REVIEW: Radio Golf

Radio Golf
by August Wilson • Directed by Kenny Leon
presented by the Goodman Theatre

We sat in a box seat. Our friend, Jenny, who works for the Goodman, gave us two free box seat tickets (thank you, Jenny). Great view of the stage (although not the seats the show was being played too), leg room, room to place my bag and hat - hell, I could've sat with my pants around my ankles and no one but my wife would've known. We could see nearly everyone in the audience.

The building is amazing - glass and wood and carpet. There were stations and bars where staff members were selling $2.00 cups of coffee in these wacky little Styrofoam cups and giant $3.00 cookies (you couldn't bring them in the theatre, of course).

The set was exposed in the pre-show (no house music - I know that sounds strange to mention, but I can't recall the last show I saw where the lack of house music seemed noticeable to me). It is an amazing set. A full two stories high - a construction office as the main playing area and cutaway sections above and on the sides to indicate the urban blight and decay surrounding it. Detailed and well-constructed, huge and all-encompassing. I couldn't help but think that I could produce ten full-length plays at the Theatre Building for two years on the money spent on this incredible set.

The lights flash. A canned announcement, welcoming everyone to the theatre, comes over the speakers (which are amazingly surrounding the audience - at one point in the show these speakers are used to THX us with telephone rings - it was cool). The announcer ended his speech with the comment that "if people were going to have candy during the performance, they should unwrap it - now" and the audience laughed. I'm not really sure why they laughed, but they did. If I said that line in one of my curtain speeches, no one would laugh - they would just stare back at me.

And then the play began.

This is August Wilson's final play - he finished it a couple of months before he died. It represents the 1990's in his century of black experience nine-part series (one that includes Fences for the 1950's and King Hedley II for the 1980's) - and I'm sure no one really wants to point out that Radio Golf is...just average.

It's kind of sad to think of Wilson's final play as average, but, apart from the average performances and the average direction, the play itself is simply nothing to crow about. It feels like a play written fifty years ago, filled with oddly placed stories and a lot of speeches. It tells an overly familiar story and tells it in a slow, plodding way. In a time where the "big secret revealed at the end" is the popular thing in film and in some plays, you can see the end of this play in the first five minutes and have easily defined all five stock characters - no one surprises in a single action throughout.

The acting is average across the board - "stand there and say your lines like you mean it" simplicity, but the speeches and "now I'll tell a story about my brother in Viet Nam to a complete stranger" moments are clumsily navigated - and the direction is perfunctory at best.

I'll confess that the audience seemed enthralled, murmuring surprise and assent throughout, either through reaffirmation of what they already knew (I can't believe that an audience comprised primarily of middle class blacks has never heard the "you an Uncle Tom/Niggers vs Negroes" speech, if only from repeated viewings of Glory) or through confirmation of what they knew was coming (you mean Harmon and Old Joe are related??).

I wanted to like it more - the set up was so opulent and it was my first time in the new Goodman facility and I love Fences.

After, on the El, we ran into a filmmaker friend. He asked what we'd seen and what we thought of it.

"Radio Golf - an average script, average direction, average performances, fucking awesome set," I commented.

"Oh. Typical Goodman show, then," he replied.