Critic John Lahr writes that August Wilson “took the vernacular rhythms and the swaggering sludge of street talk and turned that tatterdemalion into eloquence. … The noise the characters make and the time their tall tales take are redress for what Zora Neale Hurston called ‘the muteness of slavery.'”
In the clip above, actor Marc Damon Johnson offers just such a quintessential August Wilson moment from the epic Gem of the Ocean: a speech about a memory and a woman and a blue dress, delivered in the second act by Citizen Barlow, one of that play’s central characters.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDM3NjYwMjA5MDE1MjA1MzQ1NDk1N2ZmZQ004) "August Wilson Performed: From 'Gem of the Ocean' 2")
