Open Stage of Harrisburg Presents JITNEY 4/16-5/8

August Wilson's JITNEY is set to run April 16 - May 8, 2010. It is the winner of the New York Drama Critics Award for Best New Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play.

Set in 1977 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh that is served by a makeshift taxi company, Jitney is a beautiful addition to the author's decade by decade cycle of plays about the black American experience in the twentieth century.

About the playwright
August Wilson's plays stem from impressions that he formed on The Hill in the '50s and '60s. "Those were times of great struggle and change for blacks." Wilson is quoted by Jim Davidson as saying, "I grew up without a father. When I was 20 I went down onto Centre Avenue to learn from the community how to be a man. My education comes from the years I spent there. Mostly I'd listen to the older guys, because I was impressed. Here was a guy who lived 60 years--and I didn't think I was going to make it to the next year." In an article for New York Times Magazine, Samuel G. Freedman states, "Wilson gives words to trumpeters and trash men, cabbies and conjurers, boarders and landladies, all joined by a heritage of slavery. Their patois is his poetry, their dreams are his dramas."

The sum of Wilson's legacy is best stated by University of Pittsburgh professor, Rob Penny, as quoted by Bob Hoover, "August always had a strong sense of history...He feels we can all learn from the past so we can improve the future. I think Pittsburgh's history has been very, very important to him. This city is a puzzle, a disjointed place with all the different ethnic groups going their separate ways. But everything that is America exists here, from the artistic beauty to the ugliness. It's all had an effect on August."

The Cast
Don Alsedek, the play's director, has assembled from the local Harrisburg area an outstanding cast of eight men and one woman to bring to life Wilson's poetic chronicle of the black experience. Cast members are Ronnie Banks, Aaron Bomar, Daniel Fordham, Faruq Henley, DeAnna Herron, Cortez Jackson, Steven Ross, Johntrae Williams, and Stephen Blaine Fordham.

Community Outreach
A post-performance discussion will follow the Sunday, April 25 matinee performance. Harold Dunbar, a Harrisburg area attorney, will lead a discussion surrounding the search for identity and self-image of African-American men in the latter part of the 20th century.

As part of Open Stage's ongoing community outreach, two student matinees of JITNEY are scheduled on April 28 and May 5 for students in the Harrisburg School District.

Performances:
April 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30
May 1, 2, 6, 7, 8

Curtain:
8 p. m. Thurs., Fri., & Sat.
2 p. m. Sun.

Opening Night Performance and Reception:
Friday, April 16
There will be an opening night reception in the theatre lobby following the performance. Hosts for the reception are Tina Nixon and Pamela Rhoads. Stay after. Enjoy some refreshments and meet the cast and director.

Pay-What-You-Will Thursdays:
April 22, 29 and May 6
PWYW tickets are subject to availability and go on sale in the Open Stage lobby one hour prior to performance

2-for-$25 Ticket Incentive:
Sundays, April 25 and May 2
Reference Code: SUN at time of purchase
2-for-$25 Incentive discount is not available on line.

For advanced ticket reservations, call 214-ARTS (2787) or visit www.openstagehbg.com
Subscribers and groups call 717-232-OPEN.
Regular ticket prices are $25 and $21 for seniors age 60 and over and students with ID.
2-for-$25 Incentive discount and senior/student tickets are not available on line.

Open Stage, 223 Walnut Street is located on the street level of the Walnut Street Parking Garage in downtown Harrisburg

Visit our web site at www.openstagehbg.com. This production is funded, in part, by the Cultural Enrichment Fund, the capital region's united arts fund. Open Stage of Harrisburg is a Constituent of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for American theatre.

Additional Background Information
August Wilson's plays rooted in Pittsburgh's Hill District
John Fleming, St. Petersburg Times Performing Arts Critic
In Print: Sunday, January 18, 2009

There's nothing like a strong sense of place to ground a work of art. William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County for his novels, John Cheever set many short stories in the Connecticut suburbs, and the Bronte sisters had the Yorkshire moors.

For August Wilson, the rich loam of his fiction was the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where the playwright was born in 1945 and spent more than half his life.

Wilson is the author of what has come to be called the Century Cycle, a series of 10 plays that chronicle African-American life, one for each decade of the 20th century. It's an astonishing achievement that places him in the company of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams - even more astonishing in that Wilson was a ninth-grade dropout who gave credit for his education mainly to the Carnegie Library card he got at age 5.

"I sometimes wonder, 'Why Pittsburgh?' But then I think, 'Why not Pittsburgh?' says Rob Zellers, a playwright and education director at Pittsburgh Public Theater, which has produced all the plays in Wilson's cycle.

"They're not plays about Pittsburgh; they're plays about America that happen to be set in Pittsburgh. But you can tell the whole story right here. You had industrialization. You had segregated neighborhoods. You had Negro League baseball and two of the best teams there were; the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. You had other immigrant groups. The civil rights struggle took place here as much as anywhere. It could be any Northern industrial city, but then maybe not. Maybe all the proper ingredients were here. In the specifics of Pittsburgh, Wilson found the great universal things.'

The Hill District is only a short walk from downtown Pittsburgh, but white residents of the city almost never went there. "I have lived in Pittsburgh now for 40 years,' says Christopher Rawson, longtime theater critic with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and an expert on Wilson's life and work. "I'd say for the first 30 years I was here, I never went through the Hill District. You drove around it, because it was a depressed area, and it had a scary reputation - much scarier than was ever deserved, of course. But now I've gotten to know it quite well. Visiting actors and so on, I give them a tour of all the August Wilson sites. You can locate most of the plays at various places in the Hill District.'

The Post-Gazette has a section on its Web site (post-gazette.com/theater) called "August Wilson's Pittsburgh' that has a wealth of material, including a useful map placing each play in the Hill District and other Wilson landmarks.

Harlem poet Claude McKay once called the Hill District the crossroads of America. Jazz musicians Earl "Fatha' Hines, Erroll Garner, Billy Strayhorn, Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey and Mary Lou Williams all grew up in and around the Hill. The Pittsburgh Courier was the largest-circulation black newspaper in the country in the 1930s.

"August was the inheritor of a lot of cultural history,' says Rawson, who teaches a course on Wilson at the University of Pittsburgh. "All the plays come out of his growing up in Pittsburgh in the '50s and '60s, and all the stuff he heard on the streets of the Hill District. That's where all the whorehouses were, all the jazz clubs. His plays harvest the experience he had sitting in the barber shops, the numbers joints, the back-room speakeasies, the jitney stations.'

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