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Synopsis
Set in 1969, during the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of Black Power.
BookList
With this play Wilson reaches the halfway mark in his labors to dramatically limn, one-decade-per-play, twentieth-century black American life. The fifth in the cycle, it is set in 1969 in a commercial-residential part of Pittsburgh slated to fall to a redevelopment scheme; specifically, in a soul-food restaurant run by Memphis Lee and habituated by a collection of characters including, besides Lee and his young cook-washer-waitress Risa, undertaker West (the richest local businessman), just-released convict Sterling, numbers runner Wolf, new Social Security applicant Holloway, and Hambone, a gentle madman preoccupied by the ham he feels the local butcher, a white man, owes him but has never delivered. These six men and one woman exemplify as many ways of living with white oppression and their own personal demons, and their collisions of temperament and motive are as vital and moving as any in American drama.