It is a cautionary tale from the times to come: the chronicle of the man who so zealously sold the world – all of it, lock and stock – ever confident that, at the end, there would still be someplace left for him to stand.
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| Tyanna West and Mike Harrison in RADIO GOLF Photos by Maria Barber |
Those familiar with Wilson’s works will recognize the Hill, not only as the very real-world neighborhood where the playwright grew up, but the site of nine plays in Wilson’s titanic Century Cycle. Throughout the ten dramas in his Pulitzer prize-winning magnum opus, Wilson explores a series of sea-changes in the Black experience in America, as reflected in the shifting fortunes of the district and its colorful inhabitants through every decade during the 20th century.
From this distance, it is somehow fitting that Wilson’s cycle ends with that neighborhood facing an existential threat posed by one of its own: Harmond Wilks (Mike Harrison), the favored child of a ruthless realtor whose business practices helped run the Hill into the ground.
As dramaturge Terra Hodge recalls in an opening video curtain speech, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s a new generation of affluent African Americans established themselves in numbers never seen before as wealthy entrepreneurs like Wilks. In the same time, others, like Wilks’ wife, a public relations maven named Mame (Tyanna West), and his business partner and boon companion from college, Roosevelt Hicks (T.J. Swann), made their way into the halls of corporate power.
But in Radio Golf, Wilson asks the price of such pursuits – not only on the pursuers themselves, but on the communities they come from. If a single generation is taught, in the words of Wilde, the price of everything and the value of nothing, Wilson suggests that they will leave little of their heritage and historical identity for their posterity.
At the opening of Radio
Golf, Harmond is a real-estate developer in his own right, who has amassed
the financial and business connections needed to wipe his old community off the
map. Not that he’ll admit to that, of course – at least not in any forward-facing
statement – although his massive mixed-use project hinges on the Hill being
designated a blighted neighborhood for a federal restoration grant. When he
proudly tells rough-edged Sterling Johnson (slow-burning Robert Cotton), a school
mate who now works in construction, “We’re going to bring the Hill back,”
Johnson corrects him: “What you mean is you gonna put something else in its
place.” 
T.J. Swann and Mike Harrison in RADIO GOLF
Johnson has a point. The tenements in Wilson’s Seven Guitars and the boarding houses in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone will not be found in Harmond’s 180-unit luxury apartment community; its manicured patios, lawns and raised garden plots will not resemble the disarray in front of Troy Maxon’s house or in back of King Hedley’s. No jitney stands or juke joints will lurk among its toney shops, and Memphis Lee will definitely not preside behind the counter of the planned Starbucks (just beyond the Whole Foods, next to the Barnes & Noble).
Nor will its inhabitants apparently sound anything like its previous residents. Compared to the live, jazz-inflected patois and verbal polyrhythms heard throughout the Century Cycle, the soullessness of the period's greed culture manifests here in the conspicuously arid corporate tongue, slick advertising slogans and political banalities that predominate whenever Harmond, Mame and Hicks speak.
Compare that with the vivid argot of Elder Joseph Barlow, a.k.a.
Old Joe (Gerald Campbell): one of the inconvenient, idiosyncratic trickster
figures that dot Wilson’s landscapes. When Harmond tells
him, all too credulously to present-day ears, “This is America. This is the land of opportunity… I
can be anything I want,” Barlow quickly sets him straight. 
Gerald Campbell, Robert Cotton and Mike Harrison in RADIO GOLF
“America is a giant slot machine,” he says. In Barlow’s metaphor, the Black man is given a single coin – one that the machine rejects every time. “You look at it and sure enough it’s an American quarter. But it don’t spend for you. It spend for everybody else. But it don’t spend for you.”
When Harmond assures him that golf will give kids all the rules they need to win in life, Barlow asks dryly, “But don’t you need some grass?” Looking around the blighted landscape, he states the obvious: “Ain’t no grass around here.”
Since there was a legal error in a tax foreclosure sale, Barlow holds the deed to a tract of land that could derail Harmond’s developmental plans – and he has no interest in selling it. But the old eccentric serves a greater purpose in Wilson’s world than merely gumming up a real estate deal.
In Barlow’s gentle, never-ending reminders of the old neighborhood and the old neighbors Harmond left behind, an uncanny emissary from another time is calling a lost young man back home: reconstructing a path from Harmond’s alienation toward reconciliation and community.
“I remember you had a porch,” he says. “A white porch and sometimes you would sit up there out the rain.” Barlow then recalls how young Harmond expressed himself “in everything. Even the way you scratch your head… All that’s like talking. We’d sit out there in the yard. You didn’t have to say anything. You didn’t have to have no other meaning. Everybody just sitting out. That was some of the best times I had in life.”
As Campbell’s voice soothes the dialogue under Jamal Farrar’s direction, you can all but hear the summer thunder and the bullfrogs. And as Wilson’s words transport us, they also frame Radio Golf as a spiritual fight, not only for the souls of the central characters, but the soul of a neighborhood as well.
When Harmond ventures to the house in question – the one-time domicile of Aunt Ester, a mythic folk priestess and spiritual healer who supposedly died at the ripe old age of 366 – a sense of place, generations or centuries old, reorients him toward restoring, and not erasing, the past.
As he does, Harmond finds his business-oriented rose-colored
blinders don’t fit so well anymore. When Hicks demands they tear down the house
they do not own, Harmond files an injunction, jeopardizing the entire project.
In that moment, a thunderstruck Harrison stares at actors Swann and West, as if
just seeing them for the first time in designer Deb Royals’ aging, dingy little office.
Swann and Harrison in RADIO GOLF
“You’ve got to have the rule of law,” he insists. “Nobody wants to live in chaos.”
That decision sets up the final conflicts, in which every central character must choose the world in which they – and everybody else – must live.
In the last words he ever wrote for stage, Wilson elevates the stakes, as Black characters fight with all they have over conflicting visions of their past, their present, and their posterity. Their incendiary rhetoric leaves none on stage unscathed – and few of us in the audience as well.
West delivers Mame’s passionate indictment on the relationship between privilege and protest, with compelling authority. “You’re acting like a kid who because things don’t go his way takes his ball and goes home,” she coldly tells Harmond. “That’s what your problem is. You’ve always been the kid who had the ball. You’re the one with the glove and the bat.”
When Johnson and Hicks square off, actors Cotton and Swann bring the heat, peppering their riveting combat with ethnic slurs and other verbal knifework. After Johnson concludes, “It’s Negroes like you who hold us back,” Hicks finally reveals his true racial allegiance: “Who’s ‘us’? Roosevelt Hicks is not part of any ‘us.’”
When someone like that has the power to erase a neighborhood, a people’s history is also placed in peril.
Wilson’s final work serves potent notice of how fragile our legacies can be. It’s significant that a playwright’s last thoughts on his way out the door were these: Preserve the past. And consider the future.
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