Radio Golf

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Radio Golf is a play by August Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright.

The play is the last in Wilson's cycle of ten plays that examines the African-American experience in the 20th Century in the United States. Each play tackles a decade, and Radio Golf is the final play covering the 1990s.

It premiered in 2005 by the Yale Repertory Theatre and then was presented on the West Coast by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California. The Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, Massachusetts then produced it in October 2006, followed by McCarter Theatre in 2007. Radio Golf then opened on Broadway in New York May 8, 2007 at the Cort Theatre, the same place where Wilson's first Broadway play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," opened in 1984. The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois is the first theater to mount a production of all ten plays in the cycle. (Radio Golf completed The Goodman's cycle in early 2007.)

Broadway Producers: Jujamcyn Theaters, Margo Lion, Jeffrey Richards/Jerry Frankel, Tamara Tunie/Wendell Pierce, Fran Kirmser, Bunting Management Group, George Frontiere and Open Pictures, Lauren Doll/Steven Greil & The August Wilson Group, Wondercity Inc., Townsend Teague, Jack Viertel, Gordon Davidson

[edit] Plot

Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated lawyer with an educated and ambitious wife, wants to redevelop the "blighted" area of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Having inherited a prosperous real estate firm from his father and grandfather, Wilks is about to declare his candidacy to be Pittsburgh's first black mayor. Meanwhile, he and his friend Roosevelt Hicks are engineering a development deal on Wylie Avenue to build a high-rise apartment building with a ground floor filled with high-end chain stores like Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Barnes & Noble.

The deal depends on federal money, which requires a finding that the area is blighted. There are offstage city politics and backroom deals. Harmond and Roosevelt, a newly-minted Mellon Bank vice president, think they are equal competitors in capitalism's public-private arena, but they may just be black front men for white money.

Suddenly another world intrudes when an old mansion at 1839 Wylie they have slated for demolition turns out to have a significant past. It was the home of Aunt Ester, the hereditary folk priestess whose tale goes back to 1619, when the first shipload of African slaves was brought to Virginia.

[edit] Setting

The play is set in the office of the redevelopment company, but much of the drama surrounds the fate of a "raggedy-ass" house at 1839 Wylie Avenue in the Hill District. This house was also the setting of Wilson's Gem of the Ocean.