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Seven Guitars

Seven Guitars

Arena Stage

By: Jordan Wright

December 14, 2021

Joy Jones and Roderick Lawrence in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars at Arena Stage running November 26 – December 26, 2021. Photo by Ryan Maxwell Photography.

Dane Figueroa Edidi in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars at Arena Stage running November 26 – December 26, 2021. Photo by Ryan Maxwell Photography.

Michael Anthony Williams, Roderick Lawrence and Eden Marryshow in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars at Arena Stage running November 26 – December 26, 2021. Photo by Ryan Maxwell Photography.

Joy Jones and Roz White in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars at Arena Stage running November 26 – December 26, 2021. Photo by Ryan Maxwell Photography.

I always feel privileged to enter the imagination of August Wilson – a world of finely drawn characters of the American Black experience. There you’ll find gamblers and street women, hustlers and laborers, dreamers and murderers – all artfully intersecting in a convoluted crescendo of pain and joy. It’s the church ladies and the faithful Wilson knows to rely on to smooth out societal wrinkles – to offer hope in times of soul crushing adversity and mind-numbing oppression.

In Wilson’s world, events occur in lowly places – around a kitchen table, in a backyard, an alley or a gypsy cab station. He finds the ordinariness of daily life and explores it to the fullest. It’s the streets and the common man he knows best, and his canny talent for leaning in gifts us with nuggets of truth amid the everyday chatter. 

In Seven Guitars we sit at a simple wooden kitchen table alongside Floyd and Vera, Louise and Canewell and Red. Advice and cake are given freely yet danger is always around the corner in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where Wilson grew up in the mean streets listening to the rhythm and rhyme of his people. Wilson uses the perils of pride and poverty to tell his compelling stories. Listen closely, as he did.  

It’s the 1940’s and blues singer, Floyd Barton, has scored a hit record and the Savoy Studio wants him back to record another, but he’s broke and won’t leave without Vera, the heartbroken woman he cheated on, who no longer trusts him. “A man that believes in himself, still needs a woman who believes in him,” Floyd tells her. His band members, Red and Canewell, want the assurance they’ll get paid before accompanying him to Chicago. Hedley is the dark horse, an outsider who speaks of mystical powers and dreams of owning his own plantation. Louise holds all the wisdom cards and the sharpest wisecracks. She is played brilliantly by Roz White, whose delivery is so spot on she earns several bursts of instantaneous applause.

Seven Guitars is set in the round which allows for a lot of motion especially for a smallish cast with a fixed set. Frustratingly, given Hedley’s Jamaican accent and that he faced away from where I was sitting for nearly the entire production, I was able to hear only a smattering of his lines. Nevertheless, actor David Emerson Toney’s body language was powerful enough to impart the gist of his words.  

Arena’s ongoing presentations of Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays, a ten-part series that chronicles 100 years of the African American experience, is an admirable commitment to the American canon of the greatest plays ever written and one that we should all support.

A superb cast under the immensely talented direction of Tazewell Thompson. With Roderick Lawrence as Floyd Barton; Joy Jones as Vera; Eden Marryshow as Red Carter; Dane Figueroa Edidi as Ruby; and Michael Anthony Williams as Canewell.  Set Design by Donald Eastman; Costume Design by Harry Nadal; and Lighting Design by Robert Wierzel.

Through December 26, 2021 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth Street, SE, Washington, DC 20024.  For tickets and information visit www.ArenaStage.com.  For a safe theater experience, all COVID-19 protocols are strictly adhered to including proof of COVID vaccination and photo ID and masks worn inside the theater throughout the performance. 

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