Radio Golf, with which August Wilson ended his 10-play cycle about life among blacks in 20th century America, is rife with beautiful and metaphoric prose and riddled with the warring tugs of history, known and unknown. This was Wilson's last play. He died Oct. 2, 2005, just after its second pre-Broadway production that summer and during the rewriting process. So the play isn't Wilson at his best, but it's very good and gets a fine staging as the eighth-season opener at Mosaic Theater, which is assaying Wilson for the first time.
Sean McClelland's set conveys a sense of change heading for the tired Hills district of Pittsburgh in 1997. The playing area is the no-frills office of Bedford Hills Redevelopment Inc., all institutional furnishings under efficient lighting. The ersatz brick walls of that building don't extend far downstage but instead yield to bits of underused properties on either side.
Harmond Wilks and longtime friend Roosevelt Hicks delight in the "blight" designation the Hills had received because their company now is eligible for federal funding. At the same time, Harmond plans to run for mayor; newly minted bank vice president Roosevelt becomes minority front man for a radio station takeover (an FCC tax break) after a round of golf; and Harmond's PR executive wife is picked to be the governor's press representative just as soon as the election's over. But Elder Joseph Barlow ("the people call me Old Joe") says a house scheduled to be demolished by the company belongs to him, and he's hired a handyman to help paint it. Both men remember Harmond as a boy, the son of a successful real estate man.
There's blues piped through the Mosaic sound system, and that's right. Wilson's prose is lyrical and commonsensical at once and is given full voice by W. Paul Bodie as Sterling, the handyman, and, especially, John Archie as Old Joe.
Other performances are less vivid, but there may be reasons for that. Lela Elam is hampered by a role -- the wife -- that's underwritten. And when Summer Hill Seven as Harmond and Robert Strain as Roosevelt seem to mute the highs and lows of their scenes, perhaps it's because the characters are constrained by their circumstances: Harmond was brought into the family business because his father had a plan; Roosevelt sees the key to success as playing "the game" -- and using the rules.
