August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60
William_B...@yahoo.com
October 3, 2005
August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
August Wilson, who chronicled the African-American experience in the
20th century in a series of plays that will stand as a landmark in the
history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway
theater, died yesterday at a hospital in Seattle. He was 60 and lived
in Seattle.
The cause was liver cancer, said his assistant, Dena Levitin. Mr.
Wilson's cancer was diagnosed in the summer, and his illness was made
public last month.
"Radio Golf," the last of the 10 plays that constitute Mr. Wilson's
majestic theatrical cycle, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater last
spring and has subsequently been produced in Los Angeles. It was the
concluding chapter in a spellbinding story that began more than two
decades ago, when Mr. Wilson's play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" had its
debut at the same theater, in 1984, and announced the arrival of a
major talent, fully matured.
Reviewing the play's Broadway premiere for The New York Times, Frank
Rich wrote that in "Ma Rainey," Mr. Wilson "sends the entire history of
black America crashing down upon our heads."
"This play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its
victims," Mr. Rich continued, "and it floats on the same authentic
artistry as the blues music it celebrates."
In the years since "Ma Rainey" appeared, Mr. Wilson collected
innumerable accolades for his work, including seven New York Drama
Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award, for 1987's "Fences," and two
Pulitzer Prizes, for "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," from 1990.
"He was a giant figure in American theater," the playwright Tony
Kushner said yesterday. "Heroic is not a word one uses often without
embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and
ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an
epic story.
"The playwright's voice in American culture is perceived as having been
usurped by television and film, but he reasserted the power of drama to
describe large social forces, to explore the meaning of an entire
people's experience in American history. For all the magic in his
plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and
Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama.
He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had
been abandoned."
To honor his achievements, Broadway's Virginia Theater is to be renamed
the August Wilson Theater. The new marquee is to be unveiled Oct. 17.
With the exceptions of "Radio Golf" and "Jitney," a play first produced
in St. Paul in 1981 and reworked and presented Off Broadway in 2000,
all of the plays in the cycle were ultimately seen on Broadway, the
sometimes treacherous but all-important commercial marketplace for
American theater. Although some were not financial successes there,
"Fences," which starred James Earl Jones, set a record for a nonmusical
Broadway production when it grossed $11 million in a single year, and
ran for 525 performances. Together, Mr. Wilson's plays logged nearly
1,800 performances on Broadway in a little more than two decades, and
they have been seen in more than 2,000 separate productions, amateur
and professional.
Each of the plays in the cycle was set in a different decade of the
20th century, and all but "Ma Rainey" took place in the impoverished
but vibrant African-American Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Mr.
Wilson was born. In 1978, before he had become a successful writer, Mr.
Wilson moved to St. Paul, and in 1994 he settled in Seattle, where he
died. But his spiritual home remained the rough streets of the Hill
District, where as a young man he sat in thrall to the voices of
African-American working men and women. Years later, he would discern
in their stories, their jokes and their squabbles the raw material for
an art that would celebrate the sustaining richness of the black
American experience, bruising as it often was.
In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with
uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in
plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life:
cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In
bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the
lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered
black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the
struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often
overwhelming obstacles.
In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power
of the blues, he also argued eloquently for the importance of black
Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying
it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was
imperative for black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual
nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing
fight against the legacies of white racism.
In an article about his cycle for The Times in 2000, Mr. Wilson wrote,
"I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and
fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of
human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in
which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of
ourselves."
Mr. Wilson did not establish the chronological framework of his cycle
until after the work had begun, and he skipped around in time. Although
"Radio Golf," the last play to be written, was set in the 1990's, "Gem
of the Ocean," which immediately preceded it in production (it came to
Broadway in the fall of 2004), was set in the first decade of the 20th
century.
His first success, "Ma Rainey," which took place in a Chicago recording
studio in 1927, depicted the turbulent relationship between a rich but
angry blues singer and a brilliant trumpet player who also wants to
succeed in the white-dominated world of commercial music. From there
Mr. Wilson turned to the 1950's, with "Fences," his most popular play,
about a garbageman and former baseball player in the Negro leagues who
clashes with his son over the boy's intention to pursue a career in
sports. His next play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," considered by many
to be the finest of his works, was a quasi-mystical drama set in a
boardinghouse in 1911. It told of a man newly freed from illegal
servitude searching to find the woman who abandoned him.
The other plays in Mr. Wilson's theatrical opus are "The Piano Lesson,"
set in 1936, in which a brother and sister argue over the fate of the
piano that symbolizes the family's anguished past history; "Two Trains
Running," concerning an ex-con re-ordering his life in 1969; "Seven
Guitars," about a blues musician on the brink of a career breakthrough
in 1948; "Jitney," a collage of the everyday doings at a gypsy cab
company in 1977; and "King Hedley II," in which another troubled ex-con
searches for redemption as the Hill District crumbles under the
onslaught of Reaganomics in 1985.
As the cycle developed, Mr. Wilson knit the plays together through
overlapping themes and characters. Many of the primary conflicts
concern the dueling prerogatives of characters poised between the
traumatizing past and the uncertain future. The central character in
"Radio Golf" is the grandson of a character in "Gem of the Ocean." The
guiding spirit of the cycle came to be Aunt Esther, a woman said to
have lived for more than three centuries, who was referred to in
several plays and who appeared at last in "Gem." She embodied the
continuity of spiritual and moral values that Mr. Wilson felt was
crucial to the black experience, uniting the descendants of slaves to
their African ancestors.
A Fruitful Partnership
Mr. Wilson's career was closely linked with that of Lloyd Richards, who
became the first black director to work on Broadway when he staged the
first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway,
Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun," in 1959. Ms. Hansberry's
warmhearted but clear-eyed play about the struggles of a black family
to move up the economic ladder in Chicago shares with Mr. Wilson's work
a focus on the daily lives of black Americans, relegating the
oppressions of white culture to the background.
Mr. Richards, the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic
director of Yale Repertory Theater from 1979 to 1991, was also the head
of the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut when Mr.
Wilson submitted "Ma Rainey" to the program. ("Jitney," begun in 1979,
had been submitted and rejected twice.) When it was accepted, Mr.
Richards helped refine the work of the then-unknown writer and first
produced and directed it at Yale Rep, where its success instantly
established Mr. Wilson as an American playwright of singular talent,
perhaps the greatest American stage poet since Tennessee Williams.
Mr. Richards would help shape and direct the next five plays in Mr.
Wilson's cycle, ending with "Seven Guitars," which arrived on Broadway
in 1996. Each play was refined through a series of productions at Yale
and other regional theaters before moving to New York. (Most grew
significantly shorter along the way: Mr. Wilson's work was most often
criticized for excessive length and sometimes belaboring its ideas. In
a celebratory review Mr. Rich wrote when "Joe Turner" opened on
Broadway, he nevertheless noted, "As usual with Mr. Wilson, the play
overstates its thematic exposition in an overlong first act.")
This formula replicated in a noncommercial arena the tryout circuit
that had once been commonplace for plays aiming for Broadway, a method
of development that ran aground as the costs of theater skyrocketed.
The process, which also involved Mr. Wilson's longtime producer,
Benjamin Mordecai, the managing director of Yale Rep during much of Mr.
Richards's tenure, was important in defining a healthy and mutually
beneficial relationship between the country's not-for-profit regional
theaters and its Broadway-centered commercial establishment. (Mr.
Mordecai, who was involved with all of Mr. Wilson's plays in one
capacity or another, died earlier this year.) More significantly, the
collaboration between Mr. Richards and Mr. Wilson was the most
artistically fruitful in American theatrical history since Elia Kazan's
association with Arthur Miller and Williams.
An Atypical Education
Mr. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in
Pittsburgh. He was named for his father, a white German immigrant who
worked as a baker, drank too much and had a fiery temperament his son
would inherit. He was mostly an absence in Mr. Wilson's childhood, and
it was his African-American mother, Daisy Wilson, who instilled in her
six children a strong sense of pride and a limited tolerance for
injustice. (She once turned down a washing machine she had won in a
contest when the company sponsoring the event tried to fob off a
secondhand item on her.) Mr. Wilson legally adopted her last name when
he set out to become a writer.
Eventually Mrs. Wilson divorced Mr. Wilson's father and remarried, and
the family moved to a largely white suburb. As the only black student
in his class at a Roman Catholic high school, Mr. Wilson gained an
awareness of the grinding ugliness of racism that would inform his
work. "There was a note on my desk every single day," he told The New
Yorker in 2001. "It said, 'Go home, nigger.' " Mr. Wilson attended two
more schools but gave up on formal education when a teacher accused him
of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. At 15, he chose to continue - but
essentially to begin - his education on his own, spending his days at
the local library absorbing books by the dozen.
Mr. Wilson acquired an equally valuable education outside the library
walls, hanging out and listening to the Hill District denizens pass the
time on stoops, in coffee shops and at Pat's Place, a local cigar
store. Eventually the voices he absorbed while hanging loose with
retirees and sharpies in his 20's would re-emerge in his plays,
sometimes with little artistic tampering.
Mr. Wilson acquired his first typewriter with $20 he had earned writing
a term paper for one of his sisters at college. But he preferred to
write in public places like bars and restaurants and had a particular
affinity for composing on cocktail napkins. Only when he settled into
his career as a playwright did he become comfortable writing at home,
in longhand on yellow notepads.
By the time he was 20, Mr. Wilson had decided he was a poet. He
submitted poems to Harper's and other magazines while supporting
himself with odd jobs, and began dressing in a style that raised
eyebrows among his peers. While most of the young men of the time were
dressing down, Mr. Wilson was always meticulously turned out in
jackets, ties and white shirts selected from thrift shops. Later he
would be known for his trademark porter's cap.
Inspired by the Black Power movement then gaining momentum, Mr. Wilson
and a group of fellow poets founded a theater workshop and an art
gallery, and in 1968 Mr. Wilson and his friend Rob Penny founded the
Black Horizons on the Hill Theater. Mr. Wilson was the director and
sometimes an actor, too, although he had no experience, and learned
about directing by checking a how-to manual out of the library. The
company was without a performance space and staged shows in the
auditoriums of local elementary schools. Tickets were sold, for 50
cents a pop, by chatting up people on the streets right before a
performance.
But Mr. Wilson's aspirations as an author were still being channeled
into poetry; after an abortive effort to write a play for his theater,
he set aside playwriting for almost a decade. He came home to drama
almost by happenstance. Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul in 1978 and
started working at the Science Museum of Minnesota. His task: adapting
Native American folk tales into children's plays.
Homesick for the Hill District and growing more comfortable with the
playwriting process, he started channeling the Hill voices haunting his
memories as a way of keeping the connection alive. "Jitney," begun in
1979, was the result. It was produced in Pittsburgh in 1982, the same
year that "Ma Rainey" was accepted at the O'Neill Center. (Mr. Wilson's
first professional production was of a prior play adapted from a series
of his poems, "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," staged by St. Paul's
Penumbra Theater.)
In a 1999 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Wilson cited his major
influences as being the "four B's": the blues was the "primary"
influence, followed by Jorge Luis Borges, the playwright Amiri Baraka
and the painter Romare Bearden. He analyzed the elements each
contributed to his art: "From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories
from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place
and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes
of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that
all art is political, although I don't write political plays. From
Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday
life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality." He added
two more B's, both African-American writers, to the list: the
playwright Ed Bullins and James Baldwin.
Although his plays achieved their success in the white-dominated
theater world, Mr. Wilson remained devoted to the alternative culture
of black Americans and mourned its gradual decline as the black middle
class grew and adopted the values of its white counterpart. He once
lamented that at convocation ceremonies at black universities, the
music would be Bach, not gospel.
When a Hollywood studio optioned "Fences," Mr. Wilson caused a ruckus
by insisting on a black director. In a 1990 article published in Spin
magazine and later excerpted in The Times, he said, "I am not carrying
a banner for black directors. I think they should carry their own. I am
not trying to get work for black directors. I am trying to get the film
of my play made in the best possible way. I declined a white director
not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors
are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the
specifics of the culture of black Americans." (The film was not made.)
He was a firm believer in the importance of maintaining a robust black
theater movement, a viewpoint that also inspired a public controversy
when Mr. Wilson clashed with the prominent theater critic and arts
administrator Robert Brustein in a series of exchanges in the pages of
American Theater magazine and The New Republic, and later in a formal
debate between the two staged at Manhattan's Town Hall in 1997,
moderated by Anna Deavere Smith.
The contretemps began when Mr. Wilson delivered a keynote address to a
national theater conference in which he lamented that among the more
than 60 members of the League of Regional Theaters, only one was
dedicated to the work of African-Americans. He also denounced as absurd
the idea of colorblind casting, asserting that an all-black "Death of a
Salesman" was irrelevant because the play was "conceived for white
actors as an investigation of the specifics of white culture." Mr.
Brustein referred to Mr. Wilson's call for an independent black theater
movement as "self-segregation."
At the sold-out debate at Town Hall the friendly antagonists
essentially restated their positions publicly. "Never is it suggested
that playwrights like David Mamet or Terrence McNally are limiting
themselves to whiteness," Mr. Wilson said. "The idea that we are trying
to escape from the ghetto of black culture is insulting."
A Legacy of Stars
Mr. Wilson was dedicated to writing for the theater, and resisted many
offers from Hollywood. (His only concession: adapting "The Piano
Lesson" for television.) He didn't even see any movies for a stretch of
10 years.
But the list of well-known television and film actors who first came to
prominence in one of Mr. Wilson's plays is lengthy. Charles S. Dutton
scored his first success as the trumpeter Levee in the original
production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a role he reprised nearly 20
years later when the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, with Whoopi
Goldberg in the title role. S. Epatha Merkerson, now known as Lt. Anita
Van Buren on "Law & Order," appeared opposite Mr. Dutton in "The Piano
Lesson" on Broadway.
Other notable actors who appeared in one or more of Mr. Wilson's plays
include Angela Bassett, Roscoe Lee Browne, Phylicia Rashad, Courtney B.
Vance, Laurence Fishburne, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Keith David, Viola Davis,
Delroy Lindo, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams and Brian Stokes
Mitchell.
Mr. Wilson's first two marriages, to Brenda Burton and Judy Oliver,
ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Constanza Romero, a
Colombian-born costume designer he met when she worked on "The Piano
Lesson"; and two daughters, Sakina Ansari (from his first marriage) and
Azula Carmen Wilson (from his third). He is also survived by his
siblings Freda Ellis, Linda Jean Kittel, Richard Kittel, Donna Conley
and Edwin Kittel.
Mr. Wilson did not write plays with specific political agendas, but he
did believe art could subtly effect social change. And while his
essential aim was to evoke and ennoble the collective African-American
experience, he also believed his work could help rewrite some of those
rules.
"I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at
black Americans," he told The Paris Review. "For instance, in 'Fences'
they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although
they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white
people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is
affected by the same things - love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty.
Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs
can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their
lives."
In describing his own work, Mr. Wilson could be analytical or offhand.
A soft-spoken man whose affability masked a sometimes short temper, he
was a connoisseur of the art of storytelling offstage and on. Here's
the story behind all his characters' stories, in his own words: "I once
wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World' and it
went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private
ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all.
Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over
again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. I'm not sure what it
means, other than life is hard."