August Wilson: An Appreciation

August Wilson accomplished something that not even Eugene O’Neill was able to do: He’d determined to write a lengthy play cycle that would offer a panoramic view of a segment of American history, and he completed it with Radio Golf, the 10th play in the monumental series, not long before his death yesterday at age 60.

In the cycle that comprises Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Gem of the Ocean, Two Trains Running, Jitney, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, and quite possibly in Radio Golf (which has yet to have a Manhattan production), Wilson’s victory is three-fold. He tells a comprehensive story of the Hill District in his Pittsburgh hometown, presents the history of African-Americans during the entire 20th century, and both glorifies and excoriates the human condition.

Of mixed blood — his mother was African-American, his father a German immigrant — Wilson was adamant that he was reporting on the black experience in each decade of the 1900s with as much unflinching honesty as he could. But he also wanted it understood that, in the final analysis, he was dealing with universalities that transcend country and race. The barren backyard of King Hedley II in which characters wait for something to grow and flourish is, of course, his bleak view of oppression among the black lower class — but it was also symbolic of humanity’s plight as he saw it.

However, Wilson was no relentless doom-sayer. Indeed, two of the motivating forces behind his writing were buoyantly positive: music and a love of language. He believed that, at the worst of times and even in the most somber of elegies, music retains the potential to uplift. Reiterating throughout his career that his prime influence was the blues, he included music and the mention of music in all of his works and frequently in their titles, with references to pianos and guitars, blues icon Ma Rainey, and W. C. Handy’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” — not to mention an obviously ironic allusion to the traditional song “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which runs in part, “The home of the brave and the free / The shrine of each patriot’s devotion.”

Music meant much to Wilson and, therefore, it often meant the world to his characters. In The Piano Lesson, there’s the family piano, a bone of contention between the brother and sister. (Berneice wants to keep it for its value as heritage; Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land.) Then there are the song-loving characters of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: Bynum Walker, a rootworker, explains his healing powers by saying he does it “with a song. My daddy taught me how to do it….My daddy used to heal people. He has the Healing Song. I got the Binding Song.”

Indeed, the Wilson cycle almost always has the feel of potent, perfumed lyrics being sung to unheard, muscular melodies. Many of the characters’ speeches are really arias at the end of which audiences have to suppress the urge to applaud — or give in to it. They’re threnodies that serve as award-winning fodder for actors just as often as the plays brought citations to the one-time Tony-winning, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilson. Even if several of the works are flawed, they contain thrilling moments when characters raise their voices in throbbing witness or protest; Wilson’s beaten-down men and women fight for air and space even when they’ve achieved Ma Rainey’s prominence. They’re people attempting to salvage a slice of dignity or trying to laugh in the face of hard times and bad news. They’re the sound of Black America singing.

Often, these characters just can’t stop expressing themselves — and their volubility can be a drawback. There’s no getting around Wilson’s tendency to say too much or his reluctance to trim his manuscripts to fighting weight, even after trying out his plays in cities across the nation before they were brought to New York. He was apparently most successful at self-editing with the earlier works; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jitney are the most economical of the priceless lot. As Wilson’s reputation grew and his clout along with it, he often seemed less disposed to heed what others must have been saying, directors Loyd Richards, Marion McClinton, and Kenny Leon among them. Yet the playwright’s extravagance with words is hard to criticize. Prolixity is often the mark of genius, as it was here. In the wake of Wilson’s death, every line of dialogue and every gritty scene suddenly seems doubly precious because there will be no more.

Incidentally, Wilson didn’t confine his strong writing to dialogue. Having started writing as a youth with the hope of becoming a poet, he knew the value and power of language. One piece of throwaway prose that proves the point is his brief forward to Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which begins: “It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911. The sun falls out of heaven like a stone. The fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress. Barges loaded with coal and iron ore trudge up the river to the mill towns that dot the Monongahela and return with fresh, hard, gleaming steel. The city flexes its muscles. Men throw countless bridges across the rivers, lay roads, and carve tunnels through the hills sprouting with houses.”

One of Wilson’s most unforgettable characters is 366-year-old Aunt Ester, who’s mentioned in the earlier plays but only walks through the door of her Hill District home for the first time in Gem of the Ocean‘s 1904 setting. She’s meant to be an African-American matriarch, the repository of black tribulations and triumphs. Now that August Wilson has come and gone, it’s clear that he positioned himself as a theater patriarch. He will have many spiritual sons and daughters of many races in generations to come, but it will be some time before any of them comes close to achieving what he achieved.

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[Ed. Note: The League of American Theatres and Producers has announced that the marquee lights of all Broadway theaters will be dimmed for one minute at 8pm on Tuesday, October 4 in memory of August Wilson, “one of America’s greatest playwrights.” Additionally, Jujamcyn Theaters had previously announced that Broadway’s Virginia Theater will be renamed after Wilson; a formal unveiling of the new marquee is scheduled for Sunday, October 16, during the preview run of the musical Jersey Boys. ]