Marion Mcclinton

Marion McClinton still recalls seeing his first August Wilson play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," in the mid-1980s. A blend of reality and magic realism, he says, it pushed the envelope of what theater could be. "The play 'rearranged the molecules.' You came in one way and left feeling different," McClinton recalls. "Though I've directed August's 'Seven Guitars,' 'Two Trains Running,' 'Fences,' 'The Piano Lesson' and 'Jitney' since then, I consider 'King Hedley II' to be his next big push.

Marion McClinton still recalls seeing his first August Wilson play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," in the mid-1980s. A blend of reality and magic realism, he says, it pushed the envelope of what theater could be. "The play 'rearranged the molecules.' You came in one way and left feeling different," McClinton recalls. "Though I've directed August's 'Seven Guitars,' 'Two Trains Running,' 'Fences,' 'The Piano Lesson' and 'Jitney' since then, I consider 'King Hedley II' to be his next big push.

The curtain will fall prematurely on the Broadway production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," starring Whoopi Goldberg and Charles S. Dutton. Originally scheduled to end June 29, the August Wilson revival will now close April 6 -- one week before Goldberg begins taping an NBC pilot for Carsey-Werner-Mandabach. The announcement was another bump in the road for "Ma Rainey." Three actors had to be replaced in rehearsals.

August Wilson's "Jitney" isn't a great play. Wilson would likely be among the first to acknowledge his revised 1978 work's blunt, splintery quality, its pedestrian patches and, especially, its narrative conveniences, which aren't so much pulled from the action and the characters as plopped on top. Yet in its own stripped-down style--quite separate from Wilson's later, more stately storytelling vehicles--"Jitney" plays, and plays well.

The Mark Taper Forum has announced a 2000-01 season that will feature a wide range of contemporary work. August Wilson's latest play, "King Hedley II" (Sept. 14-Oct. 22), will follow in the wake of his first play, "Jitney," which closed at the Taper last weekend. Part of Wilson's series of plays set in different decades, "King Hedley II" is set in 1985 in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where "Jitney" took place.

The Mark Taper Forum's 1999-2000 season will include a new Neil Simon play, "The Dinner Party," and two other world premieres--more than in any Taper season since 1988-89. Alan Alda will star as the colorful Caltech physicist Richard Feynman, the late Nobel laureate, in the premiere of an as-yet-unfinished and unnamed script by Peter Parnell, a project Alda brought to the Taper.

Performances have been canceled through Nov. 14 for "Gem of the Ocean," August Wilson's new play, as its producers continued to scramble for the nearly $1 million needed to open the show on Broadway. Tickets are still on sale for all performances beginning Nov. 16, five days after "Gem" originally was to have opened at the Walter Kerr Theater, Michael Hartman, a production spokesman, said Tuesday. A new performance schedule as well as a new opening date will be announced shortly, Hartman said.

A city of bones lies at the bottom of the Atlantic -- the remains of the slaves who died while crossing over from Africa. August Wilson first used this image in his 1986 play "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." In a 1993 interview, he called "Joe Turner" his favorite among his plays and said, "The bones rising out of the ocean -- when I wrote that I thought, 'OK, that's it, if I die tomorrow I'll be satisfied and fulfilled as an artist that I wrote that scene.'

In a world lit by moral twilight, there's a grim honor and directness in killing a man for the right reason, according to Elmore (Charles Brown). But no honor comes from "stealing somebody's life from the back seat of a Toyota," says this urban village elder--the village being a hollowed-out 1980s Pittsburgh in August Wilson's newest play, "King Hedley II." "That's why the black man's gonna catch hell for the next hundred years," he says.

"The Producers," Mel Brooks' raucous glance at old-time Broadway, produced big-time in Broadway's Tony Award nominations, grabbing 15 nods, more than any other show in Tony history. The nominations were announced Monday at a ceremony at Sardi's restaurant in Manhattan. Brooks was honored for both his score and, with Thomas Meehan, his book.