Shirley Dunlap, the head of Morgan State University’s Theatre Arts program, is sitting in her office just before a rehearsal for August Wilson’s Jitney. A tall, striking woman with a salt-and-pepper afro, dangling silver earrings, and draped layers of gray, bohemian clothes, she sits before a cardboard model of the show’s stage design. At the center of that design is a shabby office for a group of unlicensed taxi drivers, known as “gypsies” in New York, as “hacks” in Baltimore, and as “jitneys” in Pittsburgh, Wilson’s birthplace, where the play is set in 1977. Pittsburgh’s downtown office buildings rise around the office like the walls of a fort.

There are multiple plot strands in Jitney, but central to the show is the relationship between Becker, an African-American man who owns the cab company, and his son Booster, who has just been released from prison after serving 20 years for murdering one of his college classmates, a white girl named Susan. Can Becker overcome two decades of anger and pain to forgive his son for his squandered promise and very public shame? Dunlap brings an unusual approach to this question, in part because of her gender.

“Very few women get to direct an August Wilson play,” Dunlap says. “His plays exude manliness, and most of the characters are male, so it’s always assumed that a man should direct. So it’s an honor—and a challenge—for me to direct his plays. I think I was prepared for it by all those Saturday mornings in the Bronx when my mother would send me to the barbershop with my dad so she could clean house. Listening to those men tell their stories week after week enabled me to do this.”

Dunlap says she wants Becker to come across as a pillar of the church and a hard-working businessman, but she has chosen to emphasize his pain rather than the anger on which most productions focus. “I wanted him to say, more or less, ‘It’s not that I don’t forgive you, but I want you to remember the pain you caused your mother,’” Dunlap says. “Becker’s wife never appears, but it’s important that the women in these men’s lives be represented in the play even if they’re not onstage. It’s a very male world—all these taxi drivers hanging around the office—but they all have women in their lives, and I wanted that female perspective to be present.”

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