Opening weekend of Black Theatre Troupe’s new staging of August Wilson’s urban drama “King Hedley II” at the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix found BTT artistic director David Hemphill opening the show with a caveat and a plea.

The caveat: In what amounts to a theatrical nightmare, on the last night of rehearsals, actor Khalid Bilton suffered a heart attack, sending him to the hospital and leaving the show without its title character. After a scramble to the phones, Hemphill and “Hedley” director Paul Carter Harrison found a replacement, Equity actor Ken Love, who would have to perform with script in hand.

The plea: Don’t judge too harshly, Hemphill told audiences, and do what you can to promote the show with much-needed word-of-mouth.
(Sunday’s matinee found about 40 people in its audience, a deadly small number for the Herberger.) “Tell anybody who’ll listen to you,” Hemphill said, “we’re down here.”

With that, the show began. And behold: Wilson’s backyard drama of struggling black Americans — a poetic treatise on violence and money, pride and poverty — unfolded with an unexpected power, exposing a dark inner beauty that largely belongs to the strength of Wilson’s text.

In the playwright's work, the latest in his 20th-century play cycle exploration of the black American experience, we are taken to mid-’80s Pittsburgh and introduced to an intimate cast centered on one Mr. King Hedley II, a not-yet-middle-aged man who’s served seven years in prison and now works hustling stolen refrigerators and the occasional holdup job, while burying his dreams away in a small garden (a point that anchors “Hedley’s” ample comparisons to Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”) and hopes of one day owning a video store.

We meet Mister, his friend (and partner in crime, played by Ky-Moni Abraham); his mother, Ruby (Olga Idriss); and Elmore (André Lee Ellis), the man who left her long ago and killed her husband, but now wants her back. Plot lines wrap around each other like snakes into a play that’s less about story than about offering up one giant question of identity.

Blood is the key, whether in the abstract sense of family or the more concrete one of violence. Everyone here has come to terms with death and, more poignantly, murder — dismissing it as a societal norm (as in the case of the mysteriously coldblooded Hedley and cohort Mister) or adopting an Old West mentality that says an unpaid $50 loan justifies homicide. A neighbor nicknamed Stool Pigeon (played by Rod Ambrose) plays what New York Times critic Ben Brantley called one of Wilson’s typical “mad prophets,” relating goings-on in shrouds of Scripture, half warning of and half hoping for the flames of Revelation.

BTT’s assembled cast offers acting talents of varying degrees, and Wilson’s script affords each one at least a moment or two to shine in poetic monologue. Ambrose is the nuanced wonder here, with a voice that offers up its own kind of fire and brimstone when not simmering his lines in a deep sauce. Elsewhere, the cast seems at times lost or scrambling, stepping over each other's lines in a manner that suggests, in light of the tragedy of the missing lead, postponement and another week of rehearsals might have been in order. (From Hemphill’s pre-show speech, however, we can infer there’s trouble if this show tanks.)
But what of the new lead, you ask?

Seeing Love tackle his part with eyes constantly darting down to a script — well, it proves a distraction that never lifts over the lengthy show.

But the actor provides limited blocking across the stage to keep our eyes going, and Love has a natural delivery (and a voice like Lou Rawls) that gives his performance a gravity that helps assuage the awkwardness. It says much about Love that even with book in hand, he’s still a powerhouse.