THEATER . . . "SEVEN GUITARS."

Playwright August Wilson -- who wrote The Piano Lesson and Fences -- begins his new play with a scene in which a group of friends are mourning the death of Floyd Barton, a blues guitarist and singer whose career was about to take off when he died. The rest of the play, about Barton's rocky life, is "enormously promising and filled with colorful sketches of dialogue and very appealing characters" says TIME critic Bill Tynan. As the end of the play approaches, however, both the "plotting and the ideas get muddy, so it isn't as moving as it should be" Tynan says. Still, it's a problem that Wilson, a prodigious rewriter, will probably fix as the production makes its rounds of the country -- and before it gets to Broadway. It opened at the Goodman Theater in Chicago this week.