Wilson's Radio Golf to Play Baltimore's Centerstage

By Andrew Gans
June 22, 2005

August Wilson's final installment in his mammoth ten-play cycle about twentieth-century African-American life will make its Mid-Atlantic premiere at Baltimore's Centerstage in 2006.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Radio Days replaces the previously announced The Heiress on the Baltimore theatre company's 2005-06 schedule. The play, which world premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre, will also play Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum (July 31-Sept. 18) before arriving in Baltimore (March 24, 2006-April 30). Set in the 1990's, Radio Days involves real-estate developers who look to tear down the home of recurring Wilson character Aunt Esther.

Irene Lewis, artistic director of Centerstage, told the Baltimore paper, "I wanted this play very badly." Centerstage's Artistic Associate James Magruder added, "As opposed to a lot of the other August Wilson plays, there are characters in this play who have gotten access to the power that's been so long denied to them. So they have the opportunity — either there's personal enrichment or there's community enrichment, and they have the choice. And as is always the case with August Wilson, the answers are never clear-cut."

The other plays in Wilson's ten-play cycle include Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney and King Hedley II.

Wilson received the Pulitzer Prize for Fences and The Piano Lesson as well as a Tony Award for Fences. Additionally, his plays have garnered seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and an Olivier Award for Jitney. Wilson is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For more information about Centerstage, visit www.centerstage.org. For tickets, call the theatre's box office at (410) 332-0033.