On Mr. Wilson's Death

[10/2/05] Mournfully, his bright light shines no more. The man who made us laugh, made us cry, and gave the world tremendous insight into the rich world of African American music, culture, and values passed away on Sunday, October 2, 2005 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, WA. He was surrounded by his family at the time of his passing. Mr. Wilson was 60.

I have received numerous emails over the past 24 hours; I'm sure I will receive more. I plan to create a separate tribute page at some point, but I'm feeling too sad to do that right now.

Please continue to send emails. I think it's important for us to share our grief and appreciation for a man who has worked so hard to share so much.

[8/28/05] It is with great sadness that I report that Mr. August Wilson is dying from liver cancer. Doctors thought a transplant might save his life; however, apparently the disease has advanced to a lethal stage. Without some sort of miracle, Mr. Wilson has less than six months to live. For details concerning this tragic situation, please click here.

Since news of Mr. Wilson's illness swept across the Internet, I have received a number of emails expressing love and support for August and his family. The most current address I have for Mr. Wilson is:

NEW YORK -- Even after a diagnosis in June of inoperable liver cancer, August Wilson has continued to work on "Radio Golf," the final play in his epic 10-work cycle about the black experience in 20th-century America.

"He completed another draft of the play in early July," his assistant, Dena Levitin, said Friday in an interview from Seattle where the 60-year-old Wilson lives with his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and their daughter, Azula.

News of Wilson's illness was first disclosed Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "It's not like poker, you can't throw your hand in," the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright told the paper. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready." He said he has a life expectancy of three to five months.

Wilson's revelation came as "Radio Golf" works its way across the country, playing regional theaters.

"Radio Golf" had its world premiere in April at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., where many of the plays in Wilson's cycle - "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson" and "Two Trains Running" - had their first professional productions.

Wilson's latest work, directed by Kenny Leon, is on view through Sept. 18 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles where it opened Aug. 11. Another production is planned for Baltimore's Center Stage, March 24-April 30, also directed by Leon. "Radio Golf" takes place in the 1990s and concerns a successful middle-class man's struggle with the past and present.

"We've been talking pretty regularly through all this," said Gordon Davidson, founding artistic director of Center Theater, which includes the Mark Taper, and a longtime champion of Wilson's work.

Wilson didn't come to Los Angeles from Seattle for rehearsals, but Davidson and Leon were in close contact with the playwright, and his dramaturge, Todd Kreidler, through fax and e-mail.

"August did a a lot of good work on the play and it's changed a great deal from Yale," Davidson told The Associated Press Friday. "He knew what he wanted to do, and he was up to doing the work."

"We are close to being finished with (the changes)," Leon confirmed. "This time, though, it has been a different process. August wasn't in the room. So I flew back and forth to Seattle and LA. The only void has been not having August right there beside me, saying, `Let's try this.'

"It's always been about the work and that's what's so amazing. For 22 years, he has carried the burden of producing these plays about African-American culture in America.

"The same energy and effort he gave to `Jitney,' `Fences' and `Gem of the Ocean,' is here," Leon said. "In spite of his health issues, he's coming at it like a fighter, a soldier. I have been impressed and amazed."

Wilson's 10-play cycle, one for each decade, is an ambitious achievement, unique in American drama. Not even Eugene O'Neill, who authored the masterpiece "Long Day's Journey Into Night," accomplished such a monumental effort.

Nine of the plays are set in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where Wilson grew up. They were not written chronologically, but it is fitting that the last two to be completed - "Gem of the Ocean" and "Radio Golf" - span the century. "Gem of the Ocean" takes place in 1904 and "Radio Golf" nearly 100 years later.

Playwright August Wilson says he has advanced liver cancer

Rohan Preston, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

August 27, 2005

Playwright August Wilson, who came to the forefront of the American stage and claimed two Pulitzer Prizes by conveying "the majesty and nobility of black people," has advanced liver cancer. He has three to five months to live, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Wilson, 60, who has lived in Seattle for the past 15 years, spent the previous 12 in the Twin Cities, from 1978 to 1990. He first rose to national prominence during that time.

The news of Wilson's grave illness comes months after he completed a singular achievement in American drama. His "Radio Golf," the last of a ten-play cycle about black Americans' life in the 20th century, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in the spring. It is now up at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

In addition to two Pulitzers, for "Fences" (1987) and "The Piano Lesson" (1990), Wilson won many other top drama awards, including a Tony for "Fences" and an Olivier, England's Tony equivalent, for "Jitney."

The completion of the epic cycle may have vaulted him into the ranks of Nobel Prize contenders.

A high school dropout, Wilson rose to the higher circles of arts education. In addition to honorary doctorates, he has been awarded the National Humanities Medal and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wilson's plays are now produced across the country and the globe. St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre has produced most of his works, including "The Piano Lesson,"Two Trains Running" and "Fences," which was staged at the Guthrie Theater. "This announcement is sitting heavy on a lot of hearts, and rightfully so," said Twin Cities actor James A. Williams, one of the stars of the Taper's "Radio Golf."People throw the word 'genius' around a lot, but with Mr. Wilson, it found a perfect fit."

Many scholars, critics and directors agree, often ranking Wilson with 20th-century stage giants Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. His dramatic approach, which melds the homey poetry and musicality of the blues with the indomitable, wise spirit of struggling blacks, has yielded works that are often described as operatic.

"Like Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, he is able to do a kind of psychic, spiritual excavation of the past to make it meaningful for us today," said Howard University Prof. Sandra Shannon, author of a critical biography, "The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson."

Actor Williams, who has known Wilson for more than two decades and has acted in seven of his plays, has another explanation for Wilson's success: "He gets it -- the anger and pain, the poetry and tragedy," Williams said. "I grew up in the inner city where people killed people over things that seem to be insignificant or trivial. But he is someone who understands the frustration of bottled-up dreams. He understands that sometimes when the dam breaks, the water rushes everywhere."

Wilson once told the Star Tribune that he has one simple goal: "to put up on stage, in all them big lights, the majesty and nobility of black people, ordinary people, who everybody thinks of as low or worth nothing."

Born in Pittsburgh's Hill District to a black cleaning woman, Daisy Wilson Kittel, and an absent white father, Frederick August Kittel, Wilson dropped out of high school at 15 after a teacher challenged his mastery of an essay on Napoleon Bonaparte. He educated himself at the local library, reading voluminously.

Wilson moved to St. Paul in 1978 on a ticket paid for by his friend Claude Purdy, a Twin Cities actor and director. He immediately hooked up with the Penumbra Theatre, newly founded by Lou Bellamy, where he would hone his voice. Wilson did odd jobs while he worked on his plays, including working as a short-order cook for the Little Brothers -- Friends of the Elderly on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. After cooking in the morning, he would spend his afternoons writing at Nora's restaurant on W. Lake Street (now the site of Tryg's). There he composed parts of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," his 1984 breakthrough play, which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

That would be the beginning of his great rise from poor obscurity to wealthy celebrity. He left the Twin Cities in 1990 after his divorce from a St. Paul social worker, Judy Oliver.

"You know, there will be a lot of talk about his legacy and all that, but I think it's all premature," said Bellamy. "There's no need to talk about an end to some career because it ain't over. You can't count that dude out."

Near the end of "Fences," Wilson gives death a body and a face. The play's main character, Troy, wrestles with the grim reaper.

"Troy was in the back yard with that bat poised, waiting," said biographer Shannon. "That's nobody but August. If he goes out, he's gonna do it in the batter's position. He's gonna die swinging."

Rohan Preston is at rpreston@startribune.com.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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Playwright Wilson says he's dying

'I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready.'

August Wilson, 60, one of America's greatest playwrights, has told the Post-Gazette he is dying of liver cancer.

"It's not like poker, you can't throw your hand in," he said by phone from Seattle. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready."

Doctors at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle discovered his condition in June and recommended immediate chemoembolization -- cancer-fighting drugs injected directly into the tumor -- followed by a liver transplant. But the disease proved too far advanced for treatment. Wilson said his physicians told him then that he had a life expectancy of three to five months.

"I'm glad I finished the cycle [of plays]," Wilson said, referring to his famed Pittsburgh Cycle. An unequaled achievement in American drama, it chronicles the tragedies and aspirations of African Americans in 10 plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century.

The final and chronologically latest in the cycle, "Radio Golf," set in 1997, takes place, like all but one of the other nine, in Pittsburgh's Hill District. It premiered at New Haven's Yale Repertory Theatre in April and is currently having its second production at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum (through Sept. 18).

Wilson spent the two months after learning of his illness working on a major re-write of "Radio Golf," although his condition did not allow him to go to Los Angeles for the rehearsals, the first such absence in his career.

A Pittsburgh native, Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minn., in 1978 and to Seattle in 1990, where he lives with his wife, Constanza Romero, and their daughter, Azula Carmen Wilson, who will be 8 this week. He has an older daughter by a previous marriage, Sakina Ansari.

Wilson's plays include "Fences," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "The Piano Lesson" and "Jitney." Together, the 10 of the Pittsburgh Cycle have won him a Tony Award, Olivier Award, two Pulitzer Prizes, five New Play Awards/Citations from the American Theatre Critics Association and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. He also was nominated for an Emmy award.

His many other honors include honorary doctorates (from the University of Pittsburgh, among others), Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, a National Humanities Medal and the 2003 Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

One additional honor of which Wilson is especially proud: He has the only high school diploma issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, testimony to his experience of leaving school at 15 in disgust at being accused of falsifying a paper he wrote on Napoleon Bonaparte and then educating himself in his local Carnegie Library.

At present, he is working against time, as much as his condition allows, on a number of writing projects.

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