AugustWilson.net
Golf finds Wilson still swinging
"She asked, 'Daddy, what's the title?' " Wilson recalls. "I said I didn't have one, and she said, 'Call it Secrets of the Radio Sisters.' And I said, 'Well, I don't have any radio sisters in there. It's about a guy and he has a radio station, and they're playing golf.' So she said, 'Call it Radio Golf.' And I said, 'That's a good idea.' Then she said, 'I'll write Secrets of the Radio Sisters.' "
Family ties emerge as a key factor in Radio Golf, the final entry in Wilson's celebrated cycle of plays tracing the experiences of black Americans through the 20th century that opened Thursday at the Yale Repertory Theatre. So do other prominent themes of his work, such as the conflict between tradition and assimilation and the struggle for moral and spiritual fulfillment in an unjust world.
Sitting in a cafe across the street from the theater, Wilson hardly seems wistful about finishing his journey, which began with the premiere of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, also at Yale, back in 1984.
"I feel free, man," says the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who turned 60 last Wednesday but can still exude an almost childlike enthusiasm. "I've had other ideas for plays that I couldn't do, because they didn't fit into the cycle. Now I can do them." He is already at work on a novel and what he describes as his first comedy: "It's about coffin-makers who go on strike, and a low-tech war breaks out between them and the undertakers." The work in progress also involves a magic radio that produces such disparate historical characters as Queen Victoria, Fidel Castro and Benny Goodman.
Wilson certainly wasn't a slave to convention, or chronology, while cranking out such modern classics as The Piano Lesson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Fences, which he is adapting into a film. Rainey, one of eight Wilson plays that have made it to Broadway — it was revived in 2003, with Whoopi Goldberg in the title role — was set in the '20s. His most recent effort, Gem of the Ocean, which ran earlier this season, predates all the others plot-wise, taking place in 1904.
With Golf, the dramatist returns to the relatively recent terrain of 1997 — though what he finds there doesn't necessarily smack of progress. Set in Wilson's native city of Pittsburgh, as all his plays have been, the play focuses on two black business partners taking part in an urban redevelopment campaign that involves tearing down the house once owned by Aunt Ester, a mystical character alluded to in other Wilson plays.
"To my observation, the black middle class has failed to return the expertise and sophistication and resources that they've gained over the past 50 years back to the community," Wilson says. "As a result, the community deteriorates, and guys like Roosevelt (one of Golf's characters) don't want anything to do with it."
As for Wilson's own contributions, all five cast members of Golf have acted more than once in productions of his work, as have such other notable black performers as James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Leslie Uggams and Phylicia Rashad. Two Golf co-stars, Anthony Chisholm and John Earl Jelks, appeared with Rashad in Gem, which was critically praised but closed after fewer than 90 performances.
Though Wilson doesn't attribute such disappointments to overt racism, he notes that Gem and the similarly short-lived Joe Turner "both took place early in the cycle, and dealt somewhat with slavery. And with King Hedley, people may have been scared; it had this guy with a scar on his face, and a knife." He also categorizes what most define as mainstream American theater as "European-American theater. There are some whites who feel that Western culture is European culture, and that by altering that esthetic in any way, you pollute it."
But the playwright also recognizes, and laments, the increasing perception that audiences — Broadway audiences in particular — would rather spend their hard-earned dollars on escapist fluff. "Chekhov could open The Cherry Orchard right next to Mamma Mia!," he says. "People would go to Mamma Mia!"
Yet Wilson is determined, in Radio Golf parlance, to stay in the game — and he is keen that his prospective successors follow suit.
"We need more theaters, and playwrights need to seize the theaters, because that's who they belong to," he says. "Yes, you have to build on the old. I take my hat off when I say Chekhov's name. But my theory is, we should be writing better plays than Chekhov did — because we have more spiritual resources.
"We've had John Coltrane, we've gone to the moon. We should stop talking about the golden age of playwriting. This is our age, golden or not. There's nothing wrong with change — and it can lead you to a better place."
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