DPL Book Club: Two Plays by August Wilson

The DPL Book Club is a monthly book club for adults which reads a variety of recent and classic fiction and non-fiction. 

For May, the Book Club has selected two plays by Pulitzer Prize winner and Pittsburgh native August Wilson, The first play is Joe Turner's Come and Gone, written in 1984.

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.

The second play is Gem of the Ocean, written in 2003. 

Gem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century—an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize–winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama’s 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life.

Copies of each title are available at Dormont Public Library. Joe Turner's Come and Gone is available on Libby as an eBook.