12 Books Published by Samuel French Inc on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Radio Golf is a fast-paced, dynamic, and wonderfully funny work about the world today and the dreams we have for the future. Set in Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, it’s the story of a successful entrepreneur who aspires to become the city’s first black mayor. But when the past begins to catch up with him, secrets get revealed that could be his undoing.

The most contemporary of all of August Wilson’s work, Radio Golf is the final play in his unprecedented ten-play cycle chronicling African-American life in the twentieth century - a series that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Completed shortly after his death in 2005, this bittersweet drama of assimilation and alienation in nineties America traces the forces of change on a neighborhood and its people caught between history and the twenty-first century.

Winner! 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Winner! 1990 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding New Play

Nominee! 1990 Tony Award, Best Play

Nominee! 2013 Outer Critics Circle Award, Outstanding Revival of a Play

Nominee! 2013 Drama League Award, Outstanding Revival of a Play

It is 1936 and Boy Willie arrives in Pittsburgh from the South in a battered truck loaded with watermelons to sell. He has an opportunity to buy some land down home, but he has to come up with the money right quick. He wa

Finalist! 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Drama

Peddling stolen refrigerators in the feeble hope of making enough money to open a video store, King Hedley, a man whose self worth is built on self delusion, is scraping in the dirt of an urban backyard trying to plant seeds where nothing will grow. Getting, spending, killing and dying in a world where getting is hard and killing is commonplace are threads woven into this 1980’s installment in the author’s renowned cycle of plays about the black ex

Finalist! 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Drama

This is the 1960s chapter of the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright’s decade by decade saga of ordinary African Americans in this turbulent century. It takes place in Memphis Lee’s coffee shop in a Pittsburgh neighborhood that is on the brink of economic development. Focus is on the characters who hang out there: a local sage, an elderly man who imparts the secrets of life as learned from a 322 year old sage, an ex con, a numbers runner, a laconic

Set in 1904, August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean begins on the eve of Aunt Esther’s 287th birthday. When Citizen Barlow comes to her Pittsburgh’s Hill District home seeking asylum, she sets him off on a spiritual journey to find a city in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Gem of the Ocean is the ninth work in Wilson’s ten-play cycle that has recorded the American Black experience and helped to define generations. The Broadway run starred Tony Award winner Phylicia Rashad as Aunt Esthe

Dramatic comedy Cahracters: 3 male, 2 female A hip and inventive new play by Walter Mosley, best-selling author of more than 25 books and most widely known for his popular Easy Rawlins mysteries, including "Devil in a Blue Dress". Tempest Landry, a street-wise young man living in Harlem, unexpectedly finds himself at the Pearly Gates. When Saint Peter orders him to hell, the quick-witted Tempest refuses to go. A technical loophole forces heaven to send Tempest back to Earth with an angel in tow to keep him out of trouble. The resulting battle of wills takes an intriguing look at good versus evil and what it means to be human.

The Fall of Heaven, is a stunning success. Mosley deftly reworks The Tempest Tales into an incendiary piece of theatre that’s both enthralling and engaging, drawing in the audience and never letting them go."—Broadwayworld.com

Drama

Characters: 8 male, 1 female

Interior Set

Set in 1970 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh that is served by a makeshift taxi company, Jitney is a beautiful addition to the author’s decade by decade cycle of plays about the black American experience in the twentieth century.

"Explosive… Crackles with theatrical energy."-N.Y. Daily News

"Could be described as just a lot of men sitting around talking. But the talk has such varied range and mus

Full Length, Tragic comedy

Characters: 4 male, 3 female

Exterior Set

The sixth in the author’s decade by decade exploration of the black experience in America, two of which have won Pulitzer Prizes, Seven Guitars is part bawdy comedy, part dark elegy and part mystery. In the backyard of a Pittsburgh tenement in 1948, friends gather to mourn for a blues guitarist and singer who died just as his career was on the verge of taking off. The action that follows is

Play with music

Characters: 8 males (5 black, 3 white) 2 black females

Scenery: Unit set

It’s 1927 in a rundown studio in Chicago where Ma Rainey is recording new sides of old favorites. More goes down in the session than music in this riveting portrayal of rage, racism, the self hate and exploitation.

"Searing … funny, salty, carnal and lyrical…. Wilson has lighted a dramatic fuse that snakes and hisses through several anguished eras of American life. When the fuse reaches its e

Drama / Casting: 6m, 5f / Scenery: Interior Sets

Set in a black boardinghouse in Pittsburgh in 1911, this drama by the author of The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars and Fences is an installment in the author’s series chronicling black life in each decade of this century. Each denizen of the boardinghouse has a different relationship to a past of slavery as well as to the urban present. They include the proprietors, an eccentric clairvoyant with a penchant for old country voodoo, a young homeboy u

Drama / 5m, 2f / 1 Set Winner of the New York Drama Critic’s and Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize, this sensational drama starred James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, a former star of the Negro baseball leagues who now works as a garbage man in 1957 Pittsburgh. Excluded as a Negro from the major leagues during his prime, Troy’s bitterness takes it’s toll on his relationships with both his wife and son who now wants his own chance to play. "One of the great characters in American drama."

Book by Fuller, Charles