King Hedley II written by August Wilson, is the 9th play in his American Century Cycle. Directed by Dr. Ayodele Nzinga and performed by The Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc;
We are nearing the end of the road. Only King Hedley, II and Radio Golf stand between us and the completion of The American Century Cycle in chronological order. Our walk with Wilson is coming to its end. But the experience of being in communion with Wilson has changed us forever. We have gone where we might not have gone, found what we did not know we had lost, and we can’t go back to where we were before we said yes to Wilson nor do we want to. The process of the production of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle in its entirety has set The Lower Bottom Playaz on their own path, distinguished them from other companies their size no matter their demographic, and made them worthy of mention in conversations of Master Wilson.
They say Hedley is the darkest of all the plays. It is the play in which Aunt Ester leaves us. It is perhaps that very fact that has kept me from starting the fanfare for what will be our biggest season. It is hard to imagine that any season will mean as much as this one where we will complete the song we found in Wilson. I am holding it inside, reluctant to share, reluctant to put finish to what I started. Wilson has been everything.
Master Wilson has been teacher, prophet, a generous and benign tormentor– refusing to let us rest until the song is completed. He has been a driving force, true north, home in a way we could not know until we walked in saying yes. He has been our reason, the explanation, the overstanding we needed to understand who we were trying to be, and where we were going in the storm. I have been reluctant to begin the end. I am tarrying with Wilson a little longer. But this private holding on must end — the band is tuning up and the song is waiting. We will finish what we have begun.
The journey from the production of Gem of the Ocean to the final season producing Hedley and Golf, has been nothing sort of mystical, but that is the way life is. Wilson has been our life for the last five years. This moment, reflecting back over how magnanimous Wilson has been to us as human beings, artist, activist and as a creative collective I am humbled by Wilson’s immense gift to us, overjoyed we found our way to the home we have found in Wilson, and deeply grateful for Wilson’s visitation.
We are wandering in the wilderness; all there is to save us is an unsung song of self. If you can’t imagine North America as a wilderness you have not experienced history from my perspective. My people were captured and sold into servitude by a savage country founded in violence stolen from the indigenous people they found living in what they named North America. They made a grave yard of the Atlantic Ocean in the process of the inhumane transporting of millions of human beings bound for the most dehumanizing bondage the world has ever witnessed.
Once here they were stripped of semblance of humanity save that they claimed for themselves. They were for all intent obliterated, left unable to trace tribe, village, religion, language, or worldview. They were rewritten as property to be used in any manner seen fit. The concepts of honor, love, and duty were undone as were the institutions of marriage,childbearing, and by default family, all torn apart and set outside of the African– now slave, in a society that placed the slave outside of humanity.
If they ran they were hunted. If they resisted they were slaughtered. They were set afire, and hung from trees. They were caged, bartered, sold, raped, murdered, and considered no better than animals of the field.
Slavery ended and they were set free into nothing with nothing to make their way out of no way. This country has shook them from place to place in so called migrations which under closer scrutiny more resemble refugees fleeing.
Wilson’s work offers a view of the 20th Century in North America from the view of the descendants of cooks, mammy’s, share croppers, garbage men, waitresses, nail makers, steel workers, those that bent their backs to set the telephone poles in the ground and drive the railroad ties, the collective of America’s Blues people. These are their stories, this is their song of survival and the every present quest for equity in this land of equality where lynchings made their way into the new millennium and one can make a cogent case that slave catchers still exist with body cams in black and whites and they neither protect or serve us in the most literal sense.
Wilson places us center stage between the epic events of this countries history in our daily reality as ‘most human’ in search of honor and dignity. He credits us with the means for reinvention as borne by our achievements here and our legacy which stretches beyond the shores of this continent to embrace a highly developed sense of community, a view of god, a sense of worth, a cosmology, an epistemology, an artful aesthetic, and worldview that we managed to hold onto, albeit it in shreds. We are trying to remember who we are in a world that changes but manages to leave us standing in the rear of the line.
When we see our sense of continuity as a song emanating from the collective soul we can begin to grasp the enormity of Wilson’s gift to us. In his Cycle he has captured the essence of our blue black determination to thrive, our brokenness, our insistence on a share of what we built, our loving hearts, our patient longing, our twisted paths, the barbed wire, the places we leave the path, and wander into the dark, the places our light is made and the chance of wholeness waiting in remembering, claiming, and singing our song of self. It is a redemption song carved from the blues instructed by jazz and re imagined in hip hop, it is our beating heart saying I Am.
It has been a great honor to stage this work. I will be sorting the gifts it has offered up for the remainder of my life. I have been hugely influenced by Wilson and I am grateful. I invite you to join us as we finish our American Century Cycle Project. We are currently offering King Hedley, II at the Flight Deck through September 6th.
Hedley is a beautiful work for right now in North American inner cities. It offers a glimpse into the beginning of gun proliferation in urban spaces. The era of Reaganomics, Crack decimation, and inter-group violence have a sick relationship that continues to influence our quality of life. It’s a raw wake up call, a gun shot in the night, the site of a train wreck…sometimes you must go back to see now more clearly. King Hedley, II offers that chance in a dark, soaring, blues filled blood ritual of a play. You can’t miss it.
Blood is a motif in King Hedley, II. It is a strong and instructive note. It signals the life and death struggle to create and maintain life in marginalized spaces. The tension between the discussion of abortions and blood feuds destined to end in blood carry us through this speeding train ride that can only end in a tremendous wreck. What else can happen when the doors are all barred and life is on the other side.
King’s desire to sit on top of the mountain — with the key given the righteous requires — he wipe the blood off his hands. He is told the key is forgiveness but he is bound by codes of honor which dictate his actions. Blood for blood is a mantra carried by his reflection in the character of Mister. Mister outlines the tenets of honor and explains that blood spilled requires the spilling of blood, especially in the defense of your blood. It is a matter of honor. If a man kills your blood you ain’t supposed to be looking at him long. Someone must die. Blood is energy, it is life, your bloodline is your most intimate legacy, you are required to defend it.
What pathology is engendered at the event of the interruption of a man’s ability to care for his blood. How then does one proceed with honor in the world? At what point is crossing the line to ensure your blood survives permissible? What would you do to insure your unborn child’s right to live in a world big enough to dream in? At what point does the world get so small that the thought of new life, rather than inspiring joy, births fear and desperation along with the consideration of killing it before it breathes? Who turned the world around like that and how do we find a way to thrive in a world where the path to life is blocked by barbed wire or something even harder to cut through?
One of Wilson’s greatest skill displays in the work of The American Century Cycle, is to show you the world-changing as the North American stands in the same place, or even more disturbing as the ground beneath him literally shrinks. The lack of work and the great difficulty encountered by those who dream of thriving in a country they helped to build with blood and sweat. Blood on the ground but no way into the dream. King remarks that he was once worth $1200.00 during slavery but in 1985 he is reduced to $3.35 an hour he says he is going backwards. Mister observes the woman with the store got a bigger store and bigger house to go with it, he speculates, if she could drive she would have a bigger car. As the country moves forward North American African’s have moved further from center.
In our current moment the ruthless gentrification of formerly affordable communities and the continued economic inequity experienced by large numbers of North American Africans coupled with a cannibalistic educational system/carceral system and an escalation of inter-group violence informed and encouraged by systemic violence perpetrated against them magnifies the moment in which our characters live. We know this dark moment goes on, gets deeper, becomes as consuming as an ocean.
King Hedley like many young men today carries a gun because he fears violence being enacted upon him. He has killed one man and is looking to kill the man’s kin to stop him from retaliating against him. He is also about to become a father for the first time. While the sooth sayer calls on him to wash the blood from his hands I wonder how he might go about that. Some of the blood on his path is older than him. The sooth sayer says he can right the house of his father even though it may be torn asunder, but even the sooth sayer calls for the remission of blood. Blood is the new life coming extending King’s blood line and ultimately his possibles in life. The question of honor may require him to shed blood in order to live long enough to help sustain this new life.
Come and see who survives and what the blood cost of honor is. See King Hedley, II now through September 6.
Tonya does not want to have anymore children. Not in a world where “their friends might, kill them, the police might kill them, in a world that don’t respect life.” She says her 17 year old daughter with a baby is falling down a hole that it will take her a lifetime to dig her way out of. As a part of her argument for an abortion she details the story of a mother learning that her son has been shot down. She receives the news as she is washing his clothes and preparing his dinner not knowing he will never eat the meal or wear the laundry she has washed. It is delivered as part of a chilling monologue that helps to explain why the Lower Bottom Playaz offer a different brand of Wilson than you may have come to expect.
We play Wilson from the experience of our lives. We have lived beyond the playwrights observations and see his descriptions of the now pass as vivid depictions of our lived reality. The realty of drive-bys in the eighties has given way to the police terror and continued inter-group violence on steroids. We have seen the connection from the pass to the present that Wilson intends and we see beyond it to an even more blasted and blistered current moment.
Tonya’s monologue is a political position. She is in resistance to death with her refusal to bear life. Her decision is also influenced by her man’s choices. His choices are influenced by his reality. But his answer is to make something/life in the absence of all it takes to insure and sustain that life. He insist they try even if they have to call the undertaker.
She has a baby daddy in jail and fears her current man who has done time for murder is on a path back to jail. He, King Hedley, II is trying to make life grow in the rocky soil he has inherited. He never considers remaking the box his life came in –he is bound by his perception of personal history, national history, blood, and honor and out of that lens of those contexts and grim necessity he is using what he has been given to create what he perceives he needs. His ability to do so is impacted by other men who have their own rocky soil. It seems everyone’s garden in the land of rocky soil is watered by blood. Tonya’s babies father’s have blood on their hands as she fears, instructed by her lived experience, the possibility of her unborn child being bled of life.
King wants the baby in order to put something in the world. He plants a seed in the less than optimal soil of his backyard and sees it struggle to grow and reasons a child deserves a chance at life, he advised Tonya against putting it in a coffin before it draws breath. He wants to plant a seed in life even if the soil is not all it could be. How else can we go forward? How else can we get to the top of the mountain?
King Hedley, II is a tale about men and blood honor. It is a tale of women and longing for a life with good soil where love family and dreams can grow. It is a saga about struggle, the weight of things older than us, resistance and the prayer for redemption.
See it at the Flight Deck now through September 6, 2015.
chelleechauxnuff – United States – I do Inter-disciplinary Performing Arts such as Theater, mixed media works, found object collage, palm shard mask making and photo journalism, all while vocalizing all genres of music.I also grow plants and rag-up denim clothing into new designs. I love the oceans, Black cats , Black dogs and good food!
