August Wilson – The Most Compulsive and Strident Voice From the Black American Theatre

August Frederick Kittel Wilson, a prolific American writer whose plays, like Eugene O’Neill’s, Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ are produced throughout the U.S. regularly soon became the most important voice in the American theater after Lorraine Hansberry, a position that he maintained until his death in 2005 with a string of acclaimed plays starting from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom first exciting the theater world in 1984.

August Wilson mostly relies on the “4 B’s”: the Blues; fellow playwright, Amiri Bakara; Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter, Romare Bearden to tell what in his estimation he needs to tell in writing his plays. Apart from this, he has no particular method of writing his www.haytheatre.com plays.

The blues have always had the greatest influence on Wilson, as he himself confessed in an interview with Sandra G. Shannon: “I have always consciously been chasing the musicians, It’s like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians… So I’m trying to close the gap.” 1

Wilson was also greatly influenced by playwright Amiri Baraka, who was part of the Black Art movement of the 1960’s. Through Baraka’s writing, Wilson “learned sociology and political commitment” and to include the emotions of anger and violence in his works. But far from supporting Baraka’s advocacy of a violent revolution, Wilson believed that African Americans need to develop a “collective self-reliance grounded in black history and culture” a preoccupation which seems more akin to that of his other mentor, Jorge Luis Borges.

Wilson was influenced not only by good writing but also by art as he claimed, that when he saw the painter Bearden’s work that was the first time that he saw black life presented in all its richness. He was so moved that he there and then resolved that he wanted to do just that-as he wanted his plays to be the equal of Bearden’s canvases. Wilson thus started creating authentic sounding characters that have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing African Americans in each decade of the twentieth century.

Although Wilson’s plays have not been written in chronological order, the consistent and key theme in each of them is the sense of disconnection suffered by blacks that have been uprooted from their original homeland, first from Africa and then their moving northwards away from the Jim Crowism of the slave holding south for the northern industrializing cities of Chicago and New York.

Wilson lamented that by their failure to develop their own tradition, which should be a more African response to the world, [African Americans] lost their sense of identity. Wilson has felt therefore that black people must strive to know their roots in order to understand themselves and then regain their lost identity. His plays have therefore been geared to demonstrate the black struggle to either gain this understanding and thence their identity-or escape from it.
Each of his ten plays set in a different decade of the 20th century enables Wilson to explore, often in very subtle ways, the myriad and mutating forms of the legacy of slavery. Each one of this cycle called “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or his “Century Cycle,” set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African-American experience then, is unprecedented in American theater for its concept, size, and cohesion. Nine of them are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, an African-American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Ballybeg.

Although the plays are not strictly parts of a serial story, some characters appear (at various ages) in more than one of them. Children of characters in earlier plays may even appear in later ones. The character Aunt Ester, a “washer of souls” who is reported to be 285 years old in Gem of the Ocean, which takes place in her home at 1839 Wylie Avenue, and 322 in Two Trains Running and who dies in 1985, during the events of ‘King Hedley I1 is the most frequently mentioned in the cycle. In another, Radio Golf , much of the action revolves around plans to demolish and redevelop Aunt Ester’s house, some years after her death.

The plays often include an apparently mentally-impaired oracular character a different individual in each play – for example, Hedley [Sr.] in Seven Guitars, or Hambone in Two Trains Running. Most of the ideas for the plays have come from varied sources such as images, snippets of conversation, or lyrics from blues songs captured by Wilson’s ever-vigilant writer’s eye and ear. As a result of the influences from his immersion into the blues music culture, virtually all of his characters end up singing the blues to show their feelings at key dramatic moments in his plays..

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