Gem of the Ocean
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One is amazed. Here’s August Wilson after nine plays and 20 years, so near the end of his epic attempt to chronicle African-American life in each decade of the 20th century; here he is, closing in on one of the great imaginative gestures in contemporary theater, having created his own Yoknapatawpha County of the black urban experience. You’d think this latest work would project an aura of valediction appropriate to the moment. A sense of crossing the Jordan, or at least having it in sight. But no. Script number nine turns out to be a big bulging mess of folklore, philosophy, allegory, history, love, hate, legal debate, horror, mysticism, ritual, prayer, allusion, illusion, delusion, gorgeous songs, extended jokes about dog shit, and plain (as well as elaborate) crankiness. Far from bringing the project toward some kind of magisterial close, Gem of the Ocean conveys a sense of the author playing beat the clock, desperately trying to stuff everything he knows into the skin of a grand and yet somehow inadequate conceit. Even after three hours the play seems not so much to end as to force itself to stop. It’s an awkward, often trying piece of work.
But surprisingly deliberate, too. For all its logorrheic digressiveness, Gem of the Ocean is out to achieve something very specific. And magnificent. And so wildly ambitious that the question of whether or not it actually succeeds seems completely beside the point.
Which is a marvelous, wild thing to behold–and, at some level, participate in. All the more so because Donald Holder’s lighting design, with its wave shimmer and long slivers of sunlight, goes so far toward creating the physical and psychic ambience of a slave-ship hold. Holder’s light very nearly compensates for Kenny Leon’s inadequate performance as Citizen; emphasizing the galoot in the character, Leon fails to encompass the subtler, slier, nastier tones that Wilson wrote into him.
