Seven Guitars
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Seven Guitars was in fact famously attacked for its slow-moving style by critic and director Robert Brustein in 1996. Earlier that year Wilson decried the lack of support for African-American companies in a speech delivered at the conference of a national theater-services organization, Theatre Communications Group, and published in American Theatre. Among other things, he charged New Republic writer Brustein with “a presumption of inferiority of the work of minority artists.” In a heated response, Brustein suggested that Wilson attacked him because he’d shown a lack of enthusiasm for the playwright’s work. The critic noted that he’d seen but hadn’t reviewed Seven Guitars (“I left after four guitars”) and argued that “a conventionally realistic play needs an animating event, and that, however colorful its subject matter, it cannot ramble willy-nilly for two-and-a-half hours before establishing a line of action.”
It’s true that Seven Guitars, like most of Wilson’s work, is talky–especially the early scenes. But to suggest that talking isn’t action is to badly misread the play and its world. Wilson’s characters tell stories about themselves and a host of colorful offstage characters as a way of keeping life’s bitter realities at bay.
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