The Role of Black Woman
“Fences” was set in 1957. The 1950’s was a time when divorce and the disobedient woman was slowly becoming an accepted status for black woman. In Fences, Rose takes on the typical role of a black woman in the time period, but with a little added spice. Rose has settled with Troy even though there more out there for her. She was ready to settle down and have a family and that’s why she decides to marry Troy. Troy was not the best, but he was hers. She feels it is her fault that she chose; Troy. This is evident when Rose says, “That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me…It was my choice. It was my life and I didn’t have to live that way. But that’s what life offered me in the way of being a woman and I took it. I grabbed hold of it with both hands.” Troy cheats on her and gets another woman pregnant. Rose stays with him, because deep down she knew he was not perfect. This was pointed out in Act 2; Sc. 2 when she says, “I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn’t take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn’t never gonna bloom. But I held on to you, Troy. I held you tighter.” Rose gives everything to Troy even tough she realizes that he takes from her. As a black woman she feels she owes it to him. Therefore she even decides to raise Raynell. Raynell may not be her daughter, but Rose feels a duty to her. Raynell didn’t ask to be placed on this earth, and no one should punish her for it. Rose plays the role of a black woman by sticking to her family even when it seems like she is the only one trying. Rose realizes she is the glue of the family and without her the family does nothing but fall apart. Like the modern woman, Rose speaks up, but unlike the woman Rose stays put. Rose keeps quiet about being abused and cheated on, because she loves her family often more than herself. Rose chose Troy and she forces herself to deal with her decision. During the time of “Fences”, women were still second-rate and didn’t questioned things. Rose represented those women, but she showed how those women could be strong. She showed how they made mountains out of molehills. She showed how her strength was the wood that kept the family burning. August Wilson broke down major stereotypes and judgment of the role of Black Woman through the character Rose. He showed that there was a reason woman like Rose stuck with their family when the going got tough. That reason was love. Black women truly loved their families. The problem was that they loved too much.
Distinguishing the Past from the Present
Troy and Cory represent two different generation of black man. Troy remembers a time when black men were thought of as nothing. Troy lived when being in the army, marines, navy, and getting a trade was considered successful. Cory understands that about Troy, but Cory see black men playing in white sports leagues, going to college, and even receiving money to pay for college. Cory understands that this new success is not easy to obtain, but he is sure he can achieve it. Troy doesn’t want Cory to try even tough he notices himself that the world around him is changing. He figures if he could not be an exception to the change no son or seed of his can. Troy focuses on his past experiences when trying to get into baseball. “I don’t want him to be like! I want him to move as far away from my life as he can get. You the only decent thing that ever happen to me. I wish him that. But I don’t wish him a thing else from my life. I decided seventeen years ago that boy wasn’t getting involved in sports. Not after what they did to me in the sports.”(Act 1; Scene 3 Troy to Rose) His stubbornness makes him fail to realize that Cory may have the chance he never had. Too often do parent try to live their own dreams and realities through their children. Through their children’s eyes they see out of their own. They see their own past struggles, hardships, obstacle, dreams, and triumphs. These parents expect their children to face their realties and achieve their goals better than they have their selves. This is why Troy encourages Cory to get a trade something that would be a better reality for Troy but not Cory. Troy says: “...get you a trade. That way you have something can't nobody take away from you. You go on and learn how to put your hands to so good use. Besides hauling people's garbage.” Troy reflects on his own life while telling his son his words of wisdom. Cory wants his father to signs his papers to give him the chance to go college and play football. Tory refuses to sign. Rose is aware of the present, but staying in the place of a woman she does not dare disobey her husband. Rose tries her best to encourage Tory to sign the papers but Troy refuses. Rose knew that Troy was wrong, but held her actions and try only to change Troy’s mind with her words. Rose tries to persuade him in their conversations. She talks about that fact Cory only does what he does to impress him. Troy doesn’t want Cory to beg and look for his attention. Troy responded that Cory does not need to go begging for attention. Troy feels that Cory has to make his own way in life without expecting anyone to care for him. “Like you?...It’s my job. It’s my responsibility! You understand that? A man got take care of his family … Don’t you try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not.”(Act 1; Scene 3; Troy to Cory) Troy one again is forcing his past on Cory. Troy is use to a father that only took care of his children’s physical needs and not their emotional needs. As result, Troy was force to find acceptance and emotional strength within him self. He now expects Cory to do the same because his past; he believes is Cory’s present.
The Self-Pity of Black Man
A common trait of the black man is to feel sorry himself, and to expect others to feel sorry for them. These men have struggled in their lives, and feel that they have the right to release their pain on others. They hurt others and expect them to be understanding. In Fences, Troy upsets Rose, Gabriel, and Cory many times thought out the play. He cheats on Rose and expects her to understand him. “She gives me a different idea… a different understanding about myself. I can step out of this house and get away from the pressures and problems…be a different man.”(Act 2;Scene 1; Tory to Rose). Troy insults his marriage by suggesting that keeps him boxed in and he can’t stay tied down not even with Rose. This explains his resistance to build the fence. Troy already feels encaged in his relationship with his family. A fence would only represent a tangible cage for him. Troy believes that Rose should pity him, because she married him knowing he had rough edges. Troy takes everything from Rose. He does not take physical things, but the emotions that make her care, love, respect, and be in love with him. He took so much that towards the end of the play she has nothing left to give. This philosophy is expressed in her monologue to Troy “You always talking about what you give…and what you don’t have to give. But you take too. You take…and don’t even know nobody’s giving!”(Scene 1; Act 2). The pitiful black man responded in angry, he grabs her and demands an explanation for Rose’s accusation. He forgets the fact that he cheated on her. He was sorry and she was supposed to except his apology and his new child as her own; while Troy never listens to her. Rose takes this, because as his “woman”; she has to. Troy internally knows he does not deserve her, but he pities himself so much he has convinced himself that he does. His inability to be genuinely sorry and to accept his own faults is the major character trait that August Wilson wrote in the character of Troy. Troy passes his self-pity on to his son, Cory. Cory is unable to forgive his father at the end of the play, because Cory let Troy get to him. All the problems in his adult life Cory blames on the relationship with his father. Cory pities himself and stores so much pity in his heart he has no room to love father for what he was to him. Cory and Troy understand their issues with self-pity and lack of appreciation at different points in the play. Troy finds it when brings home his illegitimate child, Raynell. In Act 2; Scene 3 Troy sings, “Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the line. Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the line. I ain’t got no ticket please let me ride the blinds”. This song that may seem to be sung like a lullaby to Raynell, but I actually a plea for Rose to forgive him and let him back home and into her life. This song is sung when Troy identifies and acknowledges his own faults and the pain his has caused his family. Cory identifies with his self-pity when he makes the decision to attend his father’s funeral after the conversation he had with Rose in the final scene, “You can’t be nothing but who you are, Cory. That shadow wasn’t nothing but you growing into yourself. You either got to grow into it or cut it down to fit you. That’s all you got to measure yourself against that world out there.”(Scene 5, Act 2). Rose’s word help Cory realizes that he was not living in his father shadow he was actually building a shadow of self-pity out the image of his father. If Cory ever wanted to solve the issues within him that stir from the relationship with his father, he would have to forgive himself and his father. The death of Troy triggers the end of the black man’s self-pity.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Poetry of the Wilson Era
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Black Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson
Don’t knock at the door, little child,
I cannot let you in,
You know not what a world this is
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you,
The world is cruel, cruel, child,
I cannot let you in!
Don’t knock at my heart, little one,
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf-ear to your call
Time and time again!
You do not know the monster men
Inhabiting the earth,
Be still, be still, my precious child,
I must not give you birth!
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Black Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson
Don’t knock at the door, little child,
I cannot let you in,
You know not what a world this is
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you,
The world is cruel, cruel, child,
I cannot let you in!
Don’t knock at my heart, little one,
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf-ear to your call
Time and time again!
You do not know the monster men
Inhabiting the earth,
Be still, be still, my precious child,
I must not give you birth!
About The LEGEND
August Wilson
Frederick August Kittel
April 27, 1945 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States Nationality: American Occupation: playwright Occupation: poet Occupation: founder (originator) Awards: Pulitzer Prize, best drama, for Fences, 1987, and for The Piano Lesson, 1990; New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, 1984, for Fences, 1987, and for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, 1988; Tony Award, best drama, for Fences, 1986-87; American Theater Critics Award, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1998; Harold Washington Literary Award, 2001.
August Wilson is one of America's most prolific writers, whose plays, like those written by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, are produced throughout the country on a regular basis. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and has earned twenty three honorary degrees. He has no particular method of writing his plays, but admits to relying on what he calls the "4 B's": the Blues; fellow playwright, Amiri Bakara; author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter, Romare Bearden to tell what he needs to tell. Regarding Bearden, Wilson claimed, "When I saw his work, it was the first time that I had seen black life presented in all its richness, and I said, 'I want to do that—I want my plays to be the equal of his canvases.'"
Called "one of the most important voices in the American theater today" by Mervyn Rothstein in the New York Times, August Wilson has written a string of acclaimed plays since his Ma Rainey's Black Bottom first excited the theater world in 1984. His authentic sounding characters have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing people of color in each decade of the twentieth century. Although Wilson's "decade" plays have not been written in chronological order, the consistent, and key, theme in Wilson's dramas is the sense of disconnection suffered by blacks uprooted from their original homeland. He told the Chicago Tribune that "by not developing their own tradition, a more African response to the world, [African Americans] lost their sense of identity." Wilson has felt that black people must know their roots to understand themselves, and his plays demonstrate the black struggle to gain this understanding—or escape from it. Charles Whittaker, a critic for Ebony wrote, "Each of the eight plays he has produced to date is set in a different decade of he 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."
Most of the ideas for Wilson's plays have come from images, snippets of conversation, or lyrics from blues songs captured by his ever-vigilant writer's eye and ear. Virtually all of his characters end up singing the blues to show their feelings at key moments during his plays. The play Fences evolved from his seeing an image of a man holding a baby, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone from the depiction of a struggling mill hand in a collage by acclaimed black painter Romare Bearden, whom Wilson has cited as a particularly strong influence on his work. The blues have always had the greatest influence on Wilson, however. "I have always consciously been chasing the musicians," Wilson told interviewer Sandra G. Shannon in African American Review. "It's like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians I see. So I'm trying to close the gap."
Grew Up Poor in Pittsburgh
August Wilson grew up as the fourth of six children in a black slum of Pittsburgh, his home a two-room apartment without hot water or a telephone. Relying on welfare checks and wages from house cleaning jobs, his mother, Daisy Wilson, managed to keep her children clothed and fed. August's father, Frederick August Kittel, a baker by trade, was a white German immigrant who never lived with the family and rarely made an appearance at the apartment. August Wilson officially erased his connection to his real father when he adopted his mother's name in the 1970s. David Bedford became Wilson's stepfather when the boy was a teenager, but the relationship between father and son was rocky. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, Bedford would become a source for the play Fences, whose protagonist was a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation.
Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson consumed books voraciously. At first he read the Nancy Drew mysteries his mother managed to buy for the family, but by age 12 he was a regular at the local library. Despite his interest in the written word, August Wilson was an unexceptional student who developed a reputation for yelling answers out of turn in class. The mostly white parochial high school he attended also gave him a harsh dose of racism. When he turned in a well-written term paper on Napoleon, Wilson was accused of plagiarism by a teacher who would not believe a black child could do that well on his own. Wilson would often find notes on his desk reading "Nigger go home." At home, his family had to endure racial taunts when they moved to the mostly white Hazelwood area of Pittsburgh.
At age 15, sick of the racism that surrounded him, Wilson dropped out of school and began to educate himself, beginning in the "Negro" section of the public library. Reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, Wilson was caught up in the power of words. His fascination with language made him an avid listener, and he soaked up the conversations he overheard in coffee shops and on street corners, using the tidbits of conversations to construct stories in his head.
Poetry Writing an Early Focus
By his late teens, Wilson had dedicated himself to the task of becoming a writer. His mother wanted him to become a lawyer, but when her son continued to work at odd jobs, she got fed up with what she considered his lack of direction and kicked him out of the house. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, but somehow got himself discharged a year later. At age 20 he moved into a boarding house and began writing lines of poetry on paper bags while sitting in a local restaurant, gathering inspiration from tales swapped by elderly men at a nearby cigar store.
The symbolic starting point of Wilson's serious writing career came in 1965 when he bought a used typewriter, paying for it with twenty dollars that his sister gave him for writing her a rush term paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Wilson immersed himself in the works of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman. He also loved Amiri Baraka's poems and plays because of their lively rhythms and street-smart language. Although some of Wilson's poems were published in some small magazines over the next few years, he failed to achieve recognition as a poet.
In the late 1960s, Wilson discovered the writings of Malcolm X and, according to Chip Brown in Esquire, took up the banner of cultural nationalism. "Cultural nationalism meant black people working toward self-definition, self-determination," Wilson told Brown. "It meant that we had a culture that was valid and that we weren't willing to trade it to participate in the American Dream." In 1969 Wilson and Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, founded the black activist theater company Black Horizons on the Hill, which focused on politicizing the community and raising black consciousness. Black Horizons gave Wilson the chance to present his own early plays, mostly in public schools and community centers. Wilson never fully embraced the religion of black nationalism, however, which contributed to the failure of his first marriage to Brenda Burton, a member of the Muslim Nation of Islam.
Found a Voice
To find the voice that would make him famous as a playwright, Wilson needed to gain distance from his roots. This opportunity came in 1978 when he visited his friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul, Minnesota, and decided to stay there. Purdy urged Wilson to write a play and Wilson felt more ready than ever before. "Having moved from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, I felt I could hear voices for the first time accurately," he told the New York Times. In ten days of writing while sitting in a fish-and-chips restaurant, Wilson finished a draft of Jitney, a play set in a gypsy-cab station. He submitted the play to the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and won a $200-a-month fellowship.
Jitney and Wilson's next work, Fullerton Street, were produced at the Allegheny Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh. Jitney earned Wilson acceptance at the 1982 National Playwrights Conference, where he honed his rewriting skills. Now convinced that he was going somewhere, he quit his job writing scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota so he could have more time to compose his own works. Financial support was provided primarily by his second wife, Judy Oliver, who was a social worker.
Wilson's breakthrough came with the combination of a good play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and a supportive director, Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater. The play came to Richards's attention at the National Playwrights Conference in 1983. "The talent was unmistakable," Richards told Brown. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom began a long collaboration between the seasoned director and the novice playwright: Richards has gone on to direct all of Wilson's plays. He has also served as spokesperson and promoter for the publicity-shy Wilson, and as the father he never had. Wilson explained their relationship to Shannon: "Another way I look at it, since I love boxing, is that I am the boxer and he is the trainer. He's my trainer—'My boy August will get them.'"
Play Shown on Broadway
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom tapped the playwright's interest in the blues and its importance in American black history. He told Newsday in 1987, "I see the blues as a book of literature and it influences everything I do.... Blacks' cultural response to the world is contained in blues." His interest in blues singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey went back to 1965, when he heard a recording by Bessie Smith, who had taken lessons from Rainey. Set in 1927, the play deals with how black singers were exploited by whites who took in the lion's share of profits generated by these entertainers. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre in 1984 and was a popular and critical success, running for 275 performances. In his review, Frank Rich of the New York Times called it "a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims." Critics offered high praise of Wilson's true-to-life dialogue, although some complained that the play was too talky.
Wilson's next play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, is about a freed black man who comes north to search for his wife, who disappeared during his enslavement. It focuses on the theme of African Americans moving from the agricultural South to a new set of hardships in the industrial cities of the North in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner expresses Wilson's belief that blacks would have been stronger if they had not migrated from country to city, since they came from agrarian roots in Africa. Although the play failed at the box office, many critics loved it. Rich's review in the New York Times in 1986 said that it was "as rich in religious feeling as in historical detail."
Wilson struck gold with Fences, which hit Broadway while Joe Turner was still playing there. Set in the 1950s, its subject is Troy Maxson, a trash collector whose dreams of playing professional baseball were thwarted by white racism. Maxson's bitterness leads him to deny his son the athletic success that was not possible for blacks in the past. The title demonstrates Wilson's concern with choices and responsibility, since fences can keep people in as well as out. Like all of Wilson's characters, Maxson is a complex man who, while having moral lapses, also worked hard to provide for his family. The play, which won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards, opened on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones in the starring role.
When Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson in 1990, he became the seventh playwright to win at least twice. A largely realistic play, The Piano Lesson focuses on a family conflict over an heirloom piano. Berniece Charles's slave ancestors were traded for the piano, and another family member carved African-style portraits of them on it. Later Berniece's father died reclaiming it. Now Berniece's brother Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy farmland, and the issue threatens to tear the family apart. A Time critic hailed it as Wilson's "richest" play yet.
In Two Trains Running, which opened in New York City in 1992, Wilson probed the turbulent era of the late 1960s, when racial strife and the Vietnam War convulsed the nation. While many critics considered the play overly metaphorical and lacking in a strong female character, Rich called it Wilson's "most adventurous and honest attempt to reveal the intimate heart of history" and "a penetrating revelation of a world hidden from view to those outside it." William A. Henry III added in Time magazine that it was "Wilson's most delicate and mature work."
"A Struggling Playwright"
Wilson's plays clearly demonstrate the tensions between blacks who want to hold onto their African heritage and those who want to break away from it. As a result of being pulled in different directions, violence often breaks out among blacks in Wilson's plays, yet that violence is often misdirected. Wilson dramatized this dilemma in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, when the character Levee stabs a fellow musician who unintentionally stepped on his shoe, instead of attacking the white man who had stolen his music. When Cory Maxson threatens to assail his father with a baseball bat in Fences, he mocks his father's manhood and shows the futility of his past as a Negro baseball player. Wilson has devoted his career to dramatizing these tensions within the black community even while he upholds the dignity of the individuals who struggle with their past.
During the early 1990s, Wilson wrote Seven Guitars, a play that takes place during the post-World War II years. Seven Guitars features the story of a blues guitarist, who is murdered, and his circle of friends. The friends gather at the wake, and their stories are told in flashback form. Interestingly, Wilson often introduces characters in his plays that become the main characters in subsequent plays. In Seven Guitars King Hedley was "a cracked old man who sees ghosts" and becomes obsessed with fathering a child, a "new Messiah." Wilson's next play, King Hedley II, takes place in the 1980s. The character, King Hedley II is an ex-con who returns home and must deal with his past as well as figure out how to go "ligit." King Hedley II was first seen in the fall of 1999 at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and made it to Broadway in the summer of 2001, playing for twelve weeks. He has already constructed the framework for his next play whose main character, who was alluded to in King Hedley II, is a 366 year old mystical woman, Aunt Esther.
August Wilson has refused to give in to the temptations of Hollywood. He moved to Seattle in the early 1990s, where he has remained remarkably focused on his play writing. Wilson has said that he rarely watches television, goes to the movies, or even attends plays. His daily routine consists of writing longhand while sitting in restaurants starting around noon, then typing up his work at night, often until 4:00 a.m. Despite his success, Wilson told the New York Times: "I always tell people I'm a struggling playwright. I'm struggling to get the next play down on paper." Though the lives of many of his characters are bleak, he also has maintained a degree of optimism about the situation of people of color in the United States. "Black culture is still alive, still vital. The human spirit cannot and will not be broken."
March 2004: Wilson will receive the Freedom of Speech Award at the 10th Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in March. The festival is held in Aspen, Colorado, and is sponsored by HBO. Source: Associated Press, http://customwire.ap.org, January 21, 2004.
August 9, 2004: Wilson's play Gem of the Ocean, which premiered in Chicago in 2003, will open on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater on November 11, 2004, in a production directed by Marion McClinton. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, August 9, 2004.
Frederick August Kittel
April 27, 1945 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States Nationality: American Occupation: playwright Occupation: poet Occupation: founder (originator) Awards: Pulitzer Prize, best drama, for Fences, 1987, and for The Piano Lesson, 1990; New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, 1984, for Fences, 1987, and for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, 1988; Tony Award, best drama, for Fences, 1986-87; American Theater Critics Award, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1998; Harold Washington Literary Award, 2001.
August Wilson is one of America's most prolific writers, whose plays, like those written by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, are produced throughout the country on a regular basis. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and has earned twenty three honorary degrees. He has no particular method of writing his plays, but admits to relying on what he calls the "4 B's": the Blues; fellow playwright, Amiri Bakara; author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter, Romare Bearden to tell what he needs to tell. Regarding Bearden, Wilson claimed, "When I saw his work, it was the first time that I had seen black life presented in all its richness, and I said, 'I want to do that—I want my plays to be the equal of his canvases.'"
Called "one of the most important voices in the American theater today" by Mervyn Rothstein in the New York Times, August Wilson has written a string of acclaimed plays since his Ma Rainey's Black Bottom first excited the theater world in 1984. His authentic sounding characters have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing people of color in each decade of the twentieth century. Although Wilson's "decade" plays have not been written in chronological order, the consistent, and key, theme in Wilson's dramas is the sense of disconnection suffered by blacks uprooted from their original homeland. He told the Chicago Tribune that "by not developing their own tradition, a more African response to the world, [African Americans] lost their sense of identity." Wilson has felt that black people must know their roots to understand themselves, and his plays demonstrate the black struggle to gain this understanding—or escape from it. Charles Whittaker, a critic for Ebony wrote, "Each of the eight plays he has produced to date is set in a different decade of he 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."
Most of the ideas for Wilson's plays have come from images, snippets of conversation, or lyrics from blues songs captured by his ever-vigilant writer's eye and ear. Virtually all of his characters end up singing the blues to show their feelings at key moments during his plays. The play Fences evolved from his seeing an image of a man holding a baby, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone from the depiction of a struggling mill hand in a collage by acclaimed black painter Romare Bearden, whom Wilson has cited as a particularly strong influence on his work. The blues have always had the greatest influence on Wilson, however. "I have always consciously been chasing the musicians," Wilson told interviewer Sandra G. Shannon in African American Review. "It's like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians I see. So I'm trying to close the gap."
Grew Up Poor in Pittsburgh
August Wilson grew up as the fourth of six children in a black slum of Pittsburgh, his home a two-room apartment without hot water or a telephone. Relying on welfare checks and wages from house cleaning jobs, his mother, Daisy Wilson, managed to keep her children clothed and fed. August's father, Frederick August Kittel, a baker by trade, was a white German immigrant who never lived with the family and rarely made an appearance at the apartment. August Wilson officially erased his connection to his real father when he adopted his mother's name in the 1970s. David Bedford became Wilson's stepfather when the boy was a teenager, but the relationship between father and son was rocky. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, Bedford would become a source for the play Fences, whose protagonist was a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation.
Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson consumed books voraciously. At first he read the Nancy Drew mysteries his mother managed to buy for the family, but by age 12 he was a regular at the local library. Despite his interest in the written word, August Wilson was an unexceptional student who developed a reputation for yelling answers out of turn in class. The mostly white parochial high school he attended also gave him a harsh dose of racism. When he turned in a well-written term paper on Napoleon, Wilson was accused of plagiarism by a teacher who would not believe a black child could do that well on his own. Wilson would often find notes on his desk reading "Nigger go home." At home, his family had to endure racial taunts when they moved to the mostly white Hazelwood area of Pittsburgh.
At age 15, sick of the racism that surrounded him, Wilson dropped out of school and began to educate himself, beginning in the "Negro" section of the public library. Reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, Wilson was caught up in the power of words. His fascination with language made him an avid listener, and he soaked up the conversations he overheard in coffee shops and on street corners, using the tidbits of conversations to construct stories in his head.
Poetry Writing an Early Focus
By his late teens, Wilson had dedicated himself to the task of becoming a writer. His mother wanted him to become a lawyer, but when her son continued to work at odd jobs, she got fed up with what she considered his lack of direction and kicked him out of the house. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, but somehow got himself discharged a year later. At age 20 he moved into a boarding house and began writing lines of poetry on paper bags while sitting in a local restaurant, gathering inspiration from tales swapped by elderly men at a nearby cigar store.
The symbolic starting point of Wilson's serious writing career came in 1965 when he bought a used typewriter, paying for it with twenty dollars that his sister gave him for writing her a rush term paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Wilson immersed himself in the works of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman. He also loved Amiri Baraka's poems and plays because of their lively rhythms and street-smart language. Although some of Wilson's poems were published in some small magazines over the next few years, he failed to achieve recognition as a poet.
In the late 1960s, Wilson discovered the writings of Malcolm X and, according to Chip Brown in Esquire, took up the banner of cultural nationalism. "Cultural nationalism meant black people working toward self-definition, self-determination," Wilson told Brown. "It meant that we had a culture that was valid and that we weren't willing to trade it to participate in the American Dream." In 1969 Wilson and Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, founded the black activist theater company Black Horizons on the Hill, which focused on politicizing the community and raising black consciousness. Black Horizons gave Wilson the chance to present his own early plays, mostly in public schools and community centers. Wilson never fully embraced the religion of black nationalism, however, which contributed to the failure of his first marriage to Brenda Burton, a member of the Muslim Nation of Islam.
Found a Voice
To find the voice that would make him famous as a playwright, Wilson needed to gain distance from his roots. This opportunity came in 1978 when he visited his friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul, Minnesota, and decided to stay there. Purdy urged Wilson to write a play and Wilson felt more ready than ever before. "Having moved from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, I felt I could hear voices for the first time accurately," he told the New York Times. In ten days of writing while sitting in a fish-and-chips restaurant, Wilson finished a draft of Jitney, a play set in a gypsy-cab station. He submitted the play to the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and won a $200-a-month fellowship.
Jitney and Wilson's next work, Fullerton Street, were produced at the Allegheny Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh. Jitney earned Wilson acceptance at the 1982 National Playwrights Conference, where he honed his rewriting skills. Now convinced that he was going somewhere, he quit his job writing scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota so he could have more time to compose his own works. Financial support was provided primarily by his second wife, Judy Oliver, who was a social worker.
Wilson's breakthrough came with the combination of a good play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and a supportive director, Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater. The play came to Richards's attention at the National Playwrights Conference in 1983. "The talent was unmistakable," Richards told Brown. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom began a long collaboration between the seasoned director and the novice playwright: Richards has gone on to direct all of Wilson's plays. He has also served as spokesperson and promoter for the publicity-shy Wilson, and as the father he never had. Wilson explained their relationship to Shannon: "Another way I look at it, since I love boxing, is that I am the boxer and he is the trainer. He's my trainer—'My boy August will get them.'"
Play Shown on Broadway
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom tapped the playwright's interest in the blues and its importance in American black history. He told Newsday in 1987, "I see the blues as a book of literature and it influences everything I do.... Blacks' cultural response to the world is contained in blues." His interest in blues singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey went back to 1965, when he heard a recording by Bessie Smith, who had taken lessons from Rainey. Set in 1927, the play deals with how black singers were exploited by whites who took in the lion's share of profits generated by these entertainers. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre in 1984 and was a popular and critical success, running for 275 performances. In his review, Frank Rich of the New York Times called it "a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims." Critics offered high praise of Wilson's true-to-life dialogue, although some complained that the play was too talky.
Wilson's next play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, is about a freed black man who comes north to search for his wife, who disappeared during his enslavement. It focuses on the theme of African Americans moving from the agricultural South to a new set of hardships in the industrial cities of the North in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner expresses Wilson's belief that blacks would have been stronger if they had not migrated from country to city, since they came from agrarian roots in Africa. Although the play failed at the box office, many critics loved it. Rich's review in the New York Times in 1986 said that it was "as rich in religious feeling as in historical detail."
Wilson struck gold with Fences, which hit Broadway while Joe Turner was still playing there. Set in the 1950s, its subject is Troy Maxson, a trash collector whose dreams of playing professional baseball were thwarted by white racism. Maxson's bitterness leads him to deny his son the athletic success that was not possible for blacks in the past. The title demonstrates Wilson's concern with choices and responsibility, since fences can keep people in as well as out. Like all of Wilson's characters, Maxson is a complex man who, while having moral lapses, also worked hard to provide for his family. The play, which won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards, opened on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones in the starring role.
When Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson in 1990, he became the seventh playwright to win at least twice. A largely realistic play, The Piano Lesson focuses on a family conflict over an heirloom piano. Berniece Charles's slave ancestors were traded for the piano, and another family member carved African-style portraits of them on it. Later Berniece's father died reclaiming it. Now Berniece's brother Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy farmland, and the issue threatens to tear the family apart. A Time critic hailed it as Wilson's "richest" play yet.
In Two Trains Running, which opened in New York City in 1992, Wilson probed the turbulent era of the late 1960s, when racial strife and the Vietnam War convulsed the nation. While many critics considered the play overly metaphorical and lacking in a strong female character, Rich called it Wilson's "most adventurous and honest attempt to reveal the intimate heart of history" and "a penetrating revelation of a world hidden from view to those outside it." William A. Henry III added in Time magazine that it was "Wilson's most delicate and mature work."
"A Struggling Playwright"
Wilson's plays clearly demonstrate the tensions between blacks who want to hold onto their African heritage and those who want to break away from it. As a result of being pulled in different directions, violence often breaks out among blacks in Wilson's plays, yet that violence is often misdirected. Wilson dramatized this dilemma in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, when the character Levee stabs a fellow musician who unintentionally stepped on his shoe, instead of attacking the white man who had stolen his music. When Cory Maxson threatens to assail his father with a baseball bat in Fences, he mocks his father's manhood and shows the futility of his past as a Negro baseball player. Wilson has devoted his career to dramatizing these tensions within the black community even while he upholds the dignity of the individuals who struggle with their past.
During the early 1990s, Wilson wrote Seven Guitars, a play that takes place during the post-World War II years. Seven Guitars features the story of a blues guitarist, who is murdered, and his circle of friends. The friends gather at the wake, and their stories are told in flashback form. Interestingly, Wilson often introduces characters in his plays that become the main characters in subsequent plays. In Seven Guitars King Hedley was "a cracked old man who sees ghosts" and becomes obsessed with fathering a child, a "new Messiah." Wilson's next play, King Hedley II, takes place in the 1980s. The character, King Hedley II is an ex-con who returns home and must deal with his past as well as figure out how to go "ligit." King Hedley II was first seen in the fall of 1999 at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and made it to Broadway in the summer of 2001, playing for twelve weeks. He has already constructed the framework for his next play whose main character, who was alluded to in King Hedley II, is a 366 year old mystical woman, Aunt Esther.
August Wilson has refused to give in to the temptations of Hollywood. He moved to Seattle in the early 1990s, where he has remained remarkably focused on his play writing. Wilson has said that he rarely watches television, goes to the movies, or even attends plays. His daily routine consists of writing longhand while sitting in restaurants starting around noon, then typing up his work at night, often until 4:00 a.m. Despite his success, Wilson told the New York Times: "I always tell people I'm a struggling playwright. I'm struggling to get the next play down on paper." Though the lives of many of his characters are bleak, he also has maintained a degree of optimism about the situation of people of color in the United States. "Black culture is still alive, still vital. The human spirit cannot and will not be broken."
March 2004: Wilson will receive the Freedom of Speech Award at the 10th Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in March. The festival is held in Aspen, Colorado, and is sponsored by HBO. Source: Associated Press, http://customwire.ap.org, January 21, 2004.
August 9, 2004: Wilson's play Gem of the Ocean, which premiered in Chicago in 2003, will open on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater on November 11, 2004, in a production directed by Marion McClinton. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, August 9, 2004.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
