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GEM OF THE OCEAN. By August Wilson. Directed by Kenny Leon. Walter Kerr Theatre, New York City. 5 February 2005.
During its year-and-a-half journey from Chicago's Goodman Theatre to Broadway, August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean underwent significant reconfiguring, not the least of which was a change of director and producer. Kenny Leon took over direction from an ill Marion McClinton, and Carole Shorenstein Hays stepped in as co-producer for a cashstrapped Benjamin Mordecai (recently deceased). With each incarnation, Wilson continued to refine his story before Gem reached the Walter Kerr. According to Todd Kreidler, Wilson's dramaturg for the past six years, while everyone involved was saddened by the play's abbreviated New York run, Wilson said, ". . . yeah, but at least we got it right." What a shame, then, that more audiences could not experience this production, whose run was cut short by the same producer who initially saved it. Shorenstein Hays closed Gem on 6 February 2005 after seventy-two performances to make room for another of her productions-the Broadway transfer of John Patrick Shanley's award-winning Doubt.
Ostensibly, the closure occurred because of space limitations on Broadway, but could we imagine this happening to one of August Wilson's more celebrated works? Would The Piano Lesson have been closed to make way for Six Degrees of Separation? As Aunt Ester repeats throughout Gem, asking the right questions is essential: "People waste their time asking all the wrong questions." Although Gem never lost money, perhaps its subject didn't ignite the aptly-named Great White Way's collective imagination in the same manner as Two Trains Running or Fences.
Set in 1904 and representing the first decade in his cycle of plays, Gem may have more in common with Wilson's other truncated Broadway runs of King Hedley II and Joe Turner's Come and Gone than with other plays in his oeuvre. Like Hedley and Joe Turner, Gem is specifically grounded in that portion of the black American experience most shameful and inaccessible to white audiences. At its heart, it tells the story about the need for a new kind of black Everyman (named Citizen Barlow, and performed with great vulnerability by John Earl Jelks), representing black generations who never experienced slavery, to integrate himself into his people's collective...