AUGUST WILSON REVISITED
A new biography gives insight into Pittsburgh’s greatest playwright
On October 8, 2005, hundreds of theater luminaries gathered at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland for August Wilson’s funeral service.
“I was sad,” pastor Dwight Andrew declared, “until I remembered how his plays teach us for eternity.”
After Wynton Marsalis played “Danny Boy,” one of Wilson’s favorite tunes, he launched into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The mourners clapped their hands, stamped their feet and accompanied the casket into the street. Before heading to the cemetery, the parade of cars drove through Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson had lived with his mother and siblings in a two-room apartment with no indoor plumbing, and then Wylie Avenue, home of the playwright’s most memorable character, Aunt Ester (ancestor), a healer and custodian of Black history and traditions, who is as old as slavery.
In “August Wilson: A Life,” Patti Hartigan, a former theater critic for the Boston Globe, provides the first full-length biography of a self-taught high school dropout, who wrote one play, drawn “from the blood’s memory,” for each decade of the twentieth century, nine of them set in Pittsburgh, that illuminated the lives of ordinary African Americans and transformed theater in the United States.
Ms. Hartigan examines the myriad influences on the Century Cycle. Wilson adored his mother, Daisy Cutler, who arrived in Pittsburgh in 1937, “wide-hipped, full of grace … willing to engage America on its own terms and its moral obligation to live up to the words of its creed.”
He remembered “her myths, superstitions, prayers, the contents of her pantry, the song that escaped from her sometimes-parched lips.” Wilson never forgot the shops on the Hill; the brick thrown in his window when his family moved to a middle-class neighborhood; sitting alone in a cafeteria at Central Catholic High School; the teacher who accused him of plagiarism; the friends who encouraged him; and his discovery of “the Negro section” in the Hazelwood branch of the Carnegie Library. He listed “Four B’s” as enduring creative influences: the blues, Romare Bearden, Amira Baraka and Jorge Luis Borges. In the 1960s, The Black Power Movement, “the kiln in which I was fired,” became the fifth.
Mr. Wilson’s plays sing, Ms. Hartigan emphasizes, when unforgettable characters interrupt often unwieldy plots with long, powerful monologues that capture their aspirations and frustrations, and simmering rage erupts.
The first act of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” for example, ends as Levee, the young trumpeter, whose tunes are about to be stolen by unscrupulous white producers, tells members of Ma’s jazz band that he was slashed across the chest while trying to fight off the men who were raping his mother — and that he couldn’t save his father, who was hanged and set on fire for trying to avenge the crime. In the second act, Levee tells Cutler, the God-fearing trombonist, “God can kiss my ass.” Sometime later, Levee kills Toledo, when the piano player accidentally steps on his brand new Florsheim shoes.
And the father-son confrontation in “Fences” is one of the most explosive in American dramatic literature.
In rehearsals, and in pre-Broadway performances in regional theaters, Ms. Hartigan reveals that Wilson’s plays were works in progress. In collaboration with Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of Yale Repertory Company and dean of the Yale School of Drama, Wilson made cuts, supplied characters with backstories, strengthened plots and changed endings.
Richards may even have had a hand in the review of “Ma Rainey” in the New York Times by Frank Rich that helped launch Wilson’s career. By the time Richards retired in 1991, we learn, the pair had become estranged — and, perhaps not coincidentally, Wilson’s last plays were considerably less forceful than “Ma Rainey,” “Fences,” “Joe Turner Has Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson.”
As the year 2000 approached, Ms. Hartigan writes, Wilson “wanted nothing more than to finish the cycle and move on to something new,” perhaps a comedy called “The Coffin Maker Play.”
Significantly, Aunt Ester dies in “King Hedley II,” which had its premiere in the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1999. In “Gem of the Ocean” (2005), set in the 1990s, Roosevelt Hicks, a black front man for a white entrepreneur (who, like all white people in Mr. Wilson’s plays, never appears on stage), dismisses Ester’s home as “a raggedy-ass, rodent-infested, unfit-forhuman habitation, eyesore,” and has it condemned to gentrify the neighborhood. In an act of defiance, Elder Joseph Barlow, an elderly resident of the community, paints the house, even though it has been scheduled for demolition. Hicks and other affluent African Americans, Wilson suggests, are so intent on assimilating they have forgotten their history.
Diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer, Mr. Wilson lived long enough to learn that the Virginia Theater would be renamed the August Wilson Theater and read a headline announcing that Broadway was “The Great White Way No More,” thanks to one of America’s greatest playwrights.
Not bad for a self-taught kid from the Hill.