August Wilson

1945

Playwright
Activist

Born in Pittsburgh to a white father (Frederick August Kittle) who never lived with his family and a black mother (Daisy Wilson) from North Carolina. He shared life with his mother and five siblings.

1960s - Flunked out of the 9th grade and at worked menial jobs beginning at age 16. He received his education in libraries and in town hubs. Began writing plays in Pittsburgh and then took a job in St. Paul writing dramatic skits for the Science Museum of Minnesota.

1960s - 1970s - Became involved in the civil rights movement and began to describe himself as black nationalist.

Moved to Minneapolis and began to write clearly using speech patterns and rhythms that were familiar to him from black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. his writing was also strongly influenced by the blues.

1968 - Founded and directed the Black Horizon Theatre Company in Pittsburgh in a predominantly black neighborhood referred to as the Hill. In 1972 he began writing a play, Jitney, about a Gypsy cab station, which was produced in 1978 at Black Horizon and in 1982 at the Eugene O'Neill Center's National Playwright Conference. The play was revived and presented at the 1997 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Founded the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis Shortly after he wrote Fullerton Street which was not as well received as Jitney.

His first commercial success was Ma Rainey's Black Bottom which was developed at the Playwrights Center in 1983 and eventually moved to premier at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984 and went on to Broadway where it enjoyed 275 performances and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The premier at the Yale Repertory established a collaborative bond between Wilson and Lloyd Richards who was then dean of the Yale School of Drama.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was the first in a cycle of ten plays designed to represent the African American people's existence in the United States during this century. Each play dealt with a particular decade as illustrated in Ma Rainey's which represented a female blues singer who deals with the pressures of an abusive music business which victimized its black artists. The play was set in a movie studio and the character of Levee was played by Charles Dutton of television's Roc fame.

Fences presents a slice-of-life in a black tenement in (Pittsburgh?) set in the late 1950s through 1965. The main character, Troy Maxson, is a garbage collector who has taken great pride in keeping his family together and providing for them. Troy's rebellion and frustration set the tone for the play as he struggles for fairness in a society which seems to offer none. In his struggle he builds fences between himself and family. Troy also wrestles with the idea of death and claims that he sees death as nothing but a fastball, something he can handle. The baseball metaphor is used in relation to death and throughout the play.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in late 1986 and moved to New York in early 1988. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In this play and others, Wilson makes a special effort to highlight the elements of African heritage that white society strips away from African Americans. The story revolves around Harold Loomis who returns to a boarding house in Pittsburgh in search of his wife. He is haunted by the memory of a bounty hunter, Joe Turner, who had illegally enslaved him. Set in 1917, Harold is unable to embrace his past by participating in the Juba dance related to Africa.

Two Trains Running opened in 1992 and starred Laurence Fishburne (What's Love Got to Do With It) and Cynthia Martells (Roc ). Set in a Pittsburgh eatery, Risa, a wary waitress has scarred her legs to keep men away and to force people to look at her deeper. It had limited critical success.

Wilson currently resides in Seattle, Washington where he put the finishing touches on his latest play in the cycle, "Moon Going Down." It opened as his newest drama, Seven Guitars , at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago in January and February 1995. The play has since moved to Broadway with a successful run. Set in Pittsburgh, its about the blues and how they mean different things to blacks and to whites. In it, several blues musicians plan a move to Chicago. The play has since moved to a successful run on Broadway.

He is well on his way to completing a cycle of ten plays depicting the African American experience in this country during the twentieth century (one for each decade). He believes that African Americans need not assimilate into the dominant culture, but to contribute to that society to make it represent African Americans.

August Wilson's latest drama, KING HEDLEY II opens at the Virginia Theatre on Broadway in April 2001, and it stars Tony award-winner Brian Stokes-Mitchell and Leslie Uggams

FENCES

Opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and in New York in 1987 where it won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play was directed, as usual, by Lloyd Richards who also ran the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Fences presents a slice-of-life in a black tenement in (Pittsburgh?) set in the late 1950s through 1965. The main character, Troy Maxson, is a garbage collector who has taken great pride in keeping his family together and providing for them. Troy's rebellion and frustration set the tone for the play as he struggles for fairness in a society which seems to offer none.

Note the realistic and metaphorical use of the fence in the play. Troy and Cory are building a realistic fence around the house, and Troy is building metaphorical fences between himself and virtually everyone else in the play.

Troy wrestles with the idea of death and claims that he sees death as nothing but a fastball, something he can handle. The baseball metaphor is used in relation to death and throughout the play. His frustration with his baseball career in the Negro Leagues affects his relationship with his son, Cory.

The father and son relationship between Troy and Cory is explored as a central part of the drama. Their relationship becomes complicated by strong feelings of pride and independence on both sides.

Troy is not a flawless protagonist in that his relationship with his wife, Rose, is challenged at every turn. Eventually his sexual infidelity and a subsequent child by another woman (which Rose cares for), the marriage is effectively destroyed.

Among the ironies in the play, Troy argued for blacks to drive the garbage trucks, but he doesn't know how to drive or have a license.

According to Wilson, "One question in the play is ` Are the tools we are given sufficient to compete in a world that is different from the one our parent's knew?' I think they are--it's just that we have to do different things with the tools."

By the end of Fences , every character except Raynell is institutionalized--Rose in the church, Lyons in the penitentiary, Gabriel in the mental hospital, and Cory in the U.S. Marines. the only free person is the girl, Troy's daughter, the hope of the future.

When asked about television versus theatre's presentation of African American life, Wilson believes that though the Cosby Show was highly successful, it does not accurately reflect African American life.

Fences is both unique to the plight of African Americans and universal in its depiction of the human condition. The father-son and husband-wife relationships cross both unique and universal boundaries.

THE PIANO LESSON
Opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven Connecticut on November 26, 1987. It was previously presented as a staged reading at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's 1987 Playwrights Conference. The play was directed, as usual, by Lloyd Richards who also ran the Yale Repertory Theatre. It also moved to the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway in 1990.

The theme portrays the complexity of African American attitudes toward the past and black heritage compared to plans for the future. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990. It tells the story of a brother and sister conflict over what to do with the family piano which has totems carved on the legs by a slave ancestor. The brother, Boy Willie (Dutton) wants to sell the piano to buy land in the South to build a new life. However, the sister, Bernice, who holds the piano in her uncle's house in Pittsburgh, wants to keep it, thereby holding on to (and ignoring) the painful past.

The setting in the home of Doaker Charles, Bernice's and Boy Willie's uncle. When he is not serving as a referee in the siblings' feud, he is engaged in the tradition of storytelling. Through Doaker's stories, the audience learns of the tragic past which surrounds the liberation of the piano from the hands of white slave owners. Doaker's history as a railroad worker turned cook is also exposed.

More of the family's history is revealed through the rambling, gambling, traveling, drinking man, Wining Boy. He tells of a sordid relationship with Lymon's mother and brings news about home, Mississippi.

Bernice's plans for her daughter, Maretha are paradoxical since though she allows Maretha to play on the piano, she wont tell her of its past. Bernice also sends her to a private school often chastising her not to show her color there.

Bernice's future love relationships were challenged when after the loss of her husband, she is pursued by the ambitious reverend Avery, and then later by the misplaced soul, Lymon. Her future in love ends ambivalently.

The theme of searching for love is explored through Boy Willie's and Lymon's apparent struggle for Grace's affections. Once again Boy Willie and Bernice clash when she catches him on the couch with Grace.

At the end of the play, Boy Willie and Bernice finally came to grips with the ghosts of the past which were compelling them to take their stands about the piano. Some challenged the use of the ghost returning to haunt the family.

The piano serves as a metaphor for the legacy of the past (slavery) that has brought these characters to this point in life. What they do with that legacy is the point of the play.

The Piano Lesson is both unique to the plight of African Americans and universal in its depiction of the human condition. The sibling rivalry, history versus present and future, storytelling, and gender relationships cross both unique and universal boundaries.

The play was presented at the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre in January 1995. The director, Simon Ha, used a relatively bare stage with a high ramp across the back which was lighted by the cyclorama. Although the piano was dominant downstage, there was very little furniture present. Wallace Bridges played the role of Doaker.

Clive Barnes of the New York Post notes, "He (Troy in Fences) sees himself as a man fenced in with responsibilities, but he has created some of those fences himself--some intended to keep people out, some to keep people in...

"Unfortunately, the play needs all the endorsement power the Pulitzer offers. Though easy to respect, it isn't always easy to enjoy... Some scenes are among the most compelling, eloquent drama Wilson has ever written. Numerous others are so numbingly repetitious, even Lloyd Richards' elegant direction--plus Tony Award-quality performances- can't keep The Piano Lesson from being as tedious as a piano lesson. "

- David Patrick Stearns, USA Today -

"Whatever happens to the piano, however, the playwright makes it clear that the music in The Piano Lesson is not up for sale. That haunting music belongs to the people who have lived it, and it has once again found miraculous voice in a play that August Wilson has given to the American stage."

- Frank Rich, The New York Times -

In discussing African American heritage, Wilson commented, "As African Americans, we should demand to participate in society as Africans. That's the way out of the vicious cycle of poverty and neglect that exists in 1987 America, where you have a huge percentage of blacks living in the equivalent of South Africa townships, in housing projects...I think the process of assimilation to white American society was a big mistake."

- August Wilson -

BIBLIOGRAPHY

-----. Contemporary Literary Criticism , Vol. 63. (p. 447.)

Greenberg, James. "Did Hollywood Sit on 'Fences'?" New York Times . (Jan. 27, 1991)

Rich, Frank. "A Family Confronts Its History in August Wilson's 'Piano Lesson.'" The New York Times, (April 17, 1990).

Simon, John. "Two Trains Running." New York Times , (April 27, 1992.)

Stearns, David Patrick. "'The Piano Lesson,' Heavy on Drills." USA Today, (April 17, 1990).

Vaughn, Peter. "A Three-Year Break From Writing, Wilson Ready to Finish 'Seven Guitars.'" Minneapolis Star and Tribune (April 30, 1993).

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