Radio Golf concludes August Wilson's 20th Century decade play cycle with a tale of a business man whose ambitions for progress and success ultimately come face to face with his past and his identity.
Harmond Wilks was a child of privilege, growing up under the shadow of his successful father and his business in Pittsburgh. Now he is an ambitious mayoral candidate and head of a Hill District redevelopment organization planning to build an apartment and shopping complex featuring all the usual mall suspects; Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods, Starbucks, etc. With him is Roosevelt Hicks, an old friend and business partner, equally ambitious and unabashed in his drive to succeed, he is contemptuous of blacks stuck in poverty/anger/victim hood, and willing to get in bed with suspect real estate tycoons looking to take advantage of the government's minority ownership incentives.
Their plan is set to go, but for a rundown house at 1839 Wylie. The house at 1839 Wylie proves, through the personality and character of Old Joe Barlow to be a personal boom but professional bust for Harmond and his wife, Mame.
Radio Golf is a pretty quick read, and with five characters Wilson gets to the point quickly and with a subtle flavor, found mostly in Barlow and Roosevelt-both relative extremes in the 1990's Black American experience, with Harmond in the middle-and presents a question as to what progress really is. Full of the symbols and swift language of his other works, Radio Golf does focus for the first time on the middle class Black community and the according issues. Ambition or community, revitalization of desperate neighborhoods, the value of money versus community as well as the meanings of history within the interests of American Big Business.
Not as epic or traumatic as King Hedley II or Fences or The Piano Lesson, but ever timely, spot on and important.

My students and I read Radio Golf in preparation for a video conferences in which professional actors were rehearsing a scene from the play for a show. The main character, Harmond Wilks, dreams of becoming the first black mayor of Pittsburgh, and it looks as if he has a good chance of doing so, but when he is confronted with evidence of an injustice that he can't ignore, and tries to right it, he stands to lose it all. A true, heroic figure, he soon realizes the ugly truth that "what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right."

This is a proper finale to Wilson's century cycle, I read this play and the nine others as part of a college class and it wraps up the saga with Wilson's usual brand of honesty that makes his work so compelling. It speaks with sharp tongue about the ills of the black community but it all has the cathartic ring of truth. It is a bit slow to start but is an engaging story of redemption that is as funny as it is thought provoking.