Seven Guitars at A Noise Within

Stage and Cinema - Recommended

"...Most of Seven Guitars takes place in the days immediately prior to Floyd's murder, though the proceedings are not really suffused with foreboding of that central event. Our active focus remains, rather, on the milieu of the backyard, where six local residents and one out-of-town visitor converse, and sometimes expound, on the racially charged indignities and injustices they confront out in the larger world, the aspirations that impel them, and the shifting terms of their interconnected relationships. Every one of them is a substantial, perhaps a main, character, and the deep resonance of Wilson's dialogue allows every one of them to shape the personal, cultural and even historical contexts of their lives in Black mid-twentieth century Pittsburgh. These contexts are nicely delineated, too, by Stephanie Kerley Schwartz's gently impressionistic backyard setting and Maritri Garrett's original music composed for this production."