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August Wilson's legacy in the American theater is secure, but not, one hopes, safe. Safety in the arts means the decomposition of creative artistry into cultural artifice, where it is deemed appropriate to treat an artist's work like sacred texts. In the theater especially, remaking familiar productions is paramount to keeping works relevant. In August Wilson's oeuvre, the challenge is all the more pressing: his early death, at sixty, in 2005, has neither allowed for time to reevaluate his writing nor given directors or actors much chance to think things through anew. For now, we are seeing his plays as they were initially presented; fortunately, Wilson was such a gifted dramatist that following along the known path is enough. The production of Radio Golf  by the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, at Spencer Theatre in UMKC, which opened October 23rd (it will continue until November 9th), need only present itself to be as timely or even more so since it premiered.

The play opens on The Hill, in Pittsburgh, Wilson's half-real, half-mythical hometown, where the African-American community loomed large in his life and in his imagination. It is 1977, and a rising young developer, Harmond Wilkes (Kevyn Morrow), is running for mayor. With his old buddy, Roosevelt Hicks (a disarming performance by Wiley Moore), Harmond hopes to make a change in the old guard while moving on up for themselves. From the first, with a joke about parking their cars where Harmond and Roosevelt can see them, Wilson sets up the theme of how trouble brews when the thing that matters most is not being watched. Harmond and his wife, Mame (Julia Pace Mitchell), are as close politically as, well, Bill and Hillary; they trade jokes and suggestions about his campaign. She wants him to cut a part in his speech about police corruption that the local newspaper plans to print; after all, she says, he never knows when he will need their help. Harmond, mindful of his place in the campaign (and maybe history, too, but he shies away from that), refuses to relent. The audience can see trouble coming together long before the straight-talking Harmond; it makes the jokes batted out by the characters a bit nervier. There is no fifteen-minute intermission in real life.

Wilson draws together his plotlines and themes when an older black, Elder Joseph Barlow (Stanley Wayne Mathis), ambles into Harmond and Roosevelt's office to make himself known; before long, we learn that a derelict house that has been bought by the two developers-bought before everything was kosher--once belonged to Barlow, who still claims ownership and says he knows nothing about unpaid taxes leading to the sale. He has been having the house painted. When he discovers that Harmond and Roosevelt have plans to demolish his home, he leans into the younger black man with a mix of folksy homilies and fighting words.  The conversations between Harmond and Barlow are among the play's finest. The actors, directed by Lou Bellamy with easy assurance, react to each other like two strangers, like father and son, like the Law and the higher law. Suddenly, it seems that Harmond's decision-making is not as uniformly self-seeking as before, nor as morally pure. The campaign concessions of Barack Obama illuminate the background of Radio Golf: the audience cannot but consider the quickness with which a motivated individual's rising career and entire life can be bound by circumstances that define him (in Nietzsche's phrase) as human, all too human.

 Radio Golf is the last play in a wide-ranging cycle that encompasses Wilson's sense of the modern African-American experience. The interconnectedness of themes and characters (such as the invisible Aunt Esther, whose presence is invoked by the address of the condemned house) in ten plays-including the two Pulitzer-prize winning pieces Fences and The Piano Lesson-is rooted in Wilson's experience as an observer of the past and through his own experiences. (He was chased out of his Catholic high school as the only black student, and later dealt with a wary white establishment when he began to write). This play turns out to be an elegiac note on which to end both the cycle and August Wilson's career; in Harmond Wilkes' decision to better himself or do better for the African-American community, Wilson places the theme of self-interest squarely in a historical mode. It is a shame to always be looking back over one's shoulder. The joke about keeping an eye on one's car in the not-great part of town is tied to a plotline about playing golf-Roosevelt can see no higher prize than to play golf at an exclusive club with a prominent white businessman who pays for everything, "including the caddy." When someone breaks into Harmond's car and steals his clubs it is like a personal attack on him. His sense of self is driven off track. Like Chekhov's gun seen in the first act that will inevitably come back to haunt the characters in the last act, Harmond's missing golf clubs are a sign to him that he chooses to neglect. However important it is to keep one's eye on the prize, first and last, Wilson seems to be saying, keep an eye on one's car.

REVIEW: Radio Golf
Presented by Kansas City Repertory Theatre
Runs now through November 9
Runs Call or visit the website for performance times.
Spencer Stage, 4949 Cherry, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org 

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.