August Wilson's Lazarus Complex

Although King Hedley II is the eighth play in the August Wilson cycle, it is the only play that Wilson intentionally created as a sequel to a previous play. King Hedley II repeats scenes, characters and actions—preparation of a sacrificial animal, ritual murder, burial of the seed, robbing of a store— that Wilson's audience first came upon in Seven Guitars (1995). The core event of both plays centers around a violent confrontation that results in the death of one of the antagonists. In Seven Guitars, this violence culmi nates in a fatal encounter between a blues performer by the name of Floyd Barton and a West Indian immigrant named King Hedley, whose delu sional paranoia induces him to murder. In King Hedley II, the son of King Hedley feels compelled to repeat his father's violent actions as the sole means of inheriting his legacy. Instead of a beneficent patrimony, King Hedley II inherits this trauma as the deep truth of his own existence. The "only thing I know about the play," Wilson remarked in an interview about this baneful repetition, is that "his father killed a man. He killed a man. His surrogate father killed a man. He killed a man, and he has a seventeen-year-old son who's getting ready to kill a man."1 All of Wilson's plays were staged before the concerned regard of a blues community. The term blues refers to a contradictory, fluid, and mobile cultural and musical formation that has historically assumed multiple in carnations. In associating the blues with the repository of cultural resources and life-forms through which the alternative social formations repre sented within his plays emerged into material existence, Wilson construed the blues community as at once the setting, the ideal audience, and the social effect of his dramatic productions. August Wilson's blues describe a verbal art form in which African oral traditions are combined with Western literate forms to foster a communal