Seven Guitars

November 25–December 17, 2016

By August Wilson
Directed by Timothy Douglas

Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street

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About

Pittsburgh, 1948. Following the untimely death of Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom, friends grapple with his legacy. The fifth chapter in August Wilson’s epic Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning American Century Cycle, Seven Guitars strikes moving chords of the African American experience in the 20th century: faith, artistry, humor, oppression, brutality, and love.

WILL POWER!

Seven Guitars is the first of Yale Rep’s two 2016–17 WILL POWER! productions. The run includes 10:15AM performances on December 13 and 15, 2016, available only to high school groups. For information on WILL POWER! performances, please contact Roger-Paul Snell at yalerep@yale.edu.

The Artists

Creative Team

"The music is a specific cultural response of black America to the world, the circumstances and the situation in which they’ve found themselves. If you didn’t know anything about African people and nothing about black people in America, and someone gave you blues records, you could listen and find out what kind of people these were…their symmetry, this grace…you’d be able to construct their daily lives."

August Wilson

Playwright

"I was an understudy on Yale Rep’s original productions of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Fences—experiences that profoundly shaped me as an artist. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to direct nine of the ten plays in his 20^th Century Cycle. It’s an honor to return to the theatre where the course of American drama, and my own life, changed forever."

Timothy Douglas

Director