Gem of the Ocean

August Wilson's mighty ambition, stretching across a decade-by-decade, ten-play cycle of compassionate, poetically engaged playwriting, doesn't really stop at showing us the black experience in the 20th Century. No, Wilson is concerned with the full cargo of the African Diaspora, the history of suffering, the heritage of achievement, and the demons hatched in steerage and slavery that bedevil the race from within.

Gem of the Ocean stands chronologically at the shore of Wilson's sequence, setting us down in 1904 Pittsburgh. It's the crossroads where the historic and legendary past meets the struggles, the triumphs, and the heartbreaks to come.

With Phylicia Rashad as the 285-year-old Aunt Ester, all the precious silt of black bondage is dropped inside her Wylie Avenue parlor. Her humble house of refuge is mystically transfigured in an unforgettable scene where she takes young Citizen Barlow on a voyage of purification to the City of Bones. Part of Ester's expiation ritual takes us back to the bowels of the ship that carried her across the ocean to America.

There's an elegant symmetry between our guilt-ravaged hero, Citizen, and the ruthless Caesar, willing materialistic enforcer of the prevailing white order. Citizen has killed a man by stealing and failing to speak out on behalf of the man accused of the crime. Caesar has killed a man for stealing -- and not listening when he was ordered to surrender. Similar touches of Wilson's craft are deeply woven everywhere. While the Citizen-Caesar conflict is certainly intended to re-echo through the corridors of Wilson's succeeding pieces, the most bedazzling facets of Gem are the matriarchal Aunt Ester and the charismatic Solly Two Kings. If Ester heals Citizen's soul and cleanses his spirit, it's Solly who passes along the torch of a heroic mission.

Rashad certainly merits all the accolades she has received for the utterly unique Aunt Ester, but you're likely to be even more beguiled by the raspy-voiced Anthony Chisholm as the phlegmatic Solly. Wilson lovingly piles one colorful layer upon another in assembling the maverick's captivating life story. He has ranged from Alabama to Canada -- as a slave, a Union scout, and a daredevil pilot who liberated scores of fugitive slaves with the Underground Railroad. Now at 67, bigger than life in an outre outfit that would do Long John Silver proud, Solly makes his living peddling dog shit! A truly wondrous evening.