Weaving Blues Of Trying Times And Lost Dreams
(BEN BRANTLEY)
For the characters in this rich, music-drenched drama, produced on Broadway in 1996, the thread of human existence is both bright and tenuous, liable to snap without warning at any moment. None of the seven African-Americans who share a neighborhood and shifting dreams of conquest in ?Seven Guitars,? set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1948, denies or runs from the fact of their mortality.
?Everybody got a time coming,? one of them says. ?Nobody can?t say they don?t have a time coming.? The play is packed with such observations, along with catalogs of the names of the dead, recollections of deathbed vigils, a spirited argument over whether Jesus was right to resurrect Lazarus, and gorgeous, physically detailed inventories of the pain of losing those you know. Fittingly, the play begins just after the funeral of its central character, a young jazz guitarist (played by Lance Reddick) who was murdered just as he approached the stardom he had always sought.
The scene sets off echoes that were absent when ?Seven Guitars? was first performed. It has now been nearly a year since Wilson, one of the few great American playwrights of his generation, died at 60 of liver cancer.
?Seven Guitars? is the first of three Wilson productions from Signature?s 15th anniversary season, plans for which had begun before he was known to be ill. So when ?Seven Guitars? opens with a scene of mourning, built around the empty space left by a death, the moment feels like an overture to a stately, presumably somber wake.
The solemnity does not last long, or rather, it continues, but only as a whispered bass line in a song whose dominant strands blare, tickle, lilt and, above all, exhilarate.
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