REVIEW: August Wilson's "Radio Golf"

Just Above My Par."Radio Golf" is August Wilson's final play in his award-winning ten play cycle about African American life in the 20th Century, primarily set in Pittsburgh, PA. I saw the production at the Mark Taper Forum at The Music Center on Wednesday night. In Thursday's Los Angeles Times they select the play as a "Hot Ticket" for this weekend and in Friday's edition there is a rather vague review of the play by Daryl Miller. That review almost completely ignores the performances of the actors, except for laudatory remarks about Anthony Chisholm who plays Elder Joseph Barlow ("Old Joe") and is a veteran of Taper productions of Wilson plays. This review will be more forthcoming for people who are considering going to see August Wilson's "Radio Golf."

The play is a thought-provoking meditation on the multiple competing visions and values of people who are adjacent in racial classification but not social stratification. There are only 5 characters: Harmond Wilks, Mame Wilks, Roosevelt Hicks, Sterling Johnson and Old Joe.
Harmond and Mame are a classic Clintonian "buppie" (Black urban professional) couple. The way that the two actors portray this relationship, it is hard to tell whether Mame and Harmon are business partners, romantic partners or both. This is due to the lack of chemistry between Denise Burse and Rocky Carroll. It is commendable that the actress playing Mame Wilks is trying to give the audience the energy of Condoleezza Rice (subdued emotions combined with Republican ambition and greed). However, while she looks the part (lots of Reagan red power suits and Thatcherite helmet hair chock full of ozone-depleting chemicals) she doesn't really inhabit the part and so the audience ends up being distanced from her (or at least I did).

Roosevelt Hicks, a golf-loving, money-hungry bank vice president who is Harmond's business partner and college buddy, is played effectively by James A. Williams. Sterling Johnson is an unschooled, street-smart handyman played amusingly by John Earl Jelks. These two characters, along with Mame and Old Joe are pairs of opposing forces attempting to influence Harmond and his actions which will have a great impact on the future of a suddenly crucial parcel of real estate in the City of Pittsburgh, 1839 Wylie Avenue, and possibly the future of the city itself. At this address is an apparently abandoned house which both Old Joe and Harmond Wilks both think that they own (coincidently this house was apparently Aunt Ester's, a character who appeared in many of Wilson's other plays in the cycle). The play revolves around Harmond's dilemma and turns upon whether he will put his political ambition before his sense of "right and wrong."

The problem is that although Rocky Carroll is able to communicate the character's avarice, joy in his own self-importance and moral clarity, he does so in a way which seems to lack nuance. Either he's blazing hot, shaking and shouting with moral inidignation or he's engaged in a cold embrace with Mame following a should-be-poignant anecdote about the day he fell in love with her. It doesn't help that at some points Harmond's hesitancy at a moral crossroad looks indistinguishable from text forgetfulness from seats in the middle of orchestra right.

Thus the play's real center revolves around Anthony Chisholm's Old Joe, whose crushed-granite voice lovingly caresses August Wilson's language with the similar care that Shakespearean-trained Patrick Stewart delivers technobabble on Star Trek with inimitable convincing authority. Besides having some of the best lines, Chisholm also does the cast's best job of merging his character's voice with the author's during the play's many meaningful soliloquies.

Play: B+. Performance: B-.