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August Wilson |
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Himself a participant in the black arts movement of the 1960s, August Wilson remains opposed to assimilation and in favor of a specifically black theater in America. Through workshops, conferences, and other venues, he has put his considerable prestige and record of artistic achievement toward the realization of this goal. He has been equally ambitious in his own writing: for more than a decade, he has been writing a series of ten full-length plays, one to be set in each decade of the twentieth century. These plays intend--not only through their own actions but through reminiscences by onstage characters and other, often symbolic motifs--to present a comprehensive picture of the African-American experience in the United States. Six of these plays, covering the second through the seventh decade of the century, have already been completed, produced, and published, and in only a few years they have brought Wilson from obscurity to a position as the most consistently interesting and closely watched playwright in America.
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in the Hill District, a lowerclass black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1945. He was the fourth of six children of Frederick August Kittel, a white baker originally from Germany, and Daisy Wilson, a black woman whose mother had come to Pittsburgh on foot from North Carolina. Wilson's father had essentially rejected his family, keeping up only the most sporadic contact with them, and Wilson rejected him in return, adopting his mother's surname as his own. His mother supported the family by working as a cleaning woman, and Wilson's own meager boyhood income from delivering newspapers was needed to buy such staples as milk and bread. When he was thirteen, his stepfather, David Bedford, moved the family to a largely white section of Pittsburgh known as Hazelwood. On their first day in their new home, someone threw a brick through the front window. White students left notes reading "Nigger, go home" on his desk at school.
Wilson, who had learned to read when he was four years old, fought back by being a straight-A student, until an incident with a ninth-grade teacher led him to leave school permanently at the age of fifteen. He had outdone himself to produce a twenty-page paper on Napoleon, and the teacher, who was himself black, kept him after class. As Wilson told the story to People magazine thirty-five years later, "He said he was going to give me either an A+ or an E. Then he asked if I could prove I wrote it. I said I didn't feel I had to defend it, unless he was going to ask everyone in the class if they wrote theirs. So he circled an E and handed it back to me. I tore it up, walked out and never went back." Wilson spent the rest of the school year going to the library every day, until he worked up the courage to tell his mother that he had quit school, and then, at sixteen, began to toil at series of jobs that including cooking in coffee shops and working as a stock clerk. In 1963, he enlisted in the United States Army, but obtained a discharge after one year.
Having decided that he was going to be a writer, he spent time on street corners and at a local cigar store, observing the people of his neighborhood and listening to the stories that they told, paying attention not only to the details of their lives but also the ways in which they expressed themselves. A few weeks before his twentieth birthday, he bought a typewriter, and not long thereafter he purchased some old blues records. As he has made clear, the blues would be the most decisive influence on his own writing. He described to People the experience of hearing Bessie Smith for the first time: "Everything fell into a new place. I lived in a rooming house in Pittsburgh at the time with this odd assortment of people. I had never connected them to anything of value. I began to look at these people differently, and at myself differently. I realized that I had history and connection--the everyday poetry of the people I'd grown up with."
Wilson's early twenties coincided with the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. He began to regard himself as a black nationalist, and with a friend he founded the Black Horizons Theater Company in 1968. In the early 1970s, he published poems in such journals as Black World and Black Lines. In 1978, after visiting a friend in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was so impressed by the atmosphere of that city that he decided to move there himself. He found a job at St. Paul's Science Museum of Minnesota, writing scripts for short sketches to be presented in conjunction with the museum's exhibits, and also began to work with the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis.
In 1969, Wilson married Brenda Burton. Their daughter, Sakina Ansari, was born the following year. The marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Wilson was married to Judy Oliver from 1981 to 1990. Since 1994, he has been married to Constanza Romero, a costume designer who worked on the 1990 production of his play The Piano Lesson.
It was a visit home to Pittsburgh that sparked what would become Wilson's career as a serious playwright. On that visit, he heard afresh the voices and the stories of his native city, and he was still hearing them in his head on his return to St. Paul. He wrote Jitney, a two-act play set in a gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh, which was produced at Pittsburgh's Allegheny Repertory Theater in 1982. Fullerton Street, another play with a Pittsburgh setting, was not as successful. At the end of 1981 Wilson finished writing Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a project he had been nurturing for several years. Set in a Chicago recording studio in March 1927, it depicts a fictional incident in the life of the legendary Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, a popular blues singer who influenced Bessie Smith. In the play, bickering among the members of her band reveals the corrosive effects of racism and leads ultimately to a violent conclusion. Wilson submitted the script to the National Playwrights Conference, with the result that it received a staged reading at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut, followed by a full production at the Yale Repertory Theater in April 1984. It was produced at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and then opened on Broadway on October 11, 1984. Although some reviewers found it talky and its ending melodramatic, it received very strong notices overall. It ran for eight months, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of 1984-85, and also received a Tony nomination for best play.
Wilson's next work to come to New York was Fences, which had received a staged reading at the Eugene O'Neill Center in 1983. It opened on Broadway on March 26, 1987, with James Earl Jones as the central character, Troy Maxson, a former baseball player in the old Negro Leagues who is now a garbage collector, and who, despite his pride in being a responsible and loving family man, allows his anger and resentments to bring havoc to the lives of all those he cares about. While firmly rooted in the black experience in America, the play addressed issues of self-knowledge and relationships that are universal in the human condition, leading reviewers to make comparisons to both Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Fences won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for best play of 1986-87, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Joe Turner's Come and Gone premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater in May 1986, and opened on Broadway two years later. Based on the actual enslavement of blacks carried on by a Tennessee bounty hunter early in the twentieth century, the play is set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boarding house, where Herald Loomis, one former victim of such enslavement, has come in search of his wife. Through Loomis's experiences, Wilson once again explores issues of self-knowledge and personal identity, which here involve the casting aside of the false self imposed by the white enslaver and the reclaiming of his African heritage. While this drama did not reach the levels of popular success accorded to others of Wilson's plays, Frank Rich in The New York Times described it as "potentially its author's finest achievement yet," and it received a Tony Award nomination as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year.
There were very few limits to the success of Wilson's next play, The Piano Lesson, which had its initial production at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987. It came to Broadway in 1990, and proceeded to harvest the Tony, the Drama Critics Circle Award, the American Theater Critics Outstanding Play Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1995, it was adapted for television broadcast as a Hallmark Hall of Fame production. Set in 1937, it concerns the struggle between a brother and sister over a family heirloom, a piano that contains carvings by their great-grandfather that are emblematic of their racial and family history. The sister wants to hold on to the piano and all that it signifies, while her brother wants to sell it and use the money to buy land from the white family that had enslaved their ancestors. In refusing to assign all the rights of the matter to one side or the other, Wilson creates multidimensional characters and dramatizes the complexities of the issues at stake. While generally quite well received, the play drew sharp criticism from the distinguished critic Robert Brustein, who felt that, by concentrating repeatedly on the effects of racism and slavery, and by calibrating his plays exclusively to the sensibilities and needs of a black audience, Wilson was inhibiting his artistic growth.
Two Trains Running, produced at Yale in 1990 and in New York in 1992, is set in 1969, making it the most recently located work in Wilson's cycle, and it goes further than any of its predecessors in its use of supernatural and symbolic elements to engage the African experience in America. Seven Guitars premiered in Chicago in 1995 and came to New York in March of the following year. In it, a group of people come together in Pittsburgh in 1948 to mourn the untimely death of a friend, a blues guitarist who was on the verge of success. Through their reminiscences and revelations Wilson opens the action into another fully-fleshed chapter in his chronicle of black life in America in the twentieth century.
Over the past several years, Wilson has conducted a running and at times acrimonious debate with Robert Brustein on the subject of the social versus the aesthetic responsibilities of the artist. Wilson's admirers would claim that the artistic achievement of his plays finesses the either/or implications of Brustein's thesis, allowing him to create socially significant work that is also artistically accomplished. Whatever the ultimate merits of this debate, it is beyond question that August Wilson is the most talented and forceful playwright to emerge in America in the last several decades, and that the passion, range, and mythic dimension of his plays have done much to revitalize the ancient art of drama, the reports of whose death have yet once more been greatly exaggerated.
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