Nobody appreciates King Hedley II enough (in large part bc Stokes was totally miscast in the original bway production, probably thanks to Wilson’s fetishization of black masculinity), but truly truly truly I am convinced it is his greatest play.
And like I’m sure Stokes Did His Work as an actor and turned in a perfectly capable performance... but I just can’t imagine how the dialogue between that actor and that character set.
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Anyway the resurrection of Aunt Esther through King’s blood on the grave of her familiar is a willfully blasphemous Christian syncretism and I just know that Denzel is canny enough to sniff that out, and so I don’t know how on earth he’d direct the scene.
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Also it is one of the three or four best moments August Wilson ever wrote. It also basically argues that the violence of the crack era resurrected Aunt Esther (the wisdom of the black ancestors) as Jay-Z, or perhaps as Black Thought.
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Which I think is at a basic level a correct and persuasive reading of contemporary black history. Sigh, I really need to write my piece about King Hedley II, but there are just so many multivalent things I want to bring out of it.
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