Playdate: King Hedley II by August Wilson

BY August Wilson

June 24, 2021

Few playwrights have ever achieved something as ambitious as August Wilsons Century Cycle—a series of ten plays chronicling the experiences of African Americans across the 20th century. In King Hedley II, the commonplace struggles of a 1980s working-class family play out in a world where neither the past nor the future seem to offer any hope or guidance. Questions of manhood, honor, family, love, and death play out in a brutally real setting—while all the while a low hum of fate, fed by divination and sacrifice, force us to examine the “cycles” we cannot seem to break.