It’s hard to imagine now, looking back at a body of work that includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Two Trains Running, but when he started out in the late 1970s, Pulitzer-prize winning playwright August Wilson struggled to write dialogue. “I didn’t value and respect the way that blacks spoke,” he said years later in an interview. “I thought that in order to create art out of it, you had to change it.” He asked a playwright friend: “How do you make your characters talk?” The reply? “You don’t. You listen to them.”
Jitney, one of Wilson’s earliest plays, centres on a group of workers renowned for talking: five of the eight characters are taxi drivers (the other three are a hotel doorman and regular fare; a bookie; a girlfriend/student – it’s a man’s world). In a run-down area of Pittsburgh, Becker (world-weary-to-explosive Andrew French) runs an unlicensed cab office, a “jitney station”. The block it’s based in is scheduled for demolition. The place offers a pretext for a sequence of dialogues and encounters that open up wider African American experiences. Here, drivers waiting for jobs swap stories, jibes, hopes, frustrations. Each offers a particular angle on the forces beyond their control. Forces that, like the redevelopment set to destroy their livelihood, are operated by white men concerned with profit not people.
Like their characters, the actors also seem to be battling forces beyond their control. A long, narrow, bare and unrealistically pristine jitney office is raised above stage level and set into a thick-framed black box, on to which cityscapes are intermittently projected, as if director Tinuke Craig and designer Alex Lowde are trying to transform stage into screen. These projections, combined with Max Perryment’s atmospheric music and sound, heighten the filmic effect but interfere with dramatic pace and tension. All these elements get in the way of the performance. Fortunately, the strong cast listen to Wilson’s text and powerfully convey the lives of his characters as movingly revealed through their talk.
• Jitney is at Leeds Playhouse until 6 November
