August Wilson's King Hedley II

AUGUST WILSON (PLAYWRIGHT) (April 27, 1945-October 2, 2005) authored Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. These works explore the heritage and experience of African-Americans, decade-by-decade, over the course of the twentieth century. His plays have been produced at regional theaters across the country and all over the world, as well as on Broadway. In 2003, Mr. Wilson made his professional stage debut in his one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned. Mr. Wilson’s works garnered many awards including Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1987); and for The Piano Lesson (1990); a Tony Award for Fences; Great Britain’s Olivier Award for Jitney; as well as eight New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, Jitney, and Radio Golf. Additionally, the cast recording of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom received a 1985 Grammy Award, and Mr. Wilson received a 1995 Emmy Award nomination for his screenplay adaptation of The Piano Lesson. Mr. Wilson’s early works included the one-act plays The Janitor, Recycle, The Coldest Day of the Year, Malcolm X, The Homecoming and the musical satire Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. Mr. Wilson received many fellowships and awards, including Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellowships in Playwrighting, the Whiting Writers Award, 2003 Heinz Award, was awarded a 1999 National Humanities Medal by the President of the United States, and received numerous honorary degrees from colleges and universities, as well as the only high school diploma ever issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He was an alumnus of New Dramatists, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a 1995 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and on October 16, 2005, Broadway renamed the theater located at 245 West 52nd Street – The August Wilson Theatre. Additionally, Mr. Wilson was posthumously inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Wilson was born and raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lived in Seattle, Washington at the time of his death. He is immediately survived by his two daughters, Sakina Ansari and Azula Carmen Wilson, and his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero. 

BRANDON J. DIRDEN (CAESAR WILKS) recently appeared on Broadway starring in the Tony Award winning production of Take Me Out and Skeleton Crew for which he received a Drama Desk nomination.  He also appeared on Broadway as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award-winning production of All the Way, with Bryan Cranston, as ‘Booster’; the Tony Award winning revival of August Wilson’s Jitney; Clybourne Park; Enron; and Prelude to a Kiss. Off-Broadway, he has appeared in The Piano Lesson, for which he won Obie, Theatre World and AUDELCO awards; The First Breeze of Summer and Day of Absence at Signature Theatre; Detroit ’67 at the Public Theater and Classical Theatre of Harlem; Peter and the Starcatcher at New York Theatre Workshop; and as ‘Brutus’ in TFANA’s production of Julius Caesar. On screen he has appeared in “The Good Wife”, “For Life”, “Evil”, “The Big C”, “Public Morals”, “Manifest”, “The Get Down”, “The Accidental Wolf”, “Blue Bloods“, “The Quad”, the FX miniseries “Mrs. America” and four seasons of FX’s “The Americans” as Agent Dennis Aderholt. He has directed numerous plays by Dominique Morisseau and August Wilson and recently Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress for Two River Theater. Brandon is an Associate Arts Professor on the faculty of Tisch Grad Acting at NYU; a frequent volunteer at the 52nd Street Project; and a proud member of both Actor’s Equity Association and Fair Wage On Stage.    

Michael Carnahan previously designed The Ballad of Little Jo, Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine, Third, On Borrowed Time, and August Wilson’s Seven Guitars and Two Trains Running at Two River. Off-Broadway—Atlantic Theater Company: Skeleton Crew; 59E59: I and You; Second Stage: The Happiest Song Plays Last; Signature Theatre: The Piano Lesson, The First Breeze of Summer; Life Could Be a Dream, The Marvelous Wonderettes, Three Mo’ Tenors, Pygmalion, Howie the Rookie, Brando. Tours—Cheers, Live On Stage; A Christmas Story The Musical, Peter & The Starcatcher. Regional credits include Mark Taper Forum, Arena Stage, American Conservatory Theater, The Kennedy Center, McCarter Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Baltimore Center Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Pasadena Playhouse, Two River Theatre, Chautauqua Theater Company, Cleveland Play House, Detroit Public Theater, Laguna Playhouse, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Northlight Theatre, Signature Theatre, Bucks County Playhouse, Ogunquit Playhouse, Arsht Center, Musical Theatre West, San Jose Repertory, Center Repertory. michaelcarnahandesign.com Instagram: Carnypics Twitter: @mike_carnahan

KAREN PERRY (Costume Designer) previously designed August Wilson’s King Hedley II, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Jitney, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars and Radio Golf at Two River, as well as Love in Hate Nation, Oo-Bla-Dee, Lives of Reason, Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine, Guadalupe in the Guest Room, Third and Trouble in Mind. Her most recent credits include Run-Boy-Run & In Old Age (New York Theatre Workshop), Mothers (Playwrights Realm), Jazz (MTC), Lackawanna Blues with Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Mark Taper Forum), Fun Home (Baltimore Center Stage), Steel Magnolias, Hair, Dreamgirls (DTC), Oklahoma! (Houston Ballet at TUTS) and Cinderella Ballet (Eglevsky Ballet Company). Other credits include Danai Gurira’s Familiar (Woolly Mammoth, Guthrie, Seattle Rep), Cabin in the Sky (Encores!), Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky (Pasadena Playhouse), John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, dir. Ethan McSweeny (Arena), Crowns, stop. reset, Trinity River Trilogy by Regina Taylor (Goodman, STC, DTC/Arena), The Trip to Bountiful, Walter Mosley’s The Fall of Heaven, dir. Marion McClinton (Cincinnati Playhouse), The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell McCraney, dirs. Tina Landau and Robert O’Hara (The Public/McCarter), Having Our Say by Emily Mann (McCarter), and Resurrection by Daniel Beaty (Arena). She has designed every play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle except Fences. Film/TV credits include Gregory Hines Show, Saturday Night Live, and The Brother from Another Planet by director John Sayles. Wine in the Wildness is proudly Karen’s 14th production with TRTC. Currently: Raisin in the Sun @ the Public Theater.

Kathy A. Perkins (LIGHTING DESIGNER) has designed lighting for Broadway (Trouble in Mind), Off-Broadway, and regional theatres such as American Conservatory Theatre, Arena Stage, Berkeley Repertory, Seattle Repertory, St. Louis Black Repertory, Alliance, Goodman, Steppenwolf, Baltimore Center Stage, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New Federal Theatre, Mark Taper, Yale Repertory, Actors Theatre of Louisville, People’s Light, and Playmakers Repertory.

As a scholar, she is the editor of seven anthologies focusing on women both nationally and internationally, including Selected Plays: Alice Childress.  She is a senior editor of the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. 

Kathy has traveled to nearly fifty countries as both designer and lecturer and is the recipient of numerous research and design awards, including Ford Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and an NAACP Image Award.  She received the 2021 United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Distinguished Achievement Award for both Education and Lighting Design.

In 1995, Kathy co-curated ONSTAGE: A Century of African American Stage Design at New York’s Lincoln Center.  In 2016 she served as theatre consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture inaugural exhibition Taking the Stage.

In 2007 she was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. She received her BFA from Howard University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan.

Kathy is faculty Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kay Richardson (SOUND DESIGNER) is a two-time Suzi Bass nominated Sound Designer and Audio Engineer. Wine in the Wilderness marks Kay’s return to the Two River family. Regional Theatre designs include: The Hound of the Baskervilles at Alpine Theatre Project in Whitefish, MT, August Wilson’s Radio Golf and King Hedley II at Two River Theatre in Red Bank, NJ, Eclipsed at Synchronicity Theatre, Thurgood at Theatrical Outfit, Between Riverside & Crazy, Smart People, Fetch Clay Make Man and Gut Bucket Blues at Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company all in Atlanta, GA. Additional design work includes: A Man of No Importance, Spring Awakening, The Colored Museum, A Song for Coretta, and Seven Guitars. Kay has toured in all 50 of the United States and in over 45 countries mixing live sound for musicals and concerts. Currently she is the Sound Supervisor at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts in Princeton, NJ.

Erin Hicks grew up in Harlem, NY. She began styling hair as an assistant on The Winter’s Tale at the New York Shakespeare Festival, starring Alfre Woodard, Mandy Patinkin, and Diane Venora. Over the last 20 years she has worked on various Broadway, film and TV shows. This is Erin’s fifth show at Two River, following Guadalupe in the Guest Room and August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and King Hedley II.

UNKLEDAVE’S FIGHT HOUSE (FIGHT DIRECTION) is a team of fight/
intimacy coordinators comprised of LGBTQ theater makers. Two River credits: Hombres; El
Coqui Espectacular & The Bottle of Doom; Theo; Raisin In The Sun, Be More Chill; Seven
Guitars, King Hedley ll. Broadway: Ain’t No Mo; Kimberly Akimbo; Girl From The North Country;
Tuck Everlasting; Escape To Margaritaville; The Great Society ; An American In Paris; Disgraced.
Off-Broadway: Merrily We Roll Along (NYTW) ; On Sugarland (NYTW) ; soft (MCC) ; Halfway
Bitches Go Straight To Heaven (Labyrinth/Atlantic, Drama Desk Nom.); Oedipus El Rey (The
Public)(Drama Desk Nom.) Film: Poor Behavior; Emoticon. TV: AnnieLive!

Heidi Griffiths has worked for more than 25 years at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in NYC, where she has cast over 200 productions Off-Broadway and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, including Shakespeare, new plays, and musicals. On Broadway: The Girl From The North Country; The Inheritance; The Iceman Cometh; Sweat; Shuffle Along; The Crucible, Eclipsed; A Delicate Balance; A Raisin in the Sun; Lucky Guy; Chinglish; The Motherf**ker with the Hat; The Merchant of Venice; Hair; Passing Strange; Caroline, or Change; Take Me Out (Tony Award, Best Play 2003); Topdog/Underdog (Pulitzer Prize, 2002); The Wild Party; Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk; On the Town; and The Tempest. She also cast the films The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, MURDER and murder, Saving Face and Ladybird. Radio Golf is her 12th collaboration with Two River Theater.

Two River Theater: Theo, King Hedley II, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Women of Padilla, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine, and The School for Wives. Broadway (as Casting Associate): The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, A Delicate Balance, A Raisin in the Sun, Lucky Guy (Casting Assistant). Additional casting credits include work with Arena Stage, Center Theater Group, The Cherry Lane, Bedlam, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, LAByrinth, New Georges, TheaterWorks Hartford, and The Studio Theatre. Kate is a Casting Director at The Public Theater.

Laura Wilson Previously at TRT: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine, Third, No Place to Go. Broadway: Roman Holiday (OOT Tryout), Jitney, All The Way, First Date, A Free Man of Color, The People in the Picture. Off-Broadway: Paradise Blue (Signature Theatre); School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play (MCC); Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company); Exit Strategy (Primary Stages); The Really Big Once, A Family of Perhaps Three (Target Margin Theater). Regional: Bull Durham (Alliance Theatre); Guys and Dolls (Riverside Theatre); The Three Sisters, The Boys from Syracuse, and Things of Dry Hours (Centerstage, Baltimore); Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle (Clarence Brown Theatre).