Is August Wilson America's Greatest Playwright?

AugustWilson.net

(Interview)
Ebony, Sept, 2001, by Charles Whitaker

STANDING behind a lectern on a makeshift stage at Chicago's Printer's Row Bookfair--an annual celebration of literature and authors housed in what once was the city's old bookbinding district--playwright August Wilson, one of the featured speakers of the day, morphs into a cast of characters culled from his native Pittsburgh, the city that inspires and influences so much of his work. As the occasionally scatological dialogue spills from Wilson's mouth, the listeners are transported to a Black pool hall, a lunch counter or a barber shop, where wisdom and wisecracks mix in equal measure. In fact, the mini-drama Wilson plays out is so dead-on accurate, so true to the rhyme and ring of Black talk in Anywhere, USA, that it feels as though a tape recorder lodged in Wilson's brain has just been activated, issuing the jumble of voices.

To a certain extent, the voices and emotions Wilson conjures up are practically embedded on a reel in his head. They are the voices and conversations he collected and mentally codified more than 20 years ago, when he was but a writer-in-the-making, gathering the material that he ultimately would fashion into compelling, critically acclaimed plays.

It is the rich authenticity of those voices--telling the tale of Black folks in 20th century America--that has brought Wilson both wealth and plaudits, including two Pulitzer Prizes, seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and Broadway's top honor, the Tony Award. His impressive body of work--eight plays in 16 years --places him among the greatest theater craftsmen of the latter half of the 20th century.

He is one of the most produced of America's living playwrights, as much of a mainstay in theaters across the country as Arthur Miller or Neil Simon. Go to any city and you're likely to find some theater troupe--professional or amateur --offering an interpretation of some Wilson work (especially the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner Fences). In a financially enriching arrangement that demonstrates his power and prestige as a theatrical icon, the 56-year-old Wilson serves as co-producer of his plays, which enables him to reap both a writer's and producer's share of the profit derived from his work.

Yet it is neither money nor prizes that compel Wilson to spin those voices echoing in his head into stage productions. No, what feeds and drives this notoriously intense man is a burning desire to portray the truth of the Black experience as he knows and sees it.

"I write, like any artist, for an audience of one," he says, "basically, to satisfy myself. But I'm also trying to make an aesthetic statement. What I am trying to do is put Black culture on stage and demonstrate to the world--not to White folks, not to Black folks, but to the world -- that it exists and that it is capable of sustaining you. I want to show the world that there is no idea or concept in the human experience that cannot be examined through Black life and culture."

And so, with unwavering honesty, Wilson has set about defining the human experience in decidedly, some might say defiantly, Black terms, using the medium of theater to amplify the voices of Black folks. His writing is an exercise in self-exploration and self-definition, with each character in each play standing as a monument to the strength, perseverance, complexity and, most importantly, the humanity of Black Americans.

"I find that White audiences are surprised to discover the humanity," he says. "They don't see us that way. They look at Black America in a glancing manner."

But there is no glancing at an August Wilson play. From Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, his first commercial success, produced on Broadway in 1984, to King Hedley II, his latest effort, which just completed a surprisingly brief, 12-week run on Broadway, he has forced audiences to stare without blinking into the depths of the Black American experience, its joys and its pains. Each of the eight plays he has produced to date is set in a different decade of the 20th century, a device that has enabled Wilson to explore, often in very subtle ways, the myriad and mutating forms of the legacy of slavery.

Though still reeling from the King Hedley II experience, Wilson has already begun tinkering with a framework for the ninth play in the "Decade Cycle," this one set in the 1990s and focusing on the life of a 366-year-old mystical character, Aunt Esther, who is alluded to in King Hedley II.

He works in solitary confinement in the basement of the 100-year-old Seattle home he shares with his third wife, Constanza Romera, a costume designer, and their 3-year-old daughter, Azula. Spend any time at all with August Wilson and it becomes abundantly apparent that he is a man of spartan tastes and few personal pursuits beyond playwriting. He doesn't drive, so cars hold no interest for him. He loves jazz and blues, but doesn't care much for the crowds at clubs and concerts, preferring instead to get his musical fix in the privacy of his own home via record or CD. Contemporary cinema? Forget about it. He hasn't seen a film in years, and was so disgusted by the last one he did see --the title of which he doesn't remember--that he's practically sworn off the movies.

He is a fan of the "sweet science," and will go on at length about boxers in every weight class. He loves art and books, particularly the work of African-American masters of their craft, like Romare Bearden and Ralph Ellison. Despite his success, he lives a relatively simple life, sequestered at home when he is not on the road fine-tuning a play that is bound for Broadway or picking up an honorary degree (he has 23) or award.

In his basement sanctuary, where the plaques and prizes rest on the floor because he's yet to find time to hang them, he listens to music and writes--in longhand--letting the voices of Pittsburgh come to him, inspire him.

"I don't have any problem hearing the voices, even in Seattle," he says. "I carry Pittsburgh with me where ever I go. And there's so much in the Black experience to write about that you're never going to be able to uncover it all. Let's just say, `I ain't never gonna run out of material.'"

Critics often describe Wilson's work as operatic, filled with long, searing monologues that have the feel of grand arias. But anyone who knows Wilson and his true musical passions will recognize his plays as concerts of blues songs, steeped in the Black tradition and the Black vernacular. You won't hear echoes of other playwrights in a Wilson work. He's read and seen very few of the so-called great plays in the Western canon, a fact he revels in.

"When I started writing plays, I considered it a blessing that I hadn't read Ibsen and Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller," he says. "I didn't know the history of Western theater. So I just decided that I would do it my way, so to speak, and if people liked it, hey, that's fine."

Such headstrong determination has been a constant in Wilson's life. His road to success hasn't been fast or easy, but he is proud to say that it's a road he has paved, brick by brick, doing it his way.

He was born Frederick August Kittel in 1945 in Pittsburgh's Hill District. He didn't assume the name by which he is now known until he began to write in the 1960s. His father was White--an autocratic, and frequently absent, Austro-Hungarian baker.

But it was Wilson's mother, Daisy, who was Black, who imbued in him a sense of identity and purpose, and from whom his reverence for the African-American experience springs. Wilson was the fourth of Daisy Wilson's six children. But he was the first boy, and that, combined with his innate intelligence and gift for language, made him her favorite.

Despite his intellectual gifts, Wilson endured incredible humiliations and affronts attending Catholic schools in Pittsburgh during the 1950s. Taunts and racial epithets were hurled at him by teachers and students. He bounced from school to school, but his formal education came to a crashing end at age 15 when a White teacher charged that an essay Wilson had written on Napoleon had actually been written by one of Wilson's older sisters. The teacher demanded that Wilson prove his authorship of the essay. Instead, Wilson threw the paper in the trash and stormed out of the school, never to return.

Rather than marking an end to his education, however, that episode launched Wilson's lifelong pursuit of truth and fueled his love of books. For months, he hid the fact that he'd dropped out from his mother, leaving each day as if to go to school and, instead, heading for the public library. There, he embarked on a journey of self-education and self-awareness, devouring nearly 300 books on every topic that piqued his interest.

When his mother discovered that he'd dropped out, she banished him to the basement of their home. Ultimately, Wilson left home and kicked about in odd jobs. But by the time he reached his early 20s, the idea of becoming a writer --a poet -- had taken root.

To help him find his writer's voice, he tooled about the hangouts of the Hill District, collecting material and scribbling down observations with the conviction of a cultural anthropologist.

As the Black Power Movement hit its stride in the late 1960s, Wilson, along with neighborhood artists like the playwright Rob Penney, helped establish several Afrocentric arts organizations. "We saw theater as a tool for politicizing the community, or, as we used to say in those days, raising the consciousness of people," he says.

Still, Wilson saw himself largely as a poet. He had directed a few productions and even turned one poem into a satirical play, but most of his creative energy was spent expressing himself in verse.

It wasn't until the late 1970s, when he moved with his second wife to St. Paul, Minn., that he began to explore playwriting more seriously. He got a job at the St. Paul Science Museum, adapting tales of the northwest Indians into scripts. That exercise prompted him to think more in terms of dialogue. Then, in the cultural isolation of St. Paul, the voices of Pittsburgh began to speak to him. "I had gone from the Hill District, a community with 55,000 Black people, to Minnesota, a state with [only] about 19,000 Black people," he says. "And being there is what finally enabled me to hear the voices and to recognize and respect them. And that freed me up."

His first play, Jitney, set in a Pittsburgh taxi stand, was rejected by several prestigious playwriting workshops (Wilson eventually revised and produced it off-Broadway last year; it will soon travel to England). But his next effort, Ma Rainey, was accepted by the O'Neill Playwrights Conference and ultimately wound up in the hands of Lloyd Richards, of the Yale Repertory Theatre, the famed Black director who in 1959 guided Lorraine Hansberry's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Raisin In The Sun on Broadway.

Richards would go on to direct three Wilson works, but more importantly, he would serve as a theatrical mentor, helping to school the burgeoning playwright in stagecraft and dramaturgy.

Wilson worked hard; he felt he didn't have time to dawdle. "It took me eight years to develop my voice as a poet," he says. "I didn't want that to happen as a playwright."

He still cranks out plays at a phenomenal pace (averaging one play every 16 months), but he's learning to take time for simple pleasures like playing around the house with his young daughter Azula. He says he has a good relationship with his daughter from his first marriage, Sakina, 31, who lives in Baltimore. But he admits that age, distance and the comforts that come with financial security make him a much different dad today than he was 30 years ago. "I wouldn't say I like fatherhood more now than I did when my older daughter was born, but I was a whole lot different at 53 than I was at 23," he says. "And my life is a whole lot different, too."

What hasn't changed is his devotion to writing, specifically writing about Black people. He has a lot of stories coursing around in his head, he says, and he wants to get them all down to help his younger daughter and other Black children make sense of the world and the place of African-Americans in it. So he'll write until the end.

"Retire? Even if I never write another play, I won't retire," he says. "I'm going to die with my pen in my hand."

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