Jitney (August Wilson Century Cycle)

"Jitney" (!982, revised up until 2000) was August Wilson's first play; the time period was 1977, and it's part of his Century Cycle of Pittsburgh plays. It takes place in the station of a gypsy cab company where drivers take calls for taxi runs around the neighborhoods. What the reader takes away from the play is Wilson's masterful creation of real people, his Afro-American brothers and sisters, his ear for authentic conversation, and his use of heightened language when his people are commenting on the human condition in an often eloquent and pithy manner. Frequently what they say is a kind of popular wisdom learned through lives of hard knocks. They behave, talk, and move like real people. The plot seems to be zeroing in on Youngblood, his problems with girlfriend Rena, and threats from an interfering fellow driver Turnbo who has a gun. Then the story takes a turn and focuses on the boss of the jitney car station Becker. The city is about to tear down the station for urban renewal. Becker's son Booster is just released from prison after serving a twenty year sentence for the homicide of his white girlfriend. Becker rejects his son and has no use for him, like Troy, the father in Wilson's "Fences," he lacks any sense of forgiveness. The play lacks a single-minded arc when it veers off in Becker's direction. It ends up where you don't expect it.The play mirrors the life of Afro-Americans functioning in a white-dominated world, but I don't think it attempts to make political or polemical statements. It is descriptive, not prescriptive: this is the way the world is. Choosing a gypsy cab station for the milieu of the play was an inspiration because it allows for the frequent entrance and exit of characters, and gives insights into the larger society as the drivers interact with passengers and Shealy, the numbers taker. It also allows for a great deal of heartfelt humor. As a playwright you have to be careful you don't pile up too many weights or burdens on your characters, because you may just wear down the audience which may feel enough is enough already. Sometimes you wish that Wilson's characters would just break down, hug each other and show compassion or pity. Becker seems mean-spirited and heartless. This play has a lot of good, quotable lines, a lot of folk wisdom and folksy lines. "You look up one day and all you got left is what you ain't spent." "Everywhere you went people treated you like a big man. You used to take me to the barbershop with you. You'd walk in there and fill up the whole place." "The only thing left to do is write on his tombstone. `Here lies Bubba Boo. Was caught with Betty Jean instead of Betty Sue.'"

By the time that this review appears I will have already reviewed five of the ten plays in August Wilson's Century cycle. On the first five I believe that I ran out of fulsome praise for his work and particularly for his tightly woven story and dialogue. Rather than keep following that path for the next five plays I would prefer to concentrate on some of the dialogue that makes Brother Wilson's work so compelling. For those who want to peek at my general observations you can look at my review of "Gem Of The Ocean" (the first play chronologically in the cycle).In all previously reviewed plays I noticed some piece of dialogue that seemed to me to sum up the essence of the play. Sometimes that is done by the lead character as was the case with Troy Maxton in "Fences" when he (correctly) stated that there should been "no too early" in regard to the possibilities of black achievement and prospects in America. Other times it is by a secondary character in the form of some handed down black folk wisdom as means to survive in racially-hardened America. In "Jitney" this task falls to Doub in Act Two when he cuts through all of the rhetoric and accusations a that some blacks were (and still are) making about white abandonment of the struggle for racial equality in America. His retort: ain't no whites give a damn about you, you don't exist for them.These lines are doubly poignant in play where the central occupation is that of "homegrown" private cab drivers that sprang up in the black ghettoes because the licensed cabbies wouldn't go into black neighborhoods. Powerful stuff. As I have noted previously that says more in a couple of sentences about a central aspect of black experience in America at the end of the 20th century than many manifestos, treatises or sociological/psychological studies. That Wilson can weave that hard understanding into a play of less than one hundred pages and drive the plot line of a story that deals with the contradiction between black aspirations and the reality of the hard fact that many blacks were left behind heading into in the Reaganite 1980's when all the "boats were to be lifted to by the rising tide" is compelling. Given the hard fate for most blacks in housing, education and jobs today Brother Wilson is on to something. As I have also noted previously- that, my friends, is still something to consider in the "post-racial" Obamiad. We shall see.