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Stage Review of King Hedley II 

 
Two River Theater; Red Bank, New Jersey 

Marion Huber Stage 
November 10-December 16, 2018 

Directed by Brandon Dirden 
 

By Cameron Patrick Kelsall 
Professional Theatre Critic 

              

The decision to produce the play on the tiny Marion Huber 
Stage, which seats fewer than 100 people, drew the audience 
into the action, causing them to eavesdrop for three 
sprawling hours. 

− Cameron Patrick Kelsall 

Abstract  
A review of King Hedley II by August Wilson, staged at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey 
from November 10-December 16, 2018. 
 

Keywords 
August Wilson, King Hedley II, Brandon J. Dirden, Hill District, Reaganomics, Signature Theatre Company 

King Hedley II bears a title that evokes Shakespearean grandeur. Wilson worked on 
a grand scale throughout his career, but Hedley seems particularly willing to wade into the 

messy questions of lineage, generational trauma, and an uncertain 
future. These themes occupy Wilson elsewhere in the Century Cycle, 
but they feel especially centered here, with characters who always have 
an eye cast toward the past. 

Those backward glances may be a reaction to the uncertain 
times that form the play’s setting. King Hedley II takes place in 1985, 
amidst the rise of Reaganomics and urban blight. But what may be more 
troubling than the reality of the country is the diminution of the 
community in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, which no longer holds the 
vibrant snatches of life it retained even in the grimmest moments of 
earlier Wilson plays. Instead, “the people wandering all over the place,” 
says the prophetic Stool Pigeon in the prologue. “They got lost. They 

don’t even know the story of how they got from tit to tat.” 
Brandon J. Dirden’s intimate production for Two River Theater (Red Bank, New 

Jersey) answered the question of how the Hill District got from tit to tat with middling 
success. The decision to produce the play on the tiny Marion Huber Stage, which seats fewer 
than 100 people, drew the audience into the action, causing them to eavesdrop for three 

Cameron Kelsall 



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sprawling hours. It reminded the observer that a sense of history hinges on bonds between 
people, even in grand-scale works. 

Dirden, a fine Wilson actor in his own right, returned to Two River after directing 
Seven Guitars in 2015. (The company has produced five of Wilson’s plays since 2012, with 
plans to complete the full cycle.) His production created a visual world that communicates 
the playwright’s sense of downmarket American life in the mid-eighties. Michael Carnahan’s 
set, dotted with fading Reagan campaign posters and rocky patches of dirt, suggested the 
crumbling society at the play’s core. The two houses at the center, occupied by King (Blake 
Morris) on one side and Stool Pigeon (Brian D. Coats) on the other, looked proud but worn, 
like a boxer struggling to find his footing after a knockout punch. 

Most of the production’s action took place between the houses, with the characters 
considering how they ended up in this particular spot. King Hedley II serves as a companion 
to Seven Guitars, with some character overlap and similarities among the protagonists. 
Although King’s nominal father Hedley appears in Seven Guitars, he shares more in 
common with Floyd Barton, the tragic bluesman whose life and death form the play’s 
narrative. Both men spent time in prison and returned to a changed world where their 
ambitions couldn’t easily be achieved, no matter how they strived. Both men felt caged by 
their place in society, even while technically free. 

But where Floyd operated with smoothness, King leads with unapologetic rage. His 
ire rises to volcanic levels over seemingly insignificant matters. This presents a challenge 
that Dirden and Morris didn’t always meet. The operatic emotional scale can seem almost 
comical in its overstatement, but when a production gets it right – as Derrick Sanders’ 
staging for Signature Theatre Company did in 2007 – it’s downright terrifying. But Morris, 
who tended to deliver his lines with breakneck haste, only located King’s blinding anger, 
with little sense of the suffering and disappointment underpinning it. There was little sense 
of King as the quasi-religious figure Wilson intended, as the repeated image of a halo 
around his head failed to make the right poignant, metaphorical impression. 

That balance of realism and spirituality failed to register throughout Dirden’s 
production. Kathy A. Perkins’s high-key lighting literally bleached away the sense of nuance 
and ambiguity (it also suggested that most scenes take place at exactly the same time every 
day, contradicting the text.) Stool Pigeon’s prophecies came across more like unwanted 
insertions than necessary commentary tying beginning and end of the play together, largely 
because Dirden kept Coats separate from the main action. The impetus might have been to 
paint him as a holy figure existing outside society, but it caused a lack of gravity in crucial 
moments – as when he announces Aunt Ester’s death, which also represents the true death 
of the community. 

This caused the play to dip uncomfortably into melodrama – reinforced by one-note 
performances from Elain Graham (as Ruby, King’s mother) and Brittany Bellizeare (as 
Tonya, King’s long-suffering wife). Wilson gave each woman a rich backstory, which Dirden 
largely ignored in favor of outsized characterization and overstated line readings. The choice 
to portray them as semi-comic, almost stock figures severely limited the female perspective 
of the play – and it dissipated the power of its denouement, which finds King dying by his 
mother’s hand.  

It is perhaps not inaccurate to call King Hedley II melodrama – the word, after all, 
derives from a Greek root meaning music. Like so many of Wilson’s works, even when no 
character actually sings, the poetry hums to a rhythmic beat. Here, the characters lived in 
prose. The audience came to understand how the Hill got to be a place “all grown over with 
weeds,” as Stool Pigeon describes the once-clear path to Aunt Ester’s home. But for a play the 
balances grace and grit, the telling lacked majesty. 

 
[Editor's Note: This production marks the halfway point in Two River Theater’s 

commitment to stage all ten plays of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle.] 



K E L S A L L :  S T A G E  R E V I E W  O F  K I N G  H E D L E Y  I I  
T W O  R I V E R  T H E A T E R ,  F A L L  2 0 1 8  

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Works Cited 

Wilson, August. King Hedley II. Theatre Communications Group. 2007. 

Author Bio 

Mr. Cameron Patrick Kelsall is a theater critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Broad Street Review. 
He is also an editor and contributor for the website Exeunt NYC, where he writes about the theater 
scene in New York City. 

 
Production Photos 

 
All Photos by T. Charles Erickson  

  

Blake Morris (King Hedley II) and Harvy 
Blanks (Elmore) 

 

 
Blake Morris (King Hedley II) 

  
  

 
Brittany Bellizeare (Tonya) 

 
  



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Elain Graham (Ruby) 

 

  
Charlie Hudson III (Mister) and 

Brian D. Coats (Stool Pigeon) 

 
 
 
 
 

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	Stage Review of King Hedley II
	Abstract
	Keywords

	Works Cited
	Author Bio

