A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Two Trains Running"

A Study Guide for August Wilson's
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 30
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1410361446

A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Two Trains Running," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Two Trains Running"

A Study Guide for August Wilson's
Author: Cengage Learning Gale
Publisher:
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2017-07-25
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN: 9781375395410

A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Two Trains Running," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

Two Trains Running

Two Trains Running
Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0593087623

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes a “vivid and uplifting” (Time) play about unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary. August Wilson established himself as one of our most distinguished playwrights with his insightful, probing, and evocative portraits of Black America and the African American experience in the twentieth century. With the mesmerizing Two Trains Running, he crafted what Time magazine called “his most mature work to date.” It is Pittsburgh, 1969, and the regulars of Memphis Lee’s restaurant are struggling to cope with the turbulence of a world that is changing rapidly around them and fighting back when they can. The diner is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city’s renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. For just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these people of “loud voices and big hearts” continue to search, to father, to persevere, to hope. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events.

A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Radio Golf"

A Study Guide for August Wilson's
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1410356159

A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Radio Golf," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

Seven Guitars

Seven Guitars
Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 129
Release: 1997-08-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1101173696

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in his continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0593087607

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences comes Joe Turner's Come and Gone—Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. “The glow accompanying August Wilson’s place in contemporary American theater is fixed.”—Toni Morrison When Harold Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man—in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents he begins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world—and it will take more than the skill of the local “People Finder” to discover it. This jazz-influenced drama is a moving narrative of African-American experience in the 20th century.

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson
Author: Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603292608

The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson's plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America's collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson's work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.

August Wilson's Jitney

August Wilson's Jitney
Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2002
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780573627958

"Regular cabs will not travel to the Pittsburgh Hill District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to each other. Jitney dramatizes the lives of men hustling to make a living as jitneys--unofficial, unlicensed taxi cab drivers. When the boss Becker's son returns from prison, violence threatens to erupt. What makes this play remarkable is not the plot; Jitney is Wilson at his most real--the words these men use and the stories they tell form a true slice of life."--The Wikipedia entry, accessed 5/22/2014.