The view of the outside world that greets the Goodman Theatre audience at “Gem of the Ocean” is seen through the battered wooden slats at the backside of Aunt Ester’s home. The year is 1904, and that’s old Pittsburgh peeking through the gaps. But at times the outside world becomes a harrowing time out of mind, a storm-battered sea bearing a ship of human cargo, even the underwater realm of the magical City of Bones.
“Gem of the Ocean” is the first in a ten-play saga of Black Americans throughout the 20th century by the late American playwright August Wilson. These extraordinary tales are all set in a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood known as the Hill District, where Wilson himself was born. It took the Pulitzer Prize-winning author more 30 years to complete the entire project, and although the works can certainly stand alone as individual plays, Wilson’s Century Cycle really constitutes a massive poem that charts the path of Black Americans out of the Civil War South and into the modern era.
