Martel Manning News Today

At the play’s heart are a flawed patriarch straining against an inequitable society and resilient family members fighting generational trauma.

A painfully honest look at the relationship between a husband and wife, and a father and his two sons, the play captures a sense of the generational turmoil in one Pittsburgh family. And, along the way, Wilson subtly presages the more overtly revolutionary era that will unfold in the 1960s.

In director Monty Cole’s staging, August Wilson’s 1950s-set drama swings for the fences with mixed results.

Martin McDonagh’s intense play used to be about the right of a writer to write his gruesome tales. Now we're not so sure.