“You get to be mayor, is you gonna be mayor of the black folks or the white folks,” Sterling Johnson,  a resident of Pittsburgh’s majority-Black Hill District asks Harmond Wilks, the main character in August Wilson’s “Radio Golf,” which runs at Everyman Theatre through November 17.

In Blackness and politics you have to choose sides: are you with us or are you against us? Everyone in “Radio Golf”—the last of Wilson’s 10-play The American Century Cycle—seems to know this except for Wilks.

“He is battling morality,” says actor Jamil A.C. Mangan, who portrays Wilks in Everyman Theatre’s production of the play. “He is a real estate developer that comes from a family who have…made and done well for themselves and are very affluent black family and so he sort of grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

It’s the late 90’s and middle-class Wilks wants to redevelop the Hill District and thinks gentrification is the way forward. He also wants to be the first Black mayor of Pittsburgh, and thinks that by transforming the community for the better, he can improve his hopes of getting into office. He wants to do the right thing, it seems, but things get more complicated when he tries to make his vision a reality. It’s a reality lots of politicians must struggle with: is all money good money? Is there a way to balance corporate funds with good intentions?

“He wants to bring the Starbucks, Whole Foods, and what have you, but he’s battling with the fact that he still wants to try and preserve the community and the heritage that was there, you know before the development comes,” Mangan explains. 

On one hand, there’s his fellow Black-and-bougie companions, his wife Mame (Resident Company Member Dawn Ursusla) and his friend and business partner Roosevelt Hicks (Jason B. McIntosh). On the other, there are the poor, Black people of the Hill District who have seen it all and side eye Wilks’ pie-in-the-sky dreams, like Johnson (played by Anton Floyd) and Elder Joseph Barlow, also known as Old Joe (Charles Dumas).

“He is approached by other members of the community — other characters like Old Joe and Sterling —  who are the indegenous, who are the original inhabitants of that community that are saying ‘look, don’t kick us out. We don’t mind that you are here, but see us. Recognize us.’”

As Black Baltimore well knows, nothing is free and the process of bringing outside forces into a community of color can come with all types of baggage. The ramifications of the bargain you make when you gentrify are as true in Wilson’s Hill District as they are in Baltimore City. Here, we watch the Cherry Hill area nervously, knowing how close it is to Kevin Plank’s planned Port Covington. In “Radio Golf”, a piece of property that is scheduled to be torn down represents the kind of change actually coming to the community.

Wilson famously set the plays in this series in working class Pittsburgh, but director Carl Cofield says that the back and forth pull that Willks feels applies here, too. 

“I think one of the geniuses, one of the many geniuses of August Wilson is the existential questions that face the black community but basically affect all of us,” says director Carl Cofield. 

“That is a major sort of tenant in the work and I think it’s going to resonate profoundly with people in Baltimore. August did set this in the Hill District, but that could very well be Baltimore today which is super exciting because it adds to the urgency of why we’re doing the work, you know, talking about gentrification, And what are the collateral damages that gentrification has?”

Radio Golf runs until November 17 at Everyman Theatre (315 W. Fayette St.).

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“The Revolutionists”

Dec. 6-Jan. 7

Lauren Gunderson’s ode to women of the French Revolution poses the always-pressing but now particularly urgent question: What is the responsibility of the citizen when a country is in crisis? Gunderson—the most produced playwright in the country this theater season—puts former queen Marie Antoinette, feminist playwright Olympe de Gouges, assassin Charlotte Corday (all three lost their heads, by the way), and Caribbean spy Marianne Angelle (a fictionalized composite character based on the unsung women of the Haitian Revolution) in a room together to hash it out. All the while, de Gouges pens her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman,” Corday prepares to murder Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub, Antoinette awaits the guillotine, and Angelle checks her fellow “revolutionists”—after all, they’re fighting for the freedom of a country that runs a slave colony.  Dec. 6-Jan. 7, Everyman Theatre, 315 W. Fayette St., (410) 752-2208, everymantheatre.org, $25-$65.

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“Intimate Apparel”

Depending on who you ask, a corset is either a symbol of feminine beauty and sexuality, or one of women’s subjugation—a literal and figurative means of suffocation—or both. In the hands of lauded playwright Lynn Nottage, and those of her nimble heroine Esther, it’s not that simple.

Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel,” now running at Everyman Theatre through Nov. 19 under the direction of Tazewell Thompson (who directed “Ruined” by the same author at Everyman in 2015, a production that shared three cast members with “Intimate Apparel”), Esther (played by Dawn Ursula, deservedly cast once more as Nottage’s protagonist, again a businesswoman) is a seamstress in turn of the century New York who specializes in crafting women’s undergarments. For her, a corset is not merely a piece of lingerie; it has a story—there are the origins of the fabric and lace and how it arrived in Esther’s hands, who will wear the piece and why. There’s even a story in how silk feels against one’s back. And then there’s the story only Esther knows: the 18 years of labor spent at her machine, located in her bedroom apartment in a boarding house full of women; the small profit from her sales that she tucks into pockets of a quilt made from fabric scraps—a fund for a future beauty parlor she hopes to open in service of fellow black women.

While Esther has devoted her life to making women feel attractive, and dreams of making them feel even more pampered, such treatment is of little interest to Esther herself. She dresses modestly, wears no makeup, and, at 35, has never been with a man, though she hopes to marry one day. She finds gratification merely in pleasing her clients, seeing them admire themselves and her fine handiwork in the mirror. Her two favorite customers couldn’t be more dissimilar: One, Mrs. Van Buren (Beth Hylton), is a white Southern belle, wealthy and married, privileged but painfully repressed. The other, Mayme (Jade Wheeler) is a black prostitute—a self-made businesswoman like Esther, though Mayme feels more liberated than incomplete in the single life.

But when we meet Esther, she is not single for long. Out of the blue she receives a letter from George (Bueka Uwemedimo), a laborer working on the construction of the Panama Canal, and they strike up a correspondence, which illiterate Esther keeps going with the help of Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme. With their expertise, Esther’s messages go from friendly introductions to the 1905 equivalent of sexts to full-blown love letters, and they become engaged. George sails to New York, they marry, and—surprise—Esther finds her new husband is not the smooth talker, caring lover, and dedicated worker he’d made himself out to be in his letters. But it’s too late to swipe left.

Now a married woman with a gold-digging spouse, Esther’s labor and craft take on new meaning, as do her relationships with her clients and her fabric supplier, an observant Romanian Jew named Mr. Marks (Drew Kopas), whose tenderness and appreciation for good silk clearly make for a better albeit forbidden match.

Like the story of the corset, “Intimate Apparel” is ultimately a familiar story of woman being defined and stifled by man. But the play, again like the corset, is present for the private lives and dreams of women—black women, in particular, whose interiority would rarely unfold in such detail on major stages if not for Nottage—and the connections they form when they overlap. That rare view is worth enduring the sight of men, once again, ruining everything.

“Origin of the Species”

The Biblical creation myth pegs all human folly on women just because Eve deigned to access knowledge. But evolution and the story of the first hominids aren’t so kind to women either: That history has been told by big great male geniuses, who, naturally, tell us that man discovered fire, man learned how to use stones as tools, man created civilization. The term “man” here might be a proxy for “humankind,” as is often the case, but that exclusionary language has proven damaging enough on its own.

In her 1987 two-hander “Origin of the Species,” now receiving a run directed by Erin Riley at the Strand Theater through Nov. 19 to kick off their 10th season of women-focused theater, Bryony Lavery attempts to right this disastrous wrong in perhaps the most literal way imaginable: by digging up an early female human and letting her tell the story.

This early woman comes to us by way of Molly, an eccentric archaeologist in her golden years. She relays to the audience from her artifact-stuffed Yorkshire cottage how she traveled to East Africa ostensibly for a dig—though really, she says, she embarked on the journey to find herself a man (why someone would cross thousands of miles to an archeological site where there are more bones than breathing men is beyond me; Laverny never really illuminates). Instead, she finds her four-million-year-old female ancestor beneath the dirt, still breathing. Molly quietly smuggles her miraculous find, whom she names Victoria, back to Yorkshire and begins to teach her the English language and customs.

As she demonstrates to Victoria how to identify colors and use her imagination among other things, Molly studies and interrogates her ancestor in an attempt to uncover secrets about the beginning of human life. Struggling with her limited but growing vocabulary, Victoria signals to Molly it was woman, not man, who discovered fire; woman, not man, who figured out how to use a sharp stone to skin animals for their hides.

Molly, like most, has learned everything she knows about everything from men, and has accepted most of their stories as fact—though not without skepticism. Among the various male-authored scientific texts Molly reads to Victoria with an eyebrow raised, a real quote from one of the founders of social psychology, Gustave Le Bon: “Women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution. . . . They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt, there exists some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as for example, of a gorilla with two heads. Consequently, we may neglect them entirely.”

Together, these two old women begin to relearn the world just as their species races toward extinction (the result of man’s “achievements”). Often, their journey takes distracting turns that appear directionless. But while Lavery’s ambitious attempt to reach a summation of the history of humankind proves at times convoluted, her story is grounded by tender performances from Janet Constable Preston as Molly and Nicole Millins-Teasley as the equally inquisitive Victoria. Their exchanges offer an intimate manifestation of one of the most paramount rules in science: Question everything.

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