Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

August Wilson
1945–2005
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Aunt Ester, the spiritual center of August Wilson’s oeuvre, who’s alluded to in several plays before being made magisterial flesh in Gem of the Ocean, is said to have lived 365 years, her birth coinciding with the arrival of the first African slaves on American shores. No such claim will be made for playwright Wilson, who died Sunday, at 60, of liver cancer. But the two-time Pulitzer winner’s immortality is assured by a remarkable cycle of 10 plays chronicling decade by decade the African-American experience of the 20th century in language redolent of jazz and the blues, spoken by characters who sometimes ramble like the plays but who are as indelible as Wilson himself: a soft-spoken raconteur in a porter’s cap, writing, listening, and smoking (when that was allowed) in restaurants, among them the now-defunct Ann’s near the Huntington Theatre Company, where seven Wilson works set down on their odysseys toward Broadway.

It is uncanny that the prolific dramatist died just months after bringing his cycle to fruition with Radio Golf, which had its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in April. He will not be able to hone that one as he did the others, following them from regional theater to regional theater, armed with his keen ear and a rewriting implement. But what a singular achievement the cycle is: only Eugene O’Neill dreamed of such a thing, a nine-play saga to be titled A Tale of Dispossessors, Self-Dispossessed — and he only made it through a play and a half. Of course, there is nothing self-dispossessed about the colorful denizens of Wilson’s world, which is centered in Pittsburgh’s Hill District where he grew up and which he invokes in the introduction to his best drama, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

"It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911," Wilson begins. "The sun falls out of heaven like a stone. The fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress." Like moths to that flame, "From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing. They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth."

They are looking for a way, Wilson says, "to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy." Indeed it is the theme of his work to pick out and preserve the tunes, individual and communal, with which African-Americans, shedding vital parts of their culture, migrated north. From Aunt Ester’s parlor in 1905-set Gem of the Ocean to the urban-redevelopment office of 1997-set Radio Golf, where successful black businessmen debate whether to build on history or bulldoze it, Wilson’s characters improvise a blues-driven talk-music that smacks of an upward struggle through hard times, disenfranchisement, family conflict, self sabotage, and storytelling.

Not all of Wilson’s works live up to their characters and conversation. But the plays, several of which are interconnected, form a powerful journey through the sparse yards, warm kitchens, and neighborhood haunts where a community (particularly its men) comes to define itself in terms of a rich culture and a scarred history. Surely Ma Rainey, Fences, and The Piano Lesson, will take their places in the canon. And Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, with its smell of transience and biscuits and its powerful evocation of the Middle Passage, is among the handful of great American dramas. On it alone Wilson’s reputation will come up, in the words of the play’s Bynum Walker, "shining like new money."


Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
Back to the Theater table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group