The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes[...]

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," " and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson," " Wilson has [...]

This title provides a guide to the political and historical context of the 1950s and to the African American cultural context.August Wilson is generally acknowledged to be the most respected African American playwright. His cycle of plays spanning the decades of the twentieth century have been profo[...]