DEATH AND THE BLUES

By William Tynan

Part bawdy comedy, part dark elegy, part mystery, August Wilson's rich new play, Seven Guitars, nicely eludes categorization. It begins with a prologue in which a group of friends are mourning the death of Floyd Barton, a blues guitarist and singer whose career was on the verge of taking off. The action that follows is a flashback leading up to Floyd's death. But though full and strong in its buildup, the play loses its potency as it reaches its climax. Floyd's death may be plausible, even inevitable, but it becomes tangled in a confusing thicket of mysticism and subplots. Though Floyd is as charming and sympathetic a protagonist as we could want, the surprising truth is that his death has little effect on us. We leave the theater entertained and admiring but not truly moved.

That is hardly the fault of the nearly flawless production that Seven Guitars is being given in its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. It has been directed with both theatricality and honesty by Walter Dallas, an experienced interpreter of Wilson who was brought in when Lloyd Richards, who has directed the premiere of every other Wilson play, had to bow out because of a health problem. Scott Bradley's soaring set--the backyard of a ramshackle tenement building, complete with earnest little garden and the tallest, steepest stairway since Jacob's ladder--is abundant in telling detail. Along with Constanza Romero's flamboyant costumes, it brings to vivid life the 1948 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is the locale of the play.

Seven Guitars (whether or not it refers to the play's seven characters-- the title is a mystery too) is the sixth in an ambitious series. Wilson intends to set a work in each decade of the 20th century, with each play reflecting on aspects of the black experience in America. Though his previous efforts have enjoyed great critical success and have won two Pulitzer Prizes, only Fences (1987) achieved a run of any length on Broadway, and that was probably owing to the presence of a star, James Earl Jones. If Broadway is inhospitable to straight plays of all sorts, it is especially so to so-called black plays.

In many ways, Seven Guitars is typical August Wilson. It has a traditional beginning, middle and end, and although Wilson is addressing such big themes as identity and historical and spiritual truth, he never succumbs to polemics--his characters speak in their individual voices. The play concerns Floyd's efforts to get to Chicago to take advantage of a recording offer that could bring him into his own. But he's got problems: fresh out of a stretch in the workhouse, he must scrape up the money for a new guitar and a bus ticket, and he has to persuade his friends Canewell, a harmonica player, and Red, a drummer, to accompany him. He wants to take his girl Vera with him too, but he has to convince her that he's changed his philandering ways.

Prominent in the goings on is Hedley, a fierce old man who sells sandwiches made from the chickens he slaughters in the tenement backyard. Wilson's style is down-to-earth realism, but his plays often have a mystical element or character, and almost as often that is where they go wrong. That's the case here. The misanthropic and mysterious Hedley becomes increasingly important to the plot and increasingly difficult to understand, undercutting the narrative drive and distracting the audience's attention from Floyd. At the same time, Floyd's money problems begin to involve several unseen characters. Instead of accelerating its pace and distilling its themes in its second half, Seven Guitars slows down and muddies up.

The acting, however, could hardly be improved upon. Especially fine are the performances of Jerome Preston Bates as Floyd, who makes us care about the tortured soul that lies beneath a veneer of strut and swagger; Viola Davis, an eloquent and unaffected Vera; and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who plays the sweet-natured, joyous Canewell as a sort of Mercutio to the lovers' Romeo and Juliet.

Wilson's plays have ordinarily reached Broadway via a series of America's regional theaters, with changes and refinements made along the way. Presumably that will be the case with Seven Guitars. A production at Boston's Huntington Theatre is already planned for the fall season. One of the benefits of a staging as skillful as the Goodman's is that it can reveal all that's wrong with a script. Wilson is a prodigious rewriter: he was revising Seven Guitars as late as three days before it opened. As it moves around America, he will surely be able to fathom its problems and remedy them. Given all that's right with the play, it deserves no less.