*The Struggle Continues- August Wilson's "Gem Of The Ocean"

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Play/Book Review

Gem Of The Ocean, August Wilson, Theater Communication Group, New York, 2007

The first couple of paragraphs of this review have been used as introduction to other August Wilson Century Cycle plays as well.

Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.

Although "Gem Of The Ocean" was not August Wilson's first play written in what has become the century cycle it is first in time at the turn of the 20th century. To set the context it was time when black chattel slavery had been abolished legally but after the time, at least in the South (and de facto in the North), that Jim Crow ruled race relations in America. The great promise of the Civil War and the post-war Reconstruction period gave way to the doctrine, if one can call it that, of "separate but equal". The struggle to come to terms with that hard reality , and the realization that an additional struggle or two were going to be necessary in order to regain that promise, sets the tone for the play and for the cycle.

As for the actual dynamics of this play itself it takes place in 1904, in as is most usually the case in Wilson's work budding industrial Pittsburgh, a place that theoretically could provide hope for the black masses heading north from the dead-end of the agrarian South. That hard dirty wage slavery could provide some positive relief shows the precarious position of blacks at that time. Moreover, this is a mixed blessing as blacks could be just as easily used as `scabs', and then discarded, as an core component of the labor force.

The story hinges around the actions that occur at one of the mills when blacks go on strike themselves for better wages and working conditions. Enter, one Citizen freshly arrived from the South but also frustrated by his prospects. He commits crime and another takes the fall for it. Then, all hell breaks loose until the time of redemption.

The agent of redemption will be none other than Aunt Ester, a figure who hovers around other Wilson plays, Black Mary as her lady-in waiting and Solly Two Kings, a hardened veteran of the black struggle for equality and himself a slave before he became an agent on the Underground Railroad a job he never gave up even after the abolition of slavery. It is that premise-one that the fight for black equality is neither a given nor an easy task that, without giving the plot away, creates the dramatic tension here. Along the way we cross swords with the Booker T. Washington figure of Caesar as the black agent of the unseen (in the play) white power elite to provide the contrary notion that black self-help and black folk wisdom is passé and that one must accept that this is a dog-eat-dog world. As always Wilson provides powerful dialogue to move the action and, once again, I hear that little bluesy, gospelly music in the background that always pushes the rhythm of these works. Kudos, once again, Brother Wilson. The struggle continues.