Winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play.

Seven Guitars is a full-length drama by August Wilson. In Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1948, an aspiring blues musician returns home for the woman he loves, an ailing old man hopes for an heir to carry on his name, and three women cope with betrayal and disappointment.

Seven Guitars follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of a local blues guitarist. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them. In the backyard of a Pittsburgh tenement in 1948, friends gather to mourn for Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a blues guitarist and singer who died just as his career was on the verge of taking off. The action that follows is a flashback to the busy week leading up to Floyd's sudden and unnatural death. Familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. The sixth in August Wilson's decade by decade exploration of the black experience in America, two of which have won Pulitzer Prizes.

Seven Guitars premiered in 1995 at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago and opened on Broadway in 1996 at Walter Kerr Theatre. The play enjoyed widespread acceptance among leading regional theatres, and has become a popular choice for college and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 4 men

What people say:

"Displays a narrative sweep and almost biblical richness of language and character.... Mr. Wilson writes so vividly that the play seems to have the narrative scope and depth of a novel." — The New York Times

"The seven guitars of the title are the seven characters whose straightforward story lines Wilson turns into beautiful, complex music — a funky wailing, irresistible Chicago blues." — The New Yorker

"Impressive ... with wild, untamed elements of symbolic fantasy, and the language ... is used with the specific riff like fluency and emotional impact of jazz." — New York Post

"A blockbuster and a major American play." — New York Daily News

"A gritty, lyrical polyphony of voices that evokes the character and destiny of men and women who can't help singing the blues even when they're just talking. Bristles with symbolism, with rituals of word and action that explode into anguished eloquence and finally into violence." — Newsweek

"Doesn't all great drama include God in the debate? Don't all great playwrights grapple with theological questions that thread through human affairs? Eugene O'Neill, the playwright August Wilson most resembles, did that. Even an atheist like Brecht did it. The plays of Wilson's cycle most emphatically do, and none of his plays more emphatically, I think, than this one." — Tony Kushner

About the Playwright:

August Wilson (1945 – 2005) was one of America's greatest playwrights. An American icon, he depicted the human condition like no other playwright of his time. His crowning achievement is The Pittsburgh Cycle, his series of ten plays depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. All of them are set in Pittsburgh's Hill District except for one, which is set in Chicago. The cycle is also known as his Century Cycle. Crafted over nearly 25 years, these works garnered August Wilson a myriad accolades, including eight New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, a Tony Award and two Pulitzer Prizes.