Trenton, NJ — This holiday season, Trenton’s only professional theatre company is staging the first-ever performance of an August Wilson play within the state capital. Passage Theatre Company will present August Wilson’s Jitney, directed by Zuhairah McGill and starring Passage Theatre Executive Artistic Director Brishen Miller as Booster. Passage Theatre’s production of Jitney is supported in-part by funding through the NJEDA’s A.R.T. – Phase II Grant Program, Isles, and GoTrenton.

Set in an unlicensed jitney station in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, August Wilson’s Jitney bears witness to a community standing its ground in the face of erasure. As redevelopment threatens to dismantle both livelihoods and legacy, a group of Black men—drivers, workers, fathers, and friends—build dignity, humor, and survival in the margins of a system never designed to serve them. It is a world Trenton knows well: where official structures fail, people create their own, and joy becomes an act of resistance rather than escape. At the center is Jim Becker, a hardened owner whose fragile order is shattered by the return of his son, Booster, newly released from prison. Long-buried truths surface, forcing a reckoning between generations as private wounds collide with public struggle. Yet Jitney ultimately insists on something radical: that joy is the answer. Not naïve or accidental, but earned through truth-telling, reconciliation, and the refusal to disappear. In a city like Trenton—where survival itself requires courage—Jitney affirms that community endures, relationships can heal, and even in uncertain times, joy remains possible.