August Wilson’s Jitney

What a joy it is to be working on August Wilson’s Jitney with this amazing team of Wilson Warriors. Wilson wrote his initial version of Jitney in the late 1970s before he had any idea that it would become a critical component of what was to become one of the monumental triumphs in American theatrical literature: August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, a ten-play cycle of plays chronicling the Black American Experience in the 20th century. In 2000, Wilson re-crafted this early play into a masterwork full of resilience, hope, humor, resistance, and redemption, making this one of Wilson’s most revitalizing and potent plays in his cycle.

August Wilson’s settings have been described as “way stations,” intermediate stopping places when traveling from one place to another. A Jitney station is quite literally the “way station” for the Jitney drivers who wait for the phone to ring or a passenger to show up to request a ride to their destination. But, as in all Wilson plays, this particular setting is also a metaphorical way station for the community of characters who pass through on their spirited life journeys toward love, duty, betrayal, redemption, and self-actualization.

The existence of Jitney stations and drivers came about as a service to the black community, operating outside of the licensed system of white-run taxi companies that refused to service the black neighborhoods. These drivers are warriors, survivors, who make their meager living helping the black folks in the Hill District of Pittsburgh get where they need to be going. There are several social forces at work on these characters. For one, the impending forced closing of the Jitney station by the city through its program of Urban Renewal, better known in the black community as “Urban Removal.” We now call this “gentrification.” This prospect threatens to tear these characters and the whole community apart. There are also generational forces at play between the younger and older characters that strain and chafe their relationships. The older characters had fewer choices about fighting for their dignity in the ’30s and ’40s, and the next generation has more revolutionary ideas about how to stand their ground.

In 2025 many Black Americans continue to attempt to traverse an elusive sea of opportunity in a ship called freedom that is still bound by the chains of systemic and societally ingrained bias. The path to true self-actualization will never come from the external forces we encounter in our lives, nor can those forces impose defeat.

—Tim Bond