August Wilson was a singularly American playwright who wrote about grifters and soothsayers, loners and anchors navigating life in Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a milieu as far removed from Italy as can be imagined. Yet a new Italian-language production of his play \u201cJitney\u201d suggests that Wilson\u2019s America has no borders.<\/p>\n
Wilson\u2019s plays have been translated before, and at least one of those translations has been produced, including \u201cFences\u201d in Chinese<\/a> at the National Theater of China in Beijing in 1996. But Renzo Carbonera<\/a>, an Italian filmmaker, is making his theatrical directing debut with a production that he says will be the first Italian-language translation of a Wilson play to be performed by a cast of Black-Italian actors in both Italy and the United States.<\/p>\n Carbonera<\/a> said he was eager to introduce Italians to Wilson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright who died<\/a> in 2005 at the age of 60. He hoped to underscore for Americans how the writer\u2019s compassion for the common man transcends language and national identity.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a play about a Black community but also about love, brotherhood, suffering, death \u2014 it\u2019s life,\u201d Carbonera said in an interview in early April over video from Sardinia, the breathtakingly emerald Italian island on the Mediterranean Sea.<\/p>\n Seated next to Carbonera was Tomiwa Samson Segun Aina, who was born in Nigeria and studied acting in Italy. Aina said it was refreshing to \u201cplay someone\u2019s life without it being about how we are Black.\u201d In Italy, he added, \u201cwe don\u2019t have many texts that talk about the normal life of people that happen to look like us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJitney\u201d had a short run<\/a> last weekend in Sardinia; Carbonera said he considered it a success because \u201ca lot of people cried, and cried a lot.\u201d (It was also staged in 2023 for the Wilson Project<\/a>, a State Department-funded festival in Vicenza, Italy.)<\/p>\n In the United States, the cast will perform \u201cJitney\u201d with English subtitles at the Black Rep<\/a> in St. Louis (May 1-3) and in Cleveland through the Powerful Long Ladder<\/a> theater company (May 5-6). The tour ends at the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company<\/a> (May 8-10) in collaboration with the August Wilson House<\/a>, an arts organization dedicated<\/a> to the playwright. Stops in the American South are planned for October.<\/p>\n \u201cJitney\u201d is set in 1977 at a taxi company operating out of a forlorn building in Pittsburgh\u2019s Hill District<\/a>, the predominantly Black neighborhood where Wilson was born and lived until the age of 13. And through the story \u2014 exploring the conflicts between different generations of drivers and their sometimes clashing ideas about legacy and identity \u2014 Wilson\u2019s poeticism and riffy vernacular rings out. His plays are usually staged naturalistically, but this \u201cJitney\u201d is spare, with few props, video projections of Pittsburgh in the 1970s providing a sense of place and costumes in black and yellow, an intentional nod to the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers.<\/p>\n But what do Italians know about Wilson\u2019s world of the play? Carbonara said in visits to the United States, he took in shows at several American Black theater companies, including the National Black Theater<\/a> in New York City and Karamu House<\/a> in Cleveland.<\/p>\n Watching how Americans interpret Wilson, he became inspired to develop with his actors \u2014 most are in their 20s and 30s \u2014 their own sui generis style of movement and speech that blends American naturalism and European conceptualist performance traditions. African gestures and speech patterns too, \u201cthings that,\u201d as Aina put it, \u201can African person would easily recognize.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe African ancestry of these actors is much closer than the African ancestry of many Black American people,\u201d Carbonera said.<\/p>\n The daunting task of reimagining that realm fell to Angela Sold\u00e0, who was unfamiliar with Wilson before 2021, when she started translating \u201cJitney\u201d as her master\u2019s thesis at the University of Padua in Northern Italy. Carbonera, who also studied at the university, had asked one of his former English teachers there if she knew someone who could tackle the project.<\/p>\n To get a feel for Wilson\u2019s cultural and geographic references, Sold\u00e0 researched the Hill District\u2019s history of the Black-owned cab services<\/a> that preceded Uber. For a taste of how American actors deliver Wilson\u2019s shrewd comedy and incantatory crescendos, she watched a production of \u201cJitney\u201d in the archives of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts during a visit to the city.<\/p>\n In the two years it took her to translate the play, Sold\u00e0 said one of her biggest challenges was deciding what and how to modify and cut \u2014 losses and gains that translators wrestle with on the regular. Italian colloquialisms aren\u2019t easy proxies for Wilson\u2019s lyrical turns, especially around race. The N-word, a mot juste in Wilson\u2019s plays, becomes Negro, an Italian derogatory term for Black people. \u201cYellow gal,\u201d or a woman of mixed race, is now simply mulatta.<\/p>\n Sold\u00e0 said she kept the play\u2019s title because it \u201cholds in itself the whole story of the play.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo Italian word could express this concept,\u201d she said. (The Italian translation would be the ungainly \u201cTaxi Abusivo,\u201d or \u201cunsanctioned taxi.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cJitney\u201d is one of the 10 plays in Wilson\u2019s monumental American Century Cycle<\/a> that examines Black lives in every decade of the 20th century, nine of which are set in the Hill District<\/a>. (\u201cMa Rainey\u2019s Black Bottom\u201d takes place in Chicago.) The play premiered in Pittsburgh in 1982, ran Off Broadway<\/a> in 2000 and made it to Broadway<\/a> in 2017, winning the Tony Award for best play revival.<\/p>\n Wilson\u2019s plays are regularly staged across the country. A new production of \u201cJoe Turner\u2019s Come and Gone\u201d<\/a> is now on Broadway with Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer. In Baltimore, several theaters are in the middle of a three-year project<\/a> to stage the entire Century Cycle.<\/p>\n Carbonera first read \u201cJitney\u201d in 2019 on a flight back to Italy from Pittsburgh, where he had been a guest at an Italian film festival. He said he chose it because it centers on the fates of cabdrivers, a blue collar sphere he thought would be familiar to both Italians and Americans.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very universal but set in a specific space,\u201d he said. (For his next project, Carbonera said he hopes to stage his own Italian-language translation of Suzan-Lori Parks\u2019s \u201cTopdog\/Underdog.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n In this \u201cJitney,\u201d five actors perform all nine roles, not out of thrift but because of a dearth. Miguel Gobbo Diaz, a 30-something actor originally from the Dominican Republic, plays Becker, the 60-something operator of the taxi company.<\/p>\n \u201cWe actually don\u2019t have 60-year-old Black actors in Italy,\u201d Carbonera said. \u201cThey simply don\u2019t exist.\u201d (Rosanna Sparapano, who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is the show\u2019s lone actress.)<\/p>\n Lina Insana, an associate professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh who consulted on the initial translation process, said it wasn\u2019t until the 1980s that more people started immigrating to Italy than emigrating from it. Those arriving have included Africans.<\/p>\n The children of these immigrants are now pursuing acting careers, an Italian \u201ctheatrical pipeline,\u201d as Insana put it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are second generation, but for the first time as Black actors,\u201d Diaz said.<\/p>\n