August Wilson's Seven Guitars

August Wilson's Seven Guitars is a play in two acts about a blues guitarist, his friends and one week that goes wrong in 1940s Pittsburgh. Lincoln Center Theater is producing it as an Off-Broadway revival at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, billed as a limited engagement. Previews are set to begin on November 5, 2026, with opening night set for November 23.

It belongs to Wilson's American Century Cycle, also called the Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of ten plays that each take place in their own decade of the 20th century. Its tone mixes comedy with tragedy.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs. He originated Canewell on Broadway in 1996, winning a Tony Award, and later staged the 2006 Off-Broadway revival at Signature Theatre Company.

The play opens in a Hill District backyard, where friends have gathered after the funeral of Floyd Barton, a blues singer and guitarist. The action then steps back to the week before and moves forward day by day.

Floyd is fresh out of the workhouse after 90 days for vagrancy, a charge he insists was false. While he was away, a record he cut in Chicago with bandmates Canewell and Red Carter became a hit. He wants to return to Chicago, record again and bring Vera, the woman he left, with him. But his good guitar is in a pawnshop, and he has no money to redeem it, to buy a bus ticket or to pay for a headstone for his mother. His manager, T. L. Hall, promises an advance.

The yard belongs to the house shared by Vera, Louise and Hedley. Vera has reason to be wary, since Floyd took another woman to Chicago. Louise's niece Ruby has just arrived from Alabama, and both Canewell and Red Carter notice her. Hedley, an older neighbor who raises chickens, is sick with tuberculosis and turns down the sanitarium. He is sure the ghost of the jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden will bring him the fortune his father promised.

Wilson wrote the play for seven characters and kept it in one backyard. The funeral-first flashback structure was his tribute to the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The themes include blues music, postwar integration, violence, the politics between men and women and the Great Migration, along with ambition, artistry, community and deferred dreams. What Floyd wants is a future bigger than Black life in 1940s America allowed.

The Newhouse seats 299 around a thrust stage, so the audience sits on several sides of the yard where the play unfolds.

As of October 2026, Russell Hornsby plays Floyd Barton and Kristolyn Lloyd plays Vera. Roslyn Ruff is Louise, John Douglas Thompson is Hedley, Michael Potts is Red Carter, Daniel J. Watts is Canewell and Chanté Adams is Ruby. Ruff won a 2007 Obie Award for playing Vera in the 2006 Signature revival.

The play had a staged reading at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in summer 1994, and that first version ran over four hours. The world premiere followed in January 1995 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, directed by Walter Dallas. By the end of its regional runs in three more cities, Wilson had cut about 90 minutes.

The Broadway production, directed by Lloyd Richards, began previews on March 17, 1996, and opened on March 28 at the Walter Kerr Theatre. It closed on September 8, 1996, after 13 previews and 188 performances. Keith David played Floyd, Viola Davis played Vera and Santiago-Hudson played Canewell.