In The Good Negro, three emerging black leaders try to conquer their individual demons as the local KKK fights for its old way of life, and everyday black men and women must overcome their fears—all under the ever-watchful eye of the FBI.

An ambitious black newspaper reporter, Yvonne Wilson, goes against her editor, Pat Morgan, to investigate a murder and find the best story—but at what cost? Wilson explores the elusive nature of truth as the boundaries between reality and fiction, morality and ambition, become dangerously blurred.

From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize.

The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson's ten-part Century Cycle), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s . . . a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can . . . a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less . . .

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 possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

The play begins as an art auctioneer does a verbal machine gun patter auctioning a "totally flat, authentically white," evidently unpainted canvas to the highest bidder. Attending this bizarre auction is Biddy Andreas, an ordinary good person who is married to a tremendously wealthy Greek tycoon who desperately wants to be upper-crust English. He desperately wants his wife to become "interesting" as it may advance his social status. In Biddy's earnest attempt to please her husband, she discovers the work of an angry, neglected English landscape artist who has been abandoned in the rush toward abstract chic. Attracted to the paintings, she is also intensely aware of the painter, and above all of the untrendy notion that a passion for art can transform the spirit. Against a background of glib auctioneers, valueless dealers, pacesetting Americans, and a media woman for whom art is an extension of style, Biddy turns herself into a richer human being. Robbed of her husband by his body's rejection of a kidney transplant, Biddy finally sits for her painter, who finds himself valued again.

Australia, 1789. A young, married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, many of them illiterate, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal for what will be the antipodean premiere of George Farquhar's Restoration comedy, The Recruiting Officer. Our Country's Good is based on The Playmaker, a novel by Thomas Keneally.