleveland-based Powerful Long Ladder is presenting (for just two nights) an unusual take on the play: Italy’s Sardegna Teatro and La Piccionaia’s Italian language production, directed by Renzo Carbonera in Italian with an all Black-Italian cast. There are projected English supertitles.
Cleveland is the second stop as the company tours the U.S. It will be presented at the Treelawn in the Waterloo Arts District on Tuesday May 5 and Wednesday May 6. Go here for tickets.