Review: MTC's 'Seven Guitars' Has the Blues

has opened its new season with August Wilson's . The show is vibrant, colorful, tragic, and in fact, it has the blues -- which is to say that with its uniformly powerful cast, staging and design, it delves deeply into Wilson's narrative about African American life in 1940s Pittsburgh.

Seven Guitars is part of a series of dramas that explore black culture in each decade of the 20th century. The plays revolve around an impoverished community in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where people struggle for the basics of life -- a community Wilson was born into and dedicated himself to because of the lack of historical documentation of the African American experience.

The seven characters in the play inhabit a worn backyard in the district. In that yard there is music, madness, despair and love, and the seven characters are closer than sixteenth notes. From their shared past they care for and listen to each other, monitoring death and welcoming life.

The pivotal figure is guitar player Floyd (Tobie Windham), who has written a single hit tune and returned to the neighborhood after serving time in jail, hoping to persuade Vera (Omoze Idehenre) to accompany him to Chicago, where he plans to come up with a second hit. His sidemen Canewell and Red Carter are rhythmically and riotously acted by Marc Damon Johnson and L. Peter Callender. Their music and their movements are infectious.

Louise (the wonderful Margo Hall) and her errant niece Ruby (Shinelle Azoroh) move among them, sparking them to confront emotions and reveal motivations, and Charles Branklyn is the off-center Hedley, who invokes the spirit of Buddy Bolden and remembers racial injustices through the haze of his mind.

Seven Guitars opens with Floyd's funeral and ends with his ascension into heaven. Kent Gash's straightforward direction laces the somewhat wandering episodic material deftly, Linda Tillery manages the blues, and J.B. Wilson's stage design of a no-exit place is strikingly framed in glowing scenes of local life.

The 411:  previews at Marin Theatre Company tonight through Aug. 14, open Aug., 16 and runs through Sept. 4. See the MTC website for more info and to purchase tickets.

--Bay City News Service