The Promise of 'Gem of the Ocean'
At Actors' Shakespeare Project, August Wilson's play remains essential, even when the production can't meet its demands
The past is always present at 1839 Wylie Avenue, the storied Pittsburgh home of Aunt Ester, and the seedbed for August Wilson’s entire Century Cycle. The house is a living archive of the Black presence in America, sacred ground where the visible world burdened by things like law, work, and money meets ancestors, history, and the dead—a site of reckoning and the gravitational center of Wilson’s world. It sits at the heart of Gem of the Ocean, the first installment of his ten-part Century Cycle, now staged by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Hibernian Hall through May 17.
Not just a chronicle of the 20th century but a dramatic record of Black life in America decade by decade, Gem of the Ocean is the Cycle’s origin point. At its center is the character that Wilson himself called “the most significant persona of the cycle,” the 285-year-old Aunt Ester, a figure who exists somewhat outside ordinary time.
Born around the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, Ester is a force, embodying the unbroken line of Black existence in America. She’s a moral and spiritual authority and memory keeper, serving as connector between the African past and the African-American present. 1839 Wylie is the house where that memory is both held and transmitted.
Set in 1904 (but written in 2003), Gem of the Ocean unfolds at a moment when freedom is newly granted but far from realized. Slavery may not be legally present, but structurally and psychologically, its effects are, leaving Black life suspended in a state of freedom perilously close to its opposite. Into this unresolved world comes Citizen Barlow (Joshua Lee Robinson), a young man seeking relief from the guilt surrounding a man’s death. He arrives at Aunt Ester’s door asking for his soul to be cleansed—he’s heard that she does that sort of thing—and is ultimately made to face the full weight of what he has done and the world in which he has done it. The play becomes not just about one man’s guilt, but about how an entire people live with what has been done to them, and what they’ve had to do to survive.
The play gathers a set of figures who each answer the same question differently: how to live in a world where freedom exists but cannot be fully exercised. There’s Caesar (a brilliant Kadahj Bennett), the local constable, a figure of Black authority bent toward enforcing white order. His answer is simple: follow the rules, even when they do harm. Solly Two Kings (Jonathan Kitt), a former Underground Railroad conductor, stands as his moral counterweight, still living by resistance, even when it costs him everything. And then there’s Citizen, newly arrived and unformed, a young man trying to decide what kind of person he will be. Filling out the play are Black Mary (Marhadoo Effeh), Aunt Ester’s protégé, caught between these forces and not yet settled into her own, and Eli (Dereks Thomas), the house’s gatekeeper, who maintains its order and discipline. Then there’s Rutherford Selig (Michael Broadhurst), a white traveling peddler descended from a line of “people finders” who tracked enslaved men and women, now making a living off the very people his family once hunted. The play doesn’t pass judgment on any of them. It lets their choices speak for themselves.
Of all of Wilson’s plays, Gem of the Ocean may be the most demanding. It’s less immediately legible, more resistant to momentum, and unusually dependent on how it is staged. It is no small task to translate Wilson’s plainspoken but incantatory language into something that remains engaging (it is also no small task to stage an eleven o’clock metaphysical journey to a city at the bottom of the Atlantic, but more on that later). And so it is with a very heavy heart when I say that Actors’ Shakespeare Project and director Monica White Ndounou have given us a production that fails to supply the conditions the play needs to come alive.
It isn’t that there’s one big issue that sinks this production, but rather a series of misjudgments that all add up to one disappointing whole. I’ve already mentioned Wilson’s prose, and the dialogue here—as in all of his plays—needs to crackle and sing, carrying scenes forward with a momentum the plot is not designed to supply. It should feel fast, familiar to the people speaking it, and even something the audience has to lean in to catch. Here, much of the dialogue, which can already run long, just feels rehearsed and delivered, stiff and overdetermined, without a shared rhythm across the cast. A major exception is Kadahj Bennett, who, as Caesar, shows an uncanny understanding of how Wilson’s dialogue should sound.
Then, there’s the matter of the set (designed by Peyton Tavares), which resembles a theatrical playing space rather than a lived-in structure, reading as props placed rather than belongings kept. 1839 Wylie should feel like things have accumulated there, and nothing in the set suggests time layered on top of time, the past pressing in on the present. Worse, the tidy, flat-built frame house and stock staircase give the set the look of a school production, not a storied house with a past. Isaak Olson’s often too-bright lighting doesn’t help matters.
Another fatal issue is that Regine Vital, who plays Aunt Ester, reads as several decades too young for the role. When Ester reads young, it is much harder to imagine that this woman carries an inherited authority, and the play itself contracts. At the very least, she needs to look as though she’s outlived everyone else on stage. A fully realized Ester could probably counter a set that’s too tidy and arranged, but if she doesn’t carry gravity, nothing does—the house becomes just a house, and the production has little room to succeed.
And now let’s get to that metaphysical journey I mentioned earlier. When Citizen comes to Aunt Ester asking to have his soul washed after a man’s death, he’s looking for relief, for the guilt to be taken from him. What she ultimately offers instead is a reckoning, sending him on a ritual journey to the City of Bones—a city at the bottom of the Atlantic, formed from the dead of the Middle Passage: Africans who died in the holds of slave ships or were thrown overboard en route to enslavement. There, he’s made to realize that he isn’t just one man who made one mistake, but that he’s standing inside a long history of suffering and survival. What Ester wants him to understand is that he cannot understand himself without confronting the history that made him. It isn’t just about redemption, but whether he can live with dignity inside a system designed to deny it.
The journey to the City of Bones cannot feel like a theatrical device imposed on the play from left field, which is how it reads here. A successful production of Gem of the Ocean cannot feel like people talking in a living room punctuated by a spiritual sequence—Blithe Spirit, this is not. An audience must feel that the house contains more than just this present moment; it holds the ages. The spirituality must be ever-present. Without that, the City of Bones doesn’t feel inevitable—it feels arbitrary. That sense of inevitability also depends on Aunt Ester as a figure who carries time itself, and here she simply doesn’t. The youth of this Aunt Ester makes the ritual harder to accept as real within the world of the play, draining it of its force. There is no real understanding of any of this in the production.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are two great performances here: the aforementioned Kadahj Bennett, who fills out Caesar with real force, making clear the logic—and the cost—of his position, and the very impressive Joshua Lee Robinson, who ably fills in all the shades of Citizen, from raw fear to a deep and earned clarity in a truly beautiful way. Regine Vital also has some beautiful moments, but the tides are against her here.
Wilson uses 1839 Wylie to bookend the Century Cycle, opening the series inside the storied house and closing with Radio Golf, where the house faces possible destruction through redevelopment. Though the home and its address are fictional—the number 1839 gesturing back to the Amistad rebellion—it isn’t just a location, but a site anchored to a historical moment of resistance, a kind of ground zero for everything Wilson is tracing.
But 1839 Wylie is a real place—or rather, an empty lot in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. It holds cultural and historical weight, even serving as the site of outdoor productions of Gem of the Ocean. There’s no preserved structure, no museum or house you can visit, but the parcel of land remains a kind of living marker, its significance sustained not by what stands there, but by the history it has come to represent.
The same is true of Wilson’s plays, which remain significant regardless of the production around them. This one falters often. And yet, to hear the language is still its own kind of reward, even here. That this production is given life at Hibernian Hall, in Roxbury, a historic center of Black life in Boston, only deepens that experience. This production may not fully come together, but to sit in that world, in that place, still has the power to transform.
Gem of the Ocean. Through May 17 at Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Hibernian Hall. www.actorsshakespeareproject.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.