HEAVY LIES THE CROWN

Manny Buckley’s commanding production
finds its greatest strength in the performances
surrounding its troubled protagonist

Brandon Boler, Isis Elizabeth

“If I’d been carrying twenty pounds of potatoes maybe I would have went home a shorter way.”

A fading mural of Willie Mays peeks from a corner onto two weathered houses in Pittsburgh. The year is 1985, Reaganomics is in full flower, and in his backyard in the Hill District, King Hedley the Second (James Lewis) is fuming. Still recovering from a stint in prison, King is determined to set his life to rights. His dream, shared with his best friend Mister, is to own a video store. And one has just popped up on the market. King and Mister (Ernest Henton) need $10,000 to buy in, but King’s boss just had his contract bid rejected by City Hall and Mister’s boss keeps delaying his promised raise. Desperate to raise money, King and Mister have taken to selling boosted refrigerators. They’re only $300, from GE, and state of the art; they just can’t make ice.

Isis Elizabeth, James Lewis

August Wilson’s King Hedley II, the ninth play in his Pittsburgh Cycle, is the second offering from City Lit in its 46th season. Jeremiah Barr’s charming set features the back porches of two houses, one occupied by the Hedley family and the other by an older gentleman called Stool Pigeon (Brandon Boler), who fancies himself a prophet. A raised plant bed completes the yard. It is currently bare, but King is determined to grow flowers in it despite the misgivings of his birth mother Ruby (Andrea Conway-Diaz), who insists that the dirt isn’t good enough: “You need good dirt to make things grow.” King fires back in resentment, “This is the only dirt I got.”

Isis Elizabeth

The above exchange should tell you a bit about the tone of the play to follow. King Hedley II is unabashedly theatrical. Its metaphors are overt and its performances are big and brash; occasionally too much so for the small City Lit space, particularly in the case of Lewis and Boler. The technical design leans into this classical theatricality: Mike McShane’s lighting design narrows to a spot for each performer during each monologue, and his sound design is on point as well. There’s also a marvelous (and unobtrusive) blues soundtrack that does a lot to set the scene. Director Manny Buckley knows exactly what he’s doing here, and he does it very well.

Brandon Boler

Raising the money for the video store is just one of King’s problems: his wife Tonya (a spectacular Isis Elizabeth) has just discovered she’s pregnant and is insisting on getting an abortion; he still cannot get over his former girlfriend Neesi, who was killed in a car crash while he was in prison for murder, and he’s just learned that the cousin of the man he killed is in town and has been inquiring as to his whereabouts. If that wasn’t all, Elmore (Jelani Julyus), a gambler who took King for everything he had the last time they met, is going to visit. Elmore is Ruby’s former lover, and he’s coming to Pittsburgh with more than gambling on his mind.

Ernest Henton, James Lewis

If you’ve seen or read Wilson’s Seven Guitars, you’ll recognize some of these names. Several characters are ported over from that story, and its plot influences the proceedings of King Hedley II quite a bit, especially the final scenes. But knowledge of the earlier play is entirely unnecessary here. The brilliance of King Hedley II is that the backstories are unimportant in the larger scheme of things. The focus is on the vicious cycle of systemic poverty and violence that makes escape a near miracle. It also has fascinating insights regarding the American male’s perception of honor and masculinity, which ties it to City Lit’s previous slice of Americana, the superb Shane, set in a different era where these concepts take on an oversized importance. The most powerful portions of King Hedley II involve characters trying to convince King that he’s focusing on the wrong things in life. It’s hard to like King, and Lewis’s interpretation of the character makes him even more unlikeable, bringing his intransigence and anger to the fore at the expense of his more introspective qualities. But it works to the play’s benefit. His path of self-destruction cannot be halted, and Buckley’s direction makes the audience complicit as the people who love King try their best to save a man who stubbornly refuses to be saved.

James Lewis

King Hedley II is the sort of play that actors love, and with good reason. All the major parts are beautifully wrought, and each one of the principals gets a terrific monologue. The dialogue is more often than not a bit on the nose, but it’s beautifully constructed and allows the performers plenty of room for nuance. All the actors are great, but of the cast, Isis Elizabeth’s Tonya and Jelani Julyus’s Elmore made the strongest impression on me. Elizabeth is a tour de force in her blistering monologue (in the original Broadway production, Viola Davis won her first Tony for the same part), but she’s even better in the aftermath. As King barrels on toward tragedy, you can clock the moment where Tonya gives up on him, shifting her priorities to focus on things she can control. The love is still there, but she knows she can’t save him; a scene where she tries to convince him that she doesn’t need the things that he’s willing to kill himself to provide her is the emotional peak of the play, and it is devastating.

Jelani Julyus, James Lewis

As Elmore, Jelani Julyus gives the savviest and slyest performance onstage. Beautifully costumed by Andres Mota in a dapper three-piece suit, Julyus uses his smooth baritone and megawatt smile to disguise his designs from the other characters as well as from the audience. It’s so well-crafted that it isn’t until well into the second act that we get a clue as to whether he’s one of the good guys, and even then, he keeps us on our toes until the climax. It’s a remarkable, multilayered performance that lingers long after the final curtain.

Isis Elizabeth, Andrea Conway-Diaz

There’s a cruel irony in the mural of Willie Mays looking over the Hedleys’ backyard. Considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time, Mays grew up in Jim Crow Alabama and through his athletic excellence broke through racial barriers in a way that few would have anticipated, and he did it the prescribed way: by keeping his head down, not making a fuss, and simply being better than anyone else. But by his reluctance to participate in the civil rights movement, he also failed to give voice to the challenges that regular Black men and women—mere mortals—have to face, the systemic forces that kept them locked into their socioeconomic class. The stars aligned for Mays, but his smiling visage is a constant reminder to Hedley of his failure to rise above his circumstances no matter how hard he tries. This running in place to achieve less than before is a repeated motif in King Hedley II, and Wilson directly implicates it as the reason for the fatalistic attitude of the characters:

“You can’t play the chord God ain’t wrote. He wrote the beginning and the end. He let you play around in the middle but he got it all written down.”

Whether by choice or accident, the supporting performances in City Lit’s King Hedley II overshadow the lead. But it feels appropriate. In this darkest and most despairing of Wilson’s plays, the real tragedy is that for all his intentions, King’s ultimate fate will have no significant effect on the people around him. Wilson leaves open the question whether there will be a King Hedley III, and Isis Elizabeth’s performance doesn’t even hint at Tonya’s decision; either way, her sorrowful eyes seem to say, it doesn’t really matter.

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photos by Steven Townshend of Distant Era

King Hedley II
City Lit Theater Company
Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. in Chicago
3 hours, including intermission
Fri & Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3; Mon, Nov. 16 at 7:30
ends on November 29, 2026
for tickets ($22-$40), call 773.293.3682 or visit City Lit

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