‘King Hedley II’ Marks Latest Stop for BNS on August Wilson’s Century Cycle

With over 3,300 No Kings protests popping up across the USA and on three other continents during its first weekend, you can call BNS Productions’ local premiere of August Wilson’s King Hedley II an example of serendipitous or awkward timing. But you couldn’t deny that Wilson’s tragedy, the first BNS piece to be staged at the Arts Factory, where it wrapped its run on Sunday, was timely.

While a record 8 million US citizens took to the streets, many reclaiming turf that was only recently terrorized by ICE G-Men chasing down an imaginary alien threat, basic living conditions of the 1980s, shown vividly by Wilson in all their wildness and squalor, still plague our inner cities. Religion, magic and honest hard work offer no surer cure than guns, crime and hopelessness.

Wilson’s clear vision and wisdom targeted the Hill District of Pittsburgh, illuminating each of the decades in the 20th century from a distinctively African American perspective, forming an incomparably epic 10-play Century Cycle. 

In some ways, The Century Cycle (or Pittsburgh Cycle, as it’s sometimes called) is also incomparably complex. Some characters appear in multiple decades while others are mentioned in one drama only to appear onstage in another.

To further complicate matters, Wilson did not move through the decades of his Century chronologically. Amid this seeming haphazardness, King Hedley II, opening in 1999 and commemorating the 1980s, anchors the most cohesive trio of plays in the series.

The titular King’s father appears in Seven Guitars, the 1995 play that Wilson wrote immediately before Hedley II, along with Ruby and Elmore — but we see them four decades earlier in the 1940s, when King Jr. is in embryo. 

Read more: Brand New Sheriff Continues in the Wilson Tradition (2019)

Prominently mentioned in Hedley II, Aunt Ester will finally be seen, some 81 years younger, in Gem of the Ocean, the first play in the overall Cycle, which premiered memorably on Broadway in 2003, depicting the 1900s decade and starring Phylicia Rashad as Ester.  

If, as Wilson has said, Aunt Ester is a folk priestess who symbolizes the weighty history of African American tragedy and triumph, then her death at age 366 during Hedley II marks an unmistakable low point in the Cycle. The tempest of contention that breaks out at her home in Radio Golf, both the final play in the Cycle (depicting the 1990s) and Wilson’s final work, can be viewed either as piling insult onto injury or as a kind of rebirth.

Like Hedley I, King would take it badly if anyone didn’t call him by his regal name. In fact, when we first see him, he is returning home from a seven-year stretch in prison for killing a man named Pernell, who not only slashed King’s face, leaving a permanent scar, but insisted on calling him Champ. 

Hedley Sr. also committed murder for the same reason, so if you caught the Charlotte premiere of Seven Guitars in 2015, you would assume — like father, like son — that Hedley II has no regrets.

Not yet.

There’s another side to this King that promises a fresh start, for he states his concrete ambitions of opening a video store, a venture that cannot fail, and begins planting a garden in his front yard. 

Both Tonya and Ruby, the wife and mother who have held down this rundown fortress for seven years, are skeptical; they can’t believe King can follow a straight path to success. As sure as that bad dirt in their front yard won’t grow anything, King is bound to take the crooked way and land back in jail.

Hearkening back to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Wilson sets up a similar situation in the ’80s to the one the Younger family encountered in the ’50s. Only Wilson’s is a far bleaker view. Walter Younger held down a job, started a family, and his little sister had middle-class dreams and prospects.

King is more primal and dangerous than Walter, no less easily swayed and played. You’d better not stomp on those seeds King planted, though he sees the common sense of fencing off his little plot to prevent accidental incursions. Barbed wire, a bit aggressive, is his choice for fencing.

We can hope that the GE refrigerators that King and his best friend, Mister, are selling around town came from a legitimate source, but Tonya knows her man better than we do and presumes they’re stolen. An additional reason to trust Tonya’s misgivings comes when Mister proposes a heist at a jewelry store that he has already cased.

Meanwhile, smooth-talking gambler Elmore is back in town with an eye toward reclaiming Ruby, getting married and settling down. Proof of his wiliness comes after he talks King into letting him in on the GE scheme. 

Smooth operator, but he’s playing with fire. Even Mister knows better than to shoot dice with Elmore until he can bring a crooked set to the game.

Toi Aquila RJ, who also portrays Tonya, has a secure grasp of the costume designs that give each of the major characters his or her own distinctive style. There is black menace for King, a Sporting Life hipness for Elmore, and a diva flair for Ruby, the former big band vocalist. 

These core four are the strongest performers in director Rory Sheriff’s shrewdly chosen cast.

Much of the power that Jonathan Caldwell generates as King comes from those calmer moments when he is open to reason, though still somehow seething. Explosions seem impending and inevitable. 

Tim Bradley as Elmore, on the other hand, sports a weaponized smile that conquers the ladies and confounds the men. As Ruby, Myneesha King gets to impress by belting a few bars, yet there’s no less sass in how her Ruby sees through both her son’s and her lover’s lies while succumbing to them.

For all that he packs into each of his plays, Wilson is anything but concise. Aquila’s anger as Tonya is as towering as her husband’s and her monologue arguably encapsulates the passions and grievances that the playwright expresses most powerfully.

Yet there are ancient Greek elements artfully woven into Wilson’s script. Not knowing who you or your parents really are goes all the way back to Sophocles, most famously in Oedipus Rex, but the more overt thread in Hedley, the true prophet cursed with never being believed, goes back to Aeschylus and his pitiful Cassandra. 

Here in Pittsburgh this time, it’s Stool Pigeon, with Tone X laying heaps of Scripture on us all — and Wilson’s most delicious line: “God’s a bad motherfucker.”

Now there’s some Greek attitude! 

Rounding out the cast is Andrew Monroe as Mister, appropriately the most inexperienced actor playing the most ordinary character. Not only does Mister bring King’s plight down to earth and help universalize it, he fails to move King with his pleadings — and to match his uncontrollable machismo when the heist goes down.

Deadly conflict between King and Elmore seems as foreordained as a dark storm first viewed on the far horizon.