The American play Jitney, about the lives of American taxi drivers, begins previews this week.

August Wilson's play, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, is set in Pittsburgh, an industrial American town, in the 1970s. Jitney is about a team of unlicensed taxi drivers (the name is an American term for unlicensed mini-cabs) and their struggle to find some sort of purpose and dignity in fairly bleak working conditions.

Since writing Jitney, Wilson has gone on to become one of America's best-known playwrights, specializing in the experience of African-Americans. The play casts a wry light on the African-American experience, although according to USA Today it is also "an acutely intelligent, deeply affecting study of the human spirit" that transcends race.

The fact that the cast are all American will undoubtedly give an authenticity and energy to the play, which is on for only 34 performances (previews from Oct. 11, opens on Oct. 16, in repertoire until Nov. 21).

—by Paul Webb Theatrenow