DGA Press and Awards - Jitney Evening Standard 2001

Remarkable Ride to US Wasteland
By Nicholas de Jongh

Originally printed in London Evening Standard , January 1, 2001

What a stealthy emotionally overwhelming spell August Wilson, America's best-regarded black playwright, casts in Jitney. Roger Robinson's father and Keith Randolph Smith's son blaze a trail of fury and desolation when they meet after 20 years apart. In Marion McClinton's finely pitched production - fresh from Broadway - these performances are outstanding. They possess a power and conviction that's unmatched upon the London stage. I was bowled over.

David Gallo's fine stage set plunges you into a twilight world of American taxi-driving: the office seems to be sited under a motorway. The view from this musty wasteland, where you can almost smell the scent of decay, is of boarded-up shops and industrial chimneys...

Jitney is a panorama of life in the very slow lane where everyone plays the blues. Wilson beautifully modulates the action. All of an unsettling sudden the routine office banter is disrupted by the outbreak of hostilities between the drivers...

The encounter between father and son is remarkable and enthralling in its raw eloquence. Becker represents a generation of respectable, black fathers who have worked and struggled to give their sons better life-chances...

Faint streaks of melodrama and sentimentality sometimes colour the second half. But these do not diminish the pathos of the taxi drivers' attempt to defy the planners' edict that the office be razed to the ground, or their reconciling acceptance of Booster in their midst after catastrophe: a triumph of communality and grace that brings this beautiful, terrifically acted play to its bitter-sweet finale.