Seven Guitars

Full Length, Tragic comedy Characters: 4 male, 3 female Exterior Set The sixth in the author's decade by decade exploration of the black experience in America, two of which have won Pulitzer Prizes, Seven Guitars is part bawdy comedy, part dark elegy and part mystery. In the backyard of a Pittsburgh tenement in 1948, friends gather to mourn for a blues guitarist and singer who died just as his career was on the verge of taking off. The action that follows is a flashback to the busy week leading up to Floyd's sudden and unnatural death. "Displays a narrative sweep and almost biblical richness of language and character.... Mr. Wilson writes so vividly that the play seems to have the narrative scope and depth of a novel."-The New York Times. "Impressive ... with wild, untamed elements of symbolic fantasy, and the language ... is used with the specific riff like fluency and emotional impact of jazz."-New York Post. Winner of the N.Y. Drama Critics Award for Best Play.

August Wilson is a major American playwright whose work has been consistently acclaimed as among the finest of the American theater. His first play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best new play of 1984-85. His second play, Fences, won numerous awards for best play of the year, 1987, including the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, his third play, was also voted best play of 1987-88 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. In 1990, Wilson was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson.