JITNEY to Open KC Melting Pot Theatre's 12th Season

KC Melting Pot Theatre, Kansas City's oldest professional Black theater, will open its 12th season with August Wilson's Jitney, a cornerstone of Wilson's American Century Cycle. The production kicks off the season's guiding theme, "Power, Pressure, and Possibility", a lens through which KCMPT will examine how ordinary people hold their ground among the pressures that shape our communities and inside systems built to displace them. Performances will run Thursday, September 17 through Saturday, September 26.

Set in a Pittsburgh gypsy cab station in the 1970s, Jitney follows the men at Becker's Car Service, drivers who built their own transportation business from the ground up, a self-made enterprise born of ingenuity and necessity, serving a community the official system refused to see. As urban renewal spreads and the city plans threaten to erase the block that has held them together, the drivers confront questions of fatherhood, loyalty, and legacy, each staking a claim to what the future should look like and who gets to build it.

As one of the most celebrated plays of August Wilson's canon, Jitney captures the resilience, humor, and hard-won dignity of a community determined to define itself on its own terms. It is a fitting curtain-raiser that asks what it means to hold power, withstand pressure, and still choose possibility.

The cast features Harvey Williams (Becker), Desmond "337" Jones (Turnbo), E. Larry Guidry (Youngblood), Jerron O'Neal (Fielding), Theodore "Priest" Hughes (Doub), Donald Paul Jones III (Shealy), Dennis Jackson (Philmore), Kameron Cole (Rena), and Shane St. James-Wolfe (Booster).