Presents biographical sketches of fourteen notable African Americans, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and "Satchel" Paige, accompanied by brief skits in which readers can act out imagined scenes from their lives.

"Regular cabs will not travel to the Pittsburgh Hill District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to each other. Jitney dramatizes the lives of men hustling to make a living as jitneys--unofficial, unlicensed taxi cab drivers. When the boss Becker's son returns from prison, violence threatens to erupt. What makes this play remarkable is not the plot; Jitney is Wilson at his most real--the words these men use and the stories they tell form a true...

The Negro Ensemble Company was founded in 1967 by actor/playwright Douglas Turner Ward, actor Robert Hooks, and theater manager Gerald Krone, with the stated goal of creating "a Theater of Excellence concentrating primarily on themes of black life. By producing consistently imaginative and challenging plays, the NEC has nurtured some of the finest theatrical talent in America and has created an enduring body of black theater literature. This program...

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...