August Wilson's Seven Guitars: blues, grief and mystery at the Detroit Repertory Theatre

“Floyd Barton is gonna make his record. Floyd Barton is going to Chicago.” It's 1948 in the backyard of a Pittsburgh tenement, and friends have gathered to mourn a blues guitarist and singer who died right as his career was about to break. Seven Guitars is the sixth play in August Wilson's American Century Cycle, his decade-by-decade look at the Black experience in America, and it's part bawdy comedy, part dark elegy and part mystery.

The play was a 1995 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The New York Times said Wilson writes so vividly that it has the scope and depth of a novel. Find it at the Detroit Repertory Theatre, 13103 Woodrow Wilson Street, Detroit.