AugustWilson.net
An Interview with August Wilson
04-26-00
By Herb
Boyd
National Editor, TBWT
When August Wilson began his
career as a playwright, it gradually dawned on him the goal of chronicling a
century of African American history in a series of plays. With the rewriting
of “Jitney,” his first full-length play completed in 1978, and its recent
opening at the Second Stage off-Broadway, Wilson is two plays short of his
mission.
A few weeks ago at the
Edison Hotel—Wilson’s favorite residence in New York City—the author sat for an
interview and recalled his remarkable career that has earned him a slew of
prestigious awards, including two Pulitzers Prizes, a Tony Award and six New
York Drama Critics Circle Awards.
Each of Wilson’s plays
depicts a decade in the twentieth century odyssey of African Americans,
beginning in the order in which they were written--except for Jitney
(1970s)--with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1920s), Fences (1950s), Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone (1910s), The Piano Lesson (1930s), Two Trains Running (1960s),
Seven Guitars (1940s) and King Hedley II (1980s). Wilson, 55 and a native of
Pittsburgh, the venue for most of his plays, relates in the interview that he is
currently working on a play to capture the black experience at the turn of
twentieth century and then to complete the cycle, one that will focus on the
first decade of the new millennium.
“With completion of my
latest play, King Hedley II, I have only the ‘bookends,’ the first and the last
decades of the 20th century, remaining,” Wilson wrote toward the end
of an essay recently published in the New York Times. “As I approach the
cycle’s end, I find myself a different person than when I started. The
experience of writing the plays has altered me in ways I cannot yet fully
articulate.
“As with any journey,” he
continued, “the only real question is: ‘Is the port worthy of the cruise?’ The
answer is a resounding ‘Yes.’ I often remark that I am a struggling
playwright. I’m struggling to get the next play on the page. Eight down and
counting. The struggle continues.”
The interview was conducted,
transcribed and edited by Herb Boyd.
Herb Boyd: Perhaps a
good place to start is with Jitney, your first full-length play completed
in 1978. Back in Detroit where I come from, we only used the word jitney—as
opposed to taxis or cabs--when referring to the cars and drivers waiting outside
supermarkets for fares. It means a little more to you and to the natives of
Pittsburgh, right?
August Wilson: Since the 1940s, all my life, that’s how you got around in the black community in Pittsburgh was with jitneys. They were a natural fact of life. These were unlicensed vehicles, only marginally legal. At one time they tried to organize the jitney drivers into a cab company called Our Cab Company, but for various reasons it didn’t last very long.
August Wilson (Photo by Herb Boyd)
HB:
Why did you decide to focus on the jitney drivers
for your first play?
AW: There were a lot of
jitney stations in Pittsburgh, located in storefronts with a pay phone. It was
a perfect place for a play because you had a set and a community of players who
work together and have created something out of nothing, having no jobs. They
are generally older men who had jobs working in the steel mills and on the
railroad. If they were lucky enough to have a pension, there was a need to
supplement with additional income, so they drove jitneys. And I think they do
it because they enjoy the company of each other; they have something to do and
it’s a place to belong. They are a microcosm of the community at large.
HB:
But in the vortex of the play there is a father/son
relationship…
AW: That’s right. It’s
about a young man, who in the midst of trying to right an injustice, spends
twenty years in prison and his father never visited him. The reason he did not
visit him is because he does not sanction the actions of his kid. He’s a
murderer and we find in the course of the play, shortly after he was sentenced
to the electric chair, his mother died. So the father blames him for her
death. She died of grief. This is the play’s central theme, though there are
several others.
HB: Your most recent
play, King Hedley II, is also centered on the family but
it’s about the disintegration of the extended family.
AW: After you look at
the eighties and the family structure and the so-called breakdown that occurred
with grandmothers raising the kids, husband in jail…add to this devastation
adverse public policies, a welfare system that said a man was not allowed in the
house, all of these factors led to the disintegration of the family. So in
view of these calamities black folks found a way to band together and strengthen
the family. If a kid’s father is in jail, it didn’t mean he didn’t get
parenting. He gets parenting by the community. So a community under assault
begins to take care of itself. It’s not so much a breakdown of the family in
the play, but a break with the tradition of the extended family. It’s the
connection with the grandparents that is broken that causes many of the problems
in the community.
HB:
Many of us have an example of this in our families…
AW: I remember my
daughter calling me from college and telling me that she had joined some Black
Action Society and they were studying about Timbuktu. I told her that was nice
but asked why didn’t she start with her grandmother and then work your way back
to Timbuktu. It didn’t make any sense to me for her to know all about Timbuktu
and know nothing about her grandmother. In this way, I felt she’d have a better
sense of who she was and her current situation.
HB:
In writing your plays you’ve pretty much followed
the advice you gave to your daughter, don’t you think?
AW: In order to
understand who you are, you have to understand your immediate ancestors. You’ve
got to make this connection with your recent past in order to understand the
present and then to plot the future. I think it is important that my daughter
understand that her grandmother could not go downtown and try on a dress. Many
of us take for granted that we can try dresses on now, but we can’t forget what
was part of our past. Our parents and grandparents bore the brunt of those
indignities and shielded us from them. We have to do something with that and
not squander our inheritance. Back in the forties in Pittsburgh when we went to
a store we couldn’t get a paper bag; we had to carry our purchases out in our
hands. I didn’t find this out until I was older. My mother was smart. She knew
if she had told me this, I would have come home one day with 2,000 bags that I’d
stole from somewhere and then ask her what else she needed.
HB:
Thus far in your mission to capture the black
experience decade by decade in your plays, you’re about two from completing the
cycle…
AW: I haven’t done the
nineties or the zero years, which I’m working on now.
HB: In capturing a
decade, does it involve extensive research?
AW: The only research I
do is to listen to the music. There’s a lot of history of our people in the
music. When I was writing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I didn’t want to
know anything about Ma Rainey. I figured what I needed to know I’d get out of
her music. Listening to her singing gave me a good sense of who she was. When
I wrote it, I gave her a nephew whom she promised her sister she’d take care
of. I said, “Oh, my God, I hope she has a sister,” cause she’s got one now.
And as it turned out, I was dead on the money because Ma adopted six or seven
kids. I just sensed from her music that she had this nurturing kind of a thing
and gave her a nephew. When I did Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I
certainly did not think about anything that happened in 1911, but I had a sense
that they didn’t have cars but had horses. And I envisioned people coming into
the cities, and there were boarding houses and people setting down roots. I
believe if you do research, you’re limited by it…It’s like putting on a
straitjacket.
HB:
How much of your personal history ends up in your
plays?
AW: As I mentioned
earlier about my uncle and his truck. I remember one time he was driving down a
hill and singing Chuck Berry’s tune “Maybelline,” and the brakes went out. He
started pumping the brakes and then he turned off on some side street and they
finally caught. In the Piano Lesson, there is a scene where they talk
about the brakes and how you have to pump them before they catch. So sometimes
little things like that are remembered and get into the plays. As for my
autobiography that you asked about earlier, well, the plays are my
autobiography, decade by decade.
HB: August, several
years ago you were quite outspoken about the racial aspects of the theater,
debating various opponents about the necessity of black theater, directors,
playwrights and other self-determination efforts. Have things changed enough to
please you nowadays?
AW: No, they have not.
The situation in America hasn’t changed, so that hasn’t changed either. One of
things we’ve done is to concretize our efforts and we’ve set up the African
Grove theater at Dartmouth, and we realize that to bring about substantive
change it has to be done step by step. We’ve gained expertise in other various
fields of endeavor…so we have lawyers on our board. The idea is to bring this
expertise to bear on the theater. Unless you have a strong board with vital
connections to funding, you’re not going to get very far developing black
theater. In our research we discovered that some of the black theaters failed
because of poor management skills, so we made it our business to go and get the
skills. And at Dartmouth we’ve developed a theater training program…it’s a
beginning and in the near future we will have a convention but before this
happens we need to organize some 40,000 black performing artists…perhaps ten
years from now we can look up and find that black theater is something different
than it is now.
HB: Around the country
today at several regional black theaters there appears to be a concern to revive
the old plays, rather than producing new ones. The Dutchman, For
Colored Girls… and other plays are being staged. How do you feel about
this?
AW: You have to
preserve. Look, right down the street you have Uncle Vanya and Death
of a Salesman, which was written in 1949…they make sure that every
generation has an opportunity to see that play. We have to do the same thing.
We have to make a decision which of our body of work we need to preserve. There
is the gifted writer, Ed Bullins, but black theaters don’t do his work. Kids
growing up today need to see his plays. At the same time we need to develop new
writers, and you have to give them an opportunity to learn by doing. It’s not an
either/or situation, but a combination of both. One of the newer playwrights
I’m excited about is Marion McClinton, who is the director of Jitney…I
can recall when I came into theater and how important director Lloyd Richards
was to me. He taught me a lot of things about theater. He let me know that I
was the writer and he was the director, and it was clear separation of
responsibilities. But, of course, in the end you have to work together and we
did that quite successfully. Among the things he taught me is how to watch a
scene, and how a writer and director can see it differently. And then there is
the subtle way that a difference of view is resolved. Lloyd was a great
teacher.
HB:
For your next play on the 1900s, have you decided on a theme or a thread that
runs through it?
AW: In Two Trains
Running there’s an off-stage character named Aunt Ester. She’s 349 years
old during this play. In King Hedley II, she’s also an off-stage
character but by now she’s 366 years old when she dies in this play. Aunt Ester
obviously represents our history all the way back to 1619 and that’s the
connection that if we don’t value it, you lose it. So, to make the new
connection, I will bring Aunt Ester back, but on stage this time in 1904. As
usual, I started listening to my music…then I wrote her name down: Aunt Ester.
I said “Okay,” and then I have her say: “There’s a lot of things I don’t talk
about…I don’t talk about the water…” and then she begins to talk about the
water. And then she says: “I don’t talk about Geechee Dan…” After getting these
first lines down, I knew I was on my way. I had Aunt Ester, Geechee Dan and the
water, that’s all I needed.
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