'Jitney' Times Two!

Jitney is in high demand! Following the run of August Wilson’s award-winning tale about cabbies in Pittsburgh in the 1970s here at SCR, the production will travel to Pasadena Playhouse, where it will run June 21-July 15, closing out their 2011-2012 season.

"I am extremely happy to enter into this collaboration with my well respected colleagues at South Coast Repertory to bring their production of this play to the stage of The Playhouse,” said Sheldon Epps, Artistic Director of The Pasadena Playhouse.  “Jitney is one of the best of the canon of plays created by a man who is surely one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th Century.  I am honored to have August's work at our theatre once again, and I look forward to the theatrical electricity that I know this fine group of actors will bring to these great words."

“We are pleased to bring SCR’s production of Jitney to the Pasadena Playhouse and look forward to sharing this important drama with the Pasadena audience and our colleagues,” said Marc Masterson, South Coast Repertory’s Artistic Director

Jitney is the first of ten plays August Wilson wrote in his renowned “Pittsburgh Cycle” which chronicles life in his childhood neighborhood, decade by decade, over the course of the 20th century. Jitney is the seventh in the series and is the winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Olivier Award for Best New Play.  The story unfolds in a storefront taxi station, where a motley crew of cabbies share stories and meddle in each other’s lives.  Old cronies drop in, fights break out and lovers make up – and just as we get to know them, Wilson asks us to look again. The New York Times calls Jitney “vibrant…velvety smooth,” and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says Jitney is a “vivid mix of comedy and passion backed by a solid sociology of men struggling to survive…Wilson excels in the casual, expressive revelation of emotion under the drone of day-to-day.”