★★★★✰
Despite the deliberately shabby box set, cloaked in tacky 1970s plastic orange and lit by a cold neon light, there is beauty beneath every surface in Tinuke Craig’s production of August Wilson’s Jitney. And not just physically, each of Wilson’s characters has a rich inner life that bubbles and boils thanks to a captivating ensemble cast and glowing directorial vision.
Framed with projections of maps and historical footage of Pittsburgh, its pulsating energy and frenetic tension are always just on the other side of the door to the taxicab waiting room where Jitney is set. It is a refuge from the interminable pace of city life for the jitney drivers who gather to jabber about money and women in a melodious cacophony of locker room talk.
Despite being kept to one room, Wilson’s writing is grandiose in scale. Distilling themes of fatherhood, familial duty, community, and race, he uses moral quandaries to illustrate inter-generational polarisations. Two contrasting families are paralleled in a narrative dialogue. One formed by the boisterous but good-hearted Vietnam veteran Youngblood and assiduous Rena, a young couple about to buy their first home, the other is fragmenting; Becker, the aging boss of the jitney rank must confront his son Booster who has just been released from prison.
Booster’s crime, killing a white ex-lover who accused him of rape to hide their relationship from her intolerant father, is presented with as much ethical weight as his father’s diligence, persevering with life even if the odds are stacked against you. Director Tinuke Craig does not shy away from confronting the cloudy moral conflicts, but she also successfully generates humour, warmth, and relief alongside them.
Wil Johnson and Blair Gyabaah as Becker and Booster respectively are mesmerising. Johnson’s volcanic outpourings and adherence to quietest defeatism clashing with Booster’s energetic youthful indignation and awkward yet stoic demeanour. This is a particular achievement given that Gyabaah had stepped in to perform Booster as an understudy.
Craig imbues the production with a jazz-like rhythm. Not only keeping dialogue snappy and fluid, she breaks scenes with poetic snapshots of the jitney drivers lives whilst sound designer Max Perryment quotes from a smorgasbord of life and culture from the city to add verisimilitude.
The city feels like a character in and of itself, something living and breathing that the characters must wrestle with, reconcile themselves with, and to live alongside. The metropolis bustles but can be also threatening, a place of hope and danger: the bureaucratic threat of knocking down the building in the name of progress and gentrification menace throughout.
That aspect of The Jitney makes it searingly relevant for 2022. Post lockdown our attention has been drawn to movement, how we move in and across the layers of the city. But returning to life over the last year, we are now more away than ever of the economic and social divides of urban life that had previously masqueraded as mundane in our everyday experience.
Words by Alexander Cohen
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