By: R. Scott Reedy

For the fourth consecutive season, Actors’ Shakespeare Project is presenting an August Wilson (1945–2005) play from the late writer’s Pittsburgh Cycle (also referred to as his Century Cycle) – this time an estimable production of 2003’s “Gem of the Ocean,” at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury through May 17.

Following first-rate productions of “The Piano Lesson,” “Seven Guitars,” and “King Hedley II,” ASP again turns to Wilson’s decade-by-decade exploration of black America to present “Gem of the Ocean,” the first in the cycle chronologically but the ninth produced. In the fall of 2004, the play made a pre-Broadway stop at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in a production, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Phylicia Rashad, that subsequently was Tony-nominated when it moved to the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. More recently, the drama – which takes place in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1904, when slavery was still a memory alive in many – was produced by Trinity Rep in Providence in 2022.

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