King Hedley II

King Hedley II opens on a man planting seeds in a strip of hard dirt behind a row of houses, seven years after the killing that sent him to prison. King has come home to a neighbourhood with less in it than when he left, a scar across his face he will explain to anyone who asks, and a plan to buy a video store with money he does not have.

He and his friend Mister are selling stolen refrigerators door to door to raise it. His wife Tonya is pregnant and does not want to be. His mother Ruby, a singer who handed him to someone else to raise, has taken up again with Elmore, a smooth old hustler who knew the family when King was small and is carrying something he has not said out loud yet.

August Wilson wrote it as the 1980s entry in his ten-play American Century Cycle, one play for each decade of the last century, and it reached the stage at the turn of the millennium. It brings back Ruby and Stool Pigeon from Seven Guitars, and inheritance is its subject: most of what gets handed down in it is debt.

The writing is built from long speeches that arrive without much warning. Stool Pigeon, the street's self-appointed prophet, hoards newspapers and talks in scripture. Elmore turns a card game into a confession. King tells the story of his own face. The action never leaves the back yard, and the tension comes from who walks into it and what they are carrying.

The seeds keep failing to come up through most of the evening. What happens at the end is less a surprise than an arrival, and the play has spent two acts making sure the cost of it is understood.