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Reflection2.pdf

INTRODUCTION A playwright, poet and polemicist, August Wilson (1945-2005) rose to prominence and achieved international acclaim with a cycle of 10 plays, often called the Century Cycle or Pittsburgh Cycle. His plays powerfully dramatize the pleasures and perils of African-American life, experience, and history across the 20th century. The plays in the Century Cycle – Jitney (1982); Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984); Fences (1987); Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988); The Piano Lesson (1990); Two Trains Running (1991); Seven Guitars (1995); King Hedley II (1999); Gem of the Ocean (2003); and Radio Golf (2005) – earned Wilson multiple accolades, including the Tony Award for Best Play (Fences, 1987), the Olivier Award for Best New Play (Jitney, 2002), and two Pulitzer Prizes for drama for Fences in 1987, and The Piano Lesson in 1990). Wilson is considered one of the most significant and influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, often compared with important writers like Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953). Wilson’s plays continue to garner numerous productions around the globe annually and remain among the most studied and written about contemporary dramatic texts in the US. Several of Wilson's works have also been adapted for film, including the 2016 Oscar-nominated movie Fences starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis as Troy and Rose Maxson.

DT+ FUNDAMENTALS

A Concise Introduction to: August Wilson

Isaiah Wooden American University

Last update: 06/02/2019

HISTORY Born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. on April 27, 1945, Wilson's early upbringing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had an immense impact on his playwriting. After his mother, Daisy Wilson, an African-American domestic worker, and father, Frederick August Kittel, a German immigrant and baker, separated during his childhood, he spent most of his youth with his maternal family in and around the Hill District, a traditionally African- American area of Pittsburgh that serves as the setting for nine of the 10 plays in the Century Cycle. As was the case for many African-Americans living in the US during this era, Wilson's family faced habitual racism. The students and teachers at the predominantly white, parochial schools the young Wilson attended were especially bigoted, bullying the budding writer for being Black and poor. When a history teacher accused a 15- year-old Wilson of plagiarising a paper he had meticulously researched and written on the French military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte, the teenager decided to drop out of school, opting instead to make frequent trips to the library to ‘self-educate.’ It was through this process of self-education that Wilson began to discover and deepen his knowledge of the artists and art forms that would become some of his most significant influences as a writer.

Chief among those influences were blues music, writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), visual artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988), and writer-activist Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones (1943-2014). Wilson affectionately called these "my four Bs," and would emend the list to include playwright-essayists James Baldwin (1924-1987) and Ed Bullins (1935- ). Wilson considered the blues the most important of the "four Bs." A musical genre and form that emerged from the work songs, spirituals and folk traditions of African-Americans living in the rural south of the US at the end of the 19th century, Wilson recognised in the blues a model and method for capturing, documenting and expressing the vagaries and complexities of African-American life. He endeavoured to emulate that model and method in his own writing. He also attempted to incorporate elements of Borges, Beardon and Baraka's singular aesthetics in his work. Speaking about his influences in a 1999 interview with The Paris Review, he explained that from Borges, Beardon and Baraka he learned that he could create stories about a specific time, place and culture and still have them resonate with universal themes; that it was possible to

render the fullness and richness of everyday life without devolving into sentimentality; and that all art, even if it does not announce itself as such, is political.

Interestingly, Wilson did not start out as a playwright but as a poet. Energised by the revolutionary spirit of the Black Arts Movements that Baraka and Bullins helped pioneer in the 1960s, he joined the Centre Avenue Poets Theater Workshop in his early 20s, where he met and collaborated with other Hill District poets, educators, artists and activists interested in illuminating and commenting on the experiences of African- Americans in and through their writing. In 1968, he joined forces with fellow Workshop participant Rob Penny to launch the Black Horizon Theater, which aimed to use the arts – performance, in particular – to raise the political consciousness of Pittsburgh's African-American residents. While Wilson directed many of the plays the company produced – and even acted in a few – he resisted writing his own, as he continued to see himself first and foremost as a poet. He would not write his first one-act play, Recycle, until 1973. He followed it up in 1976 with The Homecoming, which Pittsburgh's Kuntu Theatre produced, and The Coldest Day of the Year, which did not receive a production until 1989.

Wilson's career as a playwright began in earnest after he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978 to take a job writing scripts for the Science Museum there. With some encouragement from a friend, director Claude Purdy, he reworked a series of poems about a character named Black Bart that he’d started writing in 1977 into a musical satire called Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of Penumbra Theater, a company launched in 1976 to spotlight African- American voices within the Minneapolis-St. Paul theatre community, agreed to grant the work its first professional production in 1981. The collaborative relationship Wilson forged with Bellamy and Penumbra would prove to be one of the most important of his career. Penumbra presented early professional productions of all 10 plays in the Century Cycle.

Wilson received a crucial break in 1980 when his play Jitney garnered the Playwrights' Center of Minneapolis' Jerome Fellowship. Focusing on a group of unlicensed African-American cab drivers trying to survive in 1970s Pittsburgh amidst the push for ‘urban renewal,’ the play was

produced by the Allegheny Repertory Theater and Penumbra Theater in 1982. That same year, the National Playwrights’ Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, which had previously rejected Jitney, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, and another play Wilson wrote called Fullerton Street, selected Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom for a workshop production. It was during his time at the O'Neill that Wilson began collaborating with Lloyd Richards (1919-2006), who served as the head of the National Playwrights’ Conference, dean of the Yale School of Drama, and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater.

After Wilson fine-tuned Ma Rainey's at the O'Neill, Richards produced and directed the play at Yale Rep and on Broadway in 1984. Richards subsequently stewarded Wilson's Fences (1987), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), Two Trains Running (1992) and Seven Guitars (1996) on Broadway. He also directed the 1995 adaptation of The Piano Lesson for television. Artistic differences about the latter caused an irreparable rift in their working relationship, thus bringing an end to their auspicious collaborations. Wilson chose Marion McClinton to helm King Hedley II (2001) and Kenny Leon to direct Gem of the Ocean (2004) and Radio Golf (2007) on Broadway, thereby bearing out the call he made in a 1990 Spin Magazine essay to have Black directors oversee his work. Wilson did not live to see the latter production or the subsequent Broadway premiere of Jitney (2016) directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

Wilson announced that he had liver cancer on August 26, 2005. He died from the disease on October 2, 2005 at the age of 60. In addition to the lush representations of African-American life and experience included in his poetry and plays, he left behind a formidable legacy of advocacy for Black artists and aesthetic practices. The 1996 speech he delivered at the Theatre Communications Group national conference, ‘The Ground on Which I Stand,’ continues to serve as an important manifesto for artists interested in transforming the professional theatre world by upending the racial, class and gender asymmetries present throughout it. With his successes on Broadway and various stages throughout the US and across the globe, Wilson accrued tremendous influence, which he used to create opportunities for other African-American artists. There are countless Black actors, directors, designers and stage managers who got their starts working on Wilson's plays. There are also countless African

American playwrights – among them, Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Dominique Morisseau and Lynn Nottage – who have benefitted from the successful relationships Wilson cultivated with various theatres in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2015, Denzel Washington announced that he had entered into an agreement with HBO to produce films of all 10 plays in the Century Cycle. In addition to introducing Wilson's work to new audiences, the films promise to further highlight the significance of Wilson's accomplishments.

METHODS

When Wilson began feverishly writing Jitney in a Twin Cities fish and chip restaurant, he did not intend the play to be part of a larger series of works. Indeed, it was only after he completed Ma Rainey's Black Bottom that he realised that he had written three plays set in three different decades: Jitney in the 1970s; Fullerton Street in the 1940s; and Ma Rainey's in the 1920s. Wilson explains:

“Once I became conscious of that, I realised I was trying to focus on what I felt were the most important issues confronting Black Americans for that decade, so ultimately they could stand as a record of Black experience over the past hundred years presented in the form of dramatic literature.” (Powers, 1984, p.52).

Wilson considered the 10-play cycle “a 400-year-old autobiography.” With the project, he aimed to craft a dynamic portrait of African-American experience and to represent silenced and suppressed aspects of African- American history. He was especially interested in exploring the particularities of life in the Hill District, the backdrop for all the plays in the cycle except Ma Rainey's, which unfolds in Chicago.

It took Wilson more than 25 years to complete the Century Cycle, which he did not write in chronological order. He finished Gem of the Ocean, set in the 1900s, in 2003; Joe Turner's Come and Gone, set in the 1910s, in 1988; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, set in the 1920s, in 1984; The Piano Lesson, set in the 1930s, in 1990; Seven Guitars, set in the 1940s, in 1996; Fences, set in the 1950s, in 1987; Two Trains Running, set in the 1960s, in 1992; Jitney, set in the 1970s, in 2000; King Hedley II, set in the 1980s, in 2001; and, Radio Golf, set in the 1990s, in 2005. Wilson explicitly wrote the plays to be in conversation with one another. Thus, there are characters, themes, plotlines and idiomatic expressions that repeat and resonate across each. Critics have often highlighted this intertextuality as one of the cycle's greatest triumphs. They also frequently herald Wilson's emphatic embrace of the Black vernacular. Writing for the New York Times in 2017, Ben Brantley exclaims:

"I can't think of another American dramatist since Tennessee Williams who writes with the generous lyricism of Wilson. It's almost as much like the tragedies of Ancient Greece as it is like Shakespeare, or perhaps grand opera, even though the characters belong to another social stratum, altogether, from the usual aristocrats of Verdi. Wilson found the divine in the down home." (Morris, 2017).

The enthusiasm Brantley expresses for Wilson's rich language and dramaturgy is reflected throughout much of the critical writing on the Century Cycle.

While Wilson's work generally received high praise from audiences and critics alike, his forays into cultural commentary tended to spark controversy. Robert Brustein, scholar, critic and founding artistic director of Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater, took particular umbrage with Wilson's ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ speech. Wilson called Brustein, who offered some of the harshest reviews of his earliest work, "a sniper, naysayer, and cultural imperialist" during the remarks. Brustein replied in American Theatre Magazine:

"August Wilson is more comfortable writing plays than apostolic decrees. His speech is melancholy testimony to the rabid identity politics and poisonous racial consciousness that have been infecting our country in recent years. Although Wilson would deny it, such sentiments represent a reverse form of the old politics of division, an appeal for socially approved and foundation- funded separatism." (Brustein, 1996).

The barbs the pair traded in print ultimately culminated in a 1997 public town-hall debate moderated by playwright-performer Anna Deavere Smith in New York City. There was very little during the discussion on which Wilson and Brustein agreed.

Although Wilson often resisted suggestions that he wrote political plays, his work, nevertheless, transformed the cultural politics of theatre. Indeed, like Baldwin, Baraka and Bullins before him, Wilson made a forceful case with his work for the vitality and necessity of theatre that explores the human condition through the lens of African-American history and culture.