Jitney
By revising and expanding Jitney rather than creating an entirely new work, Wilson may be inviting speculation that he’s hurrying to finish the cycle. But it’s fascinating to see a Wilson play written before he became one of the last great hopes for 20th-century American theater, before he became African-American drama’s most prominent spokesman, before his every play became burdened by speculation about its prizewinning potential, before he engaged in heated debates with New Republic drama critic Robert Brustein about affirmative action in the arts and with cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the need for a separate black theater, back when August Wilson was as unfamiliar a name as Frederick August Kittel–the name he was given at birth.
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The play’s two main conflicts center around Becker–whether he’ll fight city hall to keep the jitney station open, and what he’ll do now that his son Booster has gotten out of jail after serving a 20-year sentence for murder. Booster had been an honors student in high school, with a full scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh and dreams of becoming either the next Muhammad Ali or the next Albert Einstein. All that promise came to a grisly end, however, when his white girlfriend, under pressure from her father in a scenario reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, falsely accused him of rape. Booster, as he puts it, “did what he had to do”: he murdered her and was sentenced to die in the electric chair, a judgment eventually commuted to 20 years. Booster’s mother died shortly after hearing the death sentence, and Becker never went to the trial and never spoke to his son again.
