August Wilson was a singularly American playwright who wrote about grifters and soothsayers, loners and anchors navigating life in Pittsburgh.
It’s a milieu as far removed from Italy as can be imagined. Yet a new Italian-language production of his play “Jitney” suggests that Wilson’s America has no borders.
Wilson’s plays have been translated before, and at least one of those translations has been produced, including “Fences” in Chinese at the National Theater of China in Beijing in 1996. But Renzo Carbonera, an Italian filmmaker, is making his theatrical directing debut with a production that he says will be the first Italian-language translation of a Wilson play to be performed by a cast of Black-Italian actors in both Italy and the United States.
Carbonera said he was eager to introduce Italians to Wilson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright who died in 2005 at the age of 60. He hoped to underscore for Americans how the writer’s compassion for the common man transcends language and national identity.
“This is a play about a Black community but also about love, brotherhood, suffering, death — it’s life,” Carbonera said in an interview in early April over video from Sardinia, the breathtakingly emerald Italian island on the Mediterranean Sea.
Seated next to Carbonera was Tomiwa Samson Segun Aina, who was born in Nigeria and studied acting in Italy. Aina said it was refreshing to “play someone’s life without it being about how we are Black.” In Italy, he added, “we don’t have many texts that talk about the normal life of people that happen to look like us.”
“Jitney” had a short run last weekend in Sardinia; Carbonera said he considered it a success because “a lot of people cried, and cried a lot.” (It was also staged in 2023 for the Wilson Project, a State Department-funded festival in Vicenza, Italy.)
In the United States, the cast will perform “Jitney” with English subtitles at the Black Rep in St. Louis (May 1-3) and in Cleveland through the Powerful Long Ladder theater company (May 5-6). The tour ends at the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company (May 8-10) in collaboration with the August Wilson House, an arts organization dedicated to the playwright. Stops in the American South are planned for October.
“Jitney” is set in 1977 at a taxi company operating out of a forlorn building in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the predominantly Black neighborhood where Wilson was born and lived until the age of 13. And through the story — exploring the conflicts between different generations of drivers and their sometimes clashing ideas about legacy and identity — Wilson’s poeticism and riffy vernacular rings out. His plays are usually staged naturalistically, but this “Jitney” is spare, with few props, video projections of Pittsburgh in the 1970s providing a sense of place and costumes in black and yellow, an intentional nod to the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
But what do Italians know about Wilson’s world of the play? Carbonara said in visits to the United States, he took in shows at several American Black theater companies, including the National Black Theater in New York City and Karamu House in Cleveland.
Watching how Americans interpret Wilson, he became inspired to develop with his actors — most are in their 20s and 30s — their own sui generis style of movement and speech that blends American naturalism and European conceptualist performance traditions. African gestures and speech patterns too, “things that,” as Aina put it, “an African person would easily recognize.”
“The African ancestry of these actors is much closer than the African ancestry of many Black American people,” Carbonera said.
The daunting task of reimagining that realm fell to Angela Soldà, who was unfamiliar with Wilson before 2021, when she started translating “Jitney” as her master’s thesis at the University of Padua in Northern Italy. Carbonera, who also studied at the university, had asked one of his former English teachers there if she knew someone who could tackle the project.
To get a feel for Wilson’s cultural and geographic references, Soldà researched the Hill District’s history of the Black-owned cab services that preceded Uber. For a taste of how American actors deliver Wilson’s shrewd comedy and incantatory crescendos, she watched a production of “Jitney” in the archives of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts during a visit to the city.
In the two years it took her to translate the play, Soldà said one of her biggest challenges was deciding what and how to modify and cut — losses and gains that translators wrestle with on the regular. Italian colloquialisms aren’t easy proxies for Wilson’s lyrical turns, especially around race. The N-word, a mot juste in Wilson’s plays, becomes Negro, an Italian derogatory term for Black people. “Yellow gal,” or a woman of mixed race, is now simply mulatta.
Soldà said she kept the play’s title because it “holds in itself the whole story of the play.”
“No Italian word could express this concept,” she said. (The Italian translation would be the ungainly “Taxi Abusivo,” or “unsanctioned taxi.”)
“Jitney” is one of the 10 plays in Wilson’s monumental American Century Cycle that examines Black lives in every decade of the 20th century, nine of which are set in the Hill District. (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” takes place in Chicago.) The play premiered in Pittsburgh in 1982, ran Off Broadway in 2000 and made it to Broadway in 2017, winning the Tony Award for best play revival.
Wilson’s plays are regularly staged across the country. A new production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is now on Broadway with Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer. In Baltimore, several theaters are in the middle of a three-year project to stage the entire Century Cycle.
Carbonera first read “Jitney” in 2019 on a flight back to Italy from Pittsburgh, where he had been a guest at an Italian film festival. He said he chose it because it centers on the fates of cabdrivers, a blue collar sphere he thought would be familiar to both Italians and Americans.
“It’s very universal but set in a specific space,” he said. (For his next project, Carbonera said he hopes to stage his own Italian-language translation of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.”)
In this “Jitney,” five actors perform all nine roles, not out of thrift but because of a dearth. Miguel Gobbo Diaz, a 30-something actor originally from the Dominican Republic, plays Becker, the 60-something operator of the taxi company.
“We actually don’t have 60-year-old Black actors in Italy,” Carbonera said. “They simply don’t exist.” (Rosanna Sparapano, who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is the show’s lone actress.)
Lina Insana, an associate professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh who consulted on the initial translation process, said it wasn’t until the 1980s that more people started immigrating to Italy than emigrating from it. Those arriving have included Africans.
The children of these immigrants are now pursuing acting careers, an Italian “theatrical pipeline,” as Insana put it.
“We are second generation, but for the first time as Black actors,” Diaz said.
Most of the “Jitney” cast will be visiting the United States for the first time. Sparapano said she was eager but nervous to make the trip because “the world is not so quite calm.” Diaz predicted that American audiences might be surprised by how much Italians move their hands. Aina hoped to catch a baseball game.
What do people in Wilson’s inner circle think? Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero Wilson, said through the August Wilson House that she was “very excited” for the play to come stateside.
Mark Clayton Southers, the producing artistic director of the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company, said Wilson would have approved. Southers was so confident that nothing would get lost in translation that he plans to pay no mind to the supertitles.
“I’ve seen this play probably over 200 times,” said Southers, a friend of Wilson’s for almost 30 years. “I’ll know what’s going on.”
