Smith) tends to Ester has her care-giver and confidant. Still, Solly tries to do what’s right, and that sense of honor pulls him out of safety and into danger once again.īesides Black Mary, who’s ever-present, affable and engaging Eli (A.C. Now Solly collects and sells dog droppings, a product he calls “pure,” with the unmistakable tone of a connoisseur, blithely ignoring the colorful comments of the home’s other denizens. Williams, in a wise and touching performance), rich in streetwise knowledge and a store of experience as a former runner for the Underground Railroad. One of the first people we meet is Solly Two Kings (James A. The sense of a flammable mix is always present in Aunt Ester’s household, but it is indeed a likable place. is stellar as the aptly named brutal and self-serving cop, flamboyantly drunk on the white man’s rules. Meanwhile, trouble lurks in the form of Black Mary’s brother, Caesar. Although she delivers patent-worthy silent glares and the occasional volcanic eruption, this Mary is certainly aware of Citizen’s charms. She is played by Sydney Charles, who endows this largely quiet, patience-worn feminine spirit with a finely honed stubborn streak. Sharif Atkins, in his Goodman debut as Citizen, is all raw energy as a crisis-causing petty thief in urgent need of redemption.Ĭitizen Barlow is in trouble, not that he can’t take time out to proposition stoic young housekeeper Black Mary. She uses her conjurer’s gift to attempt the healing of young Citizen Barlow, a desperate fellow who feels the death of another is on his shoulders. “Gem of the Ocean” unfolds entirely in Aunt Ester’s home. Indeed, to hear the brilliant actor Lisa Gaye Dixon, as ancient Aunt Ester, conjure up the underwater City of Bones, is to hear her anchor the slaves’ brutal history in hallowed ocean ground.

“Gem” is rich in the lore of slaves old enough to remember the dread passage by slave ship firsthand. It took the Pulitzer Prize-winning author more 30 years to complete the entire project, and although the works can certainly stand alone as individual plays, Wilson’s Century Cycle really constitutes a massive poem that charts the path of Black Americans out of the Civil War South and into the modern era. These extraordinary tales are all set in a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood known as the Hill District, where Wilson himself was born. “Gem of the Ocean” is the first in a ten-play saga of Black Americans throughout the 20th century by the late American playwright August Wilson.

But at times the outside world becomes a harrowing time out of mind, a storm-battered sea bearing a ship of human cargo, even the underwater realm of the magical City of Bones. The year is 1904, and that’s old Pittsburgh peeking through the gaps.

The view of the outside world that greets the Goodman Theatre audience at “Gem of the Ocean” is seen through the battered wooden slats at the backside of Aunt Ester’s home.

Goodman theater gem of the ocean