Leo Adam Biga

The story begins:

Gypsy cabbies are at the heart of a milestone event in Omaha theatrical history that unfolds this month at the John Beasley Theater & Workshop at the South Omaha YMCA, 3010 Q St.

For its production of American playwright August Wilson’s drama Jitney, the JBT has assembled some leading interpreters of the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s work. Its director, Claude Purdy, is one of the dramatist’s foremost collaborators. Adding luster and weight are award-winning regional theater and Broadway actors Anthony Chisholm and Willis Burks, members of Wilson’s stock acting company.
The actors are joined on stage by the theater’s namesake, John Beasley, a Wilson regular who’s worked with Chisholm. In a first, Beasley appears in Jitney with both sons, Tyrone and Michael.

Boasting four artists closely associated with his signature plays, there’s even talk Wilson may visit Omaha to catch Jitney during its JBT run. Like his Broadway-produced Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, The Piano Lesson (Pulitzer for best drama), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences (Pulitzer and Tony Award-winner for best drama) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Jitney is set in Pittsburgh, Pa. The city’s Hill District is inspiration for the writer’s projected 10-play cycle chronicling 20th century African-American life.

The Wilson “canon,” as Chisholm called it, is richly evocative of the struggles and triumphs of the African-American experience, as reflected through the rise and fall of one neighborhood Wilson knew as a child and rediscovered as an adult. It’s the place that nurtured him as an artist and that he chose as a prism to tell the Black American story.

“I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us — through profound moments in our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves,” Wilson once said of his Hill District plays.

Jitney is one chapter in this epic story. The circa-1970s drama takes place in a storefront gypsy cabstand in a decayed inner-city landscape reeling from urban renewal. Off-the-books earnings of jitney drivers figure in an underground economy where numbers running, drug dealing and loan-sharking go on.
Unlike these more unsavory pursuits, jitneys provide a community service — public transportation — that’s lacking or lagging. When events conspire to threaten the livelihood of Jitney’s men, they are angry, then resigned and, finally, moved to act.

To tell the story, the JBT gathered an unusual confluence of talent that John Beasley, its president and artistic director, sees as a step toward making the 2-year-old facility a regional theater. It’s his hope the JBT remains a magnet to attract top talent from around the country, as well as a training ground and launching pad for local actors, directors and playwrights.

Nothing quite like this has happened on the Omaha theater scene. Touring troupes from the Royal Shakespeare Company and Guthrie Theater have done residencies. An occasional New York director or actor has come through. But Omaha hasn’t had so many artists of this caliber work in a locally produced play, except for opera, since 1955. That’s when two Hollywood and Broadway icons at their peak, native Nebraskans Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire, returned in an Omaha Community Playhouse benefit production of The Country Girl. Henry’s daughter, Jane, made her debut in that same show.

Now, half-a-century later, the JBT is stamping itself as an important regional presenter of a living master playwright’s work.