Write, stop, pivot, punch
April 24th, 2008August Wilson liked to say his plays were “fat with substance”. And he was right: his 10-play cycle - Wilson wrote one for every roiling decade of the African-American experience in the 20th century - transforms historical tragedy into imaginative triumph. The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically; so are Wilson’s plays, which swing with the pulse of the African-American people, as they moved from property to personhood.
Wilson’s pedigree was complicated. He was born Frederick August Kittel, in 1945, the first son and the fourth of six children born to Fritz Kittel, a white immigrant German baker, and Daisy Wilson, his African-American wife. Fritz was drunken, abusive and distant; Wilson inherited his father’s fierce temper and wrote their bumptious relationship into his work. By the time Wilson was 20, he had dropped out of school, read his way through the local library, fought with his disappointed mother, joined the army, worked in a pharmacy, and buried his mostly unmourned father.
The African-American community in Pittsburgh embraced him, nurtured him, educated him and contained his rage at his father’s abandonment. Wilson learned of a cigar store and pool hall in his neighbourhood called Pat’s Place, where community elders congregated. Pat’s Place became his Oxford, and its garrulous denizens - “walking history books”, Wilson called them - his professors.
In April 1964, Wilson walked to downtown Pittsburgh, put $20 on the counter of a pawnshop, and came away with a heavy black Royal Standard typewriter. He had decided to reinvent himself in the heroic mould of the poet. “What I discovered is that writing was the only thing society would allow me to do,” he told me. “I couldn’t have a job or be a lawyer because I didn’t do all the things necessary. What I was allowed to do was write. If they saw me over in the corner scribbling on a piece of paper, they would say, ‘That is just a nigger over in the corner scribbling on a piece of paper.’ Nobody said, ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ So I felt free.”
He published his first poem in 1969, but, by his own admission, didn’t achieve his poetic voice until 1973. Then, in 1978, Wilson moved to St Paul, Minnesota, where he married his second wife, Judith Oliver, a white social worker. (His first wife, Brenda Burton, is the mother of his eldest daughter, Sakina.) He went from a neighbourhood that had 55,000 black people to an entire state that had the same number. “There weren’t many black folks around,” he told me. “In that silence, I could hear the language for the first time.”
When he began to write plays, Wilson claimed, he “couldn’t write dialogue”. His early experiments leaned towards the florid and artistic. In one early dramatic experiment, in which a man and a woman talk on a park bench, the woman says: “Terror hangs over the night like a hawk.” At least one of these was produced. “It wasn’t black American language,” he said. It wasn’t theatre, either. Years before, Wilson had asked a Pittsburgh friend and playwright, Rob Penny, “How do you make characters talk?” “You don’t,” Penny said. “You listen to them.”
In 1979, Wilson sat down at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, a restaurant up the street from his apartment, to write a play to submit to the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, held at a sprawling estate in Connecticut, where each summer about a dozen playwrights are provided with a dramaturg, a director and a cast to help them explore their flawed but promising plays. The play Wilson submitted was Jitney. As he conjured up the Pittsburgh taxi stand that was one of his former hangouts, Wilson listened to his characters. “I found that exhilarating,” he said. “It felt like this was what I’d been looking for, something that was mine, that would enable me to say anything.”
The O’Neill rejected Jitney. Its incredulous author, assuming that no one had read it, submitted the play again. The O’Neill rejected it again. Wilson took serious stock of his newfound calling. His inner dialogue, he told me, was: “Maybe it’s not as good as you think. You have to write a better play.” “I’ve already written the best play I can write.” “Why don’t you write above your talent?” “Oh, man, how can you do that?” “Well, you can write beneath it, can’t you?” “Oh, yeah.”
Wilson was not much influenced or inhibited by the canon of western theatre, for the simple reason that he had not read or seen any of it. (With the exception of his own plays, and a few by his friends, when we spoke in 2001 Wilson claimed to have seen only about a dozen plays.) “I consider it a blessing,” he said, “that I had not read Chekhov. I hadn’t read Ibsen. I hadn’t read Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or O’Neill.” It had taken him eight years of reading and writing to find his voice in poetry. “I didn’t want to take eight years to find my voice as a playwright,” he said.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which opened in 1984, was only the second African-American play to be produced on Broadway; the first was Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 A Raisin in the Sun. Lloyd Richards - whom Wilson later called “my guide, my mentor and my provocateur” - directed them both, asserting his quiet control from the first rehearsal of Ma Rainey. “We go into the room with the actors, we read the play,” Wilson recalled. “An actor had a question about a character. I started to speak, and Lloyd answered. There was another question, and Lloyd answered it again. I remember there was a moment when I thought, ‘The old fox knows what’s going on. This is gonna be OK.’”
From 1994 to the end of his life, Wilson lived in Seattle and worked in the crepuscular gloom of the low-ceilinged basement of his house, lit by bars of neon, where he went to sneak cigarettes, listen to music, and wait for his characters to arrive. “I just started with a line of dialogue or with a feeling,” he told American Theatre magazine in 2005, shortly before he died of cancer at the age of 60. “I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it. You start to build the scene and you don’t know where the scene’s going.” He went on: “You shift [things] around and organise it, until you have a composition that satisfies you, that expresses the idea of something, and then - bingo - you have a play.”
Wilson wrote standing up, at a high, cluttered accounting desk. For years, an Everlast punching bag was suspended from the ceiling about two steps behind. When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue was popping, he’d stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back to work. Pinned on a bulletin board were two quotations, as bold as street signs: Take It to the Moon (Frank Gehry) and Don’t Be Afraid. Just Play the Music (Charlie Parker). I called him in 2005, just before the opening of Radio Golf, to ask what it felt like, after 24 years of single-minded striving, to finish the final instalment of his cycle. Wilson said that while he was writing Radio Golf, he had listened to Three Dog Night’s The Show Must Go On. One line had stuck in his head: “I wish maybe they’d tear down the walls of this theatre and let me out.” “That’s the way I felt,” he said.
Wilson died on October 2, 2005. “I’ve lived a blessed life,” he said. “I’m ready.” Between the diagnosis in June and his death, he had enough time to finish the rewrites of Radio Golf. He also lived long enough to learn that he would be the first African-American to have a Broadway theatre named after him. No one else - not even Eugene O’Neill, who set out in the mid-30s to write a nine-play cycle and managed only two - had aimed so high and achieved so much. Wilson’s plays brought blacks and whites together under the same roof to share in the profound mysteries of race and class, and the bittersweet awareness of how separate yet indivisible we really are.
‘Bloody good parts’
British playwright Roy Williams on how he fell for Wilson
I was 22 when I first heard of August Wilson. I was working as a theatre usher, and we got free tickets for a West End matinee of Wilson’s most famous play, Fences, starring Yaphet Kotto and Adrian Lester. At the time, I was only harbouring naive dreams about being a playwright. The power and intensity of Fences, with its bloody good parts written for bloody good black actors, really stayed with me. I then learned it was the latest in a series intended to chronicle 10 decades of the black experience in America. What an ambitious idea, what a great idea, I thought. I went home thinking that if this courageous black man had the vision to be a writer, then so could I. I began writing my first play.
I never had the honour of meeting Wilson, but I did see him once. I was in New York and managed to snag an invitation to a dress rehearsal of King Hedley II. I hovered around in the stalls, watching as dozens of people lined up to congratulate him on another brilliant piece of theatre. I had been drinking earlier that day, and had walked right into my hotel’s glass entrance doors. My nose was heavily bandaged. No way was I was going to meet my literary hero looking as if I had gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. I wish I had.
Imagine a world without Wilson’s 10 cycle plays. Black actors over here, as well as black actors in America, would never have had their moments to shine as brightly, perhaps at all. Many African-American actors owe their careers, houses, cars and a dignified place in history to Wilson. He gave them material to sink their teeth into. He gave an entire community material to build their lives upon, for generations to come. He gave us work for a lifetime.
John Lahr is senior drama critic of the New Yorker. He will be joined by Roy Williams in a celebration of August Wilson at the National Theatre, London SE1, tonight (box office: 020-7452 3000). The complete August Wilson Century Cycle is published in hardback by Nick Hern Books.
Read the full post 
Posted in Money No Comments
