August Wilson - The most compulsive and strident voice of the American black theater

August Frederick Kittel Wilson, a prolific American writer whose plays, like those of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, are regularly produced in the United States, soon became the most important voice in American theater after Lorraine Hansberry. , a position he held until his death in 2005 with a series of acclaimed plays starting from Ma Rainey black background first exciting the world of theater in 1984.

August Wilson is primarily based on the “4 Bs”: the yeslues; fellow playwright, Amiri yesakara; Argentine author Jorge Luis yesorges, and painter, Romare yesWinning to tell what, in your opinion, you need to tell when writing your works. Apart from this, he has no particular method of writing his works.

The blues has always had the greatest influence on Wilson, as he himself confessed in an interview with Sandra G. Shannon: “I have always been consciously chasing musicians, it is as if our culture was in music. And writers are far behind musicians … So I’m trying to bridge the gap. ” one

Wilson was also heavily influenced by the playwright Amiri Baraka, who was part of the Black Art movement of the 1960s. Through Baraka’s writings, Wilson “learned sociology and political commitment” and included the emotions of anger and violence in his plays. But far from supporting Baraka’s defense of a violent revolution, Wilson believed that African Americans need to develop a “collective self-reliance based on black history and culture,” a concern that seems more similar 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 work of the painter Bearden, it was the first time that he saw black life presented in all its wealth. He was so moved that he was there and then resolved that he wanted to do exactly that, since he wanted his plays to be the same as Bearden’s canvases. Thus, Wilson began creating authentic characters who have brought a new understanding of the black experience to the public in a series of plays, each directed at African Americans in each decade of the 20th century.

Although Wilson’s works have not been written in chronological order, the constant and key theme in each of them is the feeling of disconnection suffered by blacks who have been uprooted from their original homeland, first from Africa and then away to Jim Crowism north of the slave heading south for the industrialized cities of North Chicago and New York.

Wilson regretted that, for not having developed his own tradition, which should be a more African response to the world, [African Americans] they lost their sense of identity. Wilson has felt, therefore, that blacks must strive to know their roots in order to understand themselves and then regain their lost identity. Therefore, his works have been designed to demonstrate the struggle of blacks to obtain this understanding and hence their identity, or to escape it.

Each of his ten plays set in a different decade of the 20th century allows Wilson to explore, often very subtly, the myriad and mutating forms of the legacy of slavery. Each of this cycle called “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or its “Century Cycle”, set in a different decade, representing the comedy and tragedy of the African American experience at the time, is unprecedented in American theater for its concept, size and cohesion. . Nine of them are in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, an African-American neighborhood that takes on mythical literary significance such as Wessex by Thomas Hardy, Yoknapatawpha County by William Faulkner or Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Ballybeg.

Although the plays are not strictly part of a serial story, some characters appear (at various ages) in more than one of them. Children of characters in previous games may even appear in later games. The character of Aunt Esther, a “soul washer” who is reported to be 285 years old Jewel of the ocean, which takes place at his home at 1839 Wylie Avenue, and 322 at Two trains running and who dies in 1985, during the events of ‘King Hedley I1 is the most mentioned in the cycle. In other, Radio Golf Much of the action revolves around plans to demolish and rebuild Aunt Ester’s home, a few years after her death.

The plays often include an apparently mentally handicapped oracular character, a different individual in each play, for example Hedley [Sr.] in Seven guitarsor hungry in Two trains running. Most of the ideas for the plays come from various sources, such as images, snippets of conversation, or blues song lyrics captured by the eye and ear of Wilson’s ever-vigilant writer. As a result of the influences of his immersion in the culture of blues music, practically all his characters end up singing blues to show their feelings in the key dramatic moments of their works.

The game Fences evolved by seeing an image of a man holding a baby, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone from a depiction of a fighting mill hand in a collage by the acclaimed black painter Romare Bearden, whom Wilson has mentioned has a particularly strong influence on his work.

Born Frederick August Kittel in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1945, Wilson, the fourth of six children, grew up in a black slum in a two-room apartment with no hot water or telephone supply on top of a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in an economically depressed neighborhood inhabited predominantly by black Americans, as well as Jewish and Italian immigrants.

Her father, a white German immigrant baker, also named Frederick August Kittel, rarely spent time with his family. as Wilson reveals that his father rarely approached. So he grew up in his mother’s house in a cultural environment that was black. His mother, Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, whose own mother had walked to North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life, had to raise her six children depending on welfare checks. and wages for house cleaning jobs. managing to keep them dressed, guided, educated and fed. According to him, she had a hard time feeding Wilson and the rest of her children. But despite all that. Wilson admitted that he had a wonderful childhood. … As a family, they did things together: say the rosary every night at seven o’clock, sit down and have dinner at a certain time. … and since they had no television, they listened to the radio.

August Wilson’s induction into racism and racial consciousness that was to be a constant theme in his works began in the late 1950s, when his mother married a black man, David Bedford, which caused them to move from the hill to a predominantly white job. class neighborhood, Hazelwood, where they found racial hostility with bricks thrown through the windows at them. Although there was now racial unity if not harmony in the home, the relationship between Wilson and his stepfather was difficult even when he was a teenager. A former convict whose race kept him from obtaining a college soccer scholarship, David Bedford would become a source for the protagonist of Wilson Troy Maxson, a former major league baseball player blocked by segregation in his game. Fences, which gained my interest in August Wilson a few years ago.

August Wilson’s literary career owes much to his mother, who taught him to read very early, a process that Wilson was transforming: allowing him to unlock information and better understand the forces that oppress him. Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson voraciously consumed books, initially reading the mysteries of Nancy Drew that his mother managed to buy for the family. When she was 5 years old, she got her first library card from the Hill District branch of the library on Wylie Avenue. He made so good use of it that he soon used it and wept when he lost it. At 12 years old he was already a regular. customer in the library. Wilson was not an exceptional student. He was so distracted that he soon developed a reputation for shouting answers out of turn in class.

His mother sent him to St. Richard’s Parish School in Hill, and then to Central Catholic High School in Oakland. As the only black student there, he was constantly teased and harassed. Threats and abuse drove him away in 1959, just before the end of his freshman year, but the next school he enrolled in, Connelly Vocational High School, proved to be unshakable.

He then switched to Gladstone High School, which was across the street. Although he was supposed to move on to tenth grade, but because he had not graduated from ninth grade at Central, he had to take ninth grade subjects. Because the work lagged behind what he had already done, he was bored and complacent until he decided he wanted to join the after-school college club led by one of the teachers.

It was that teacher who, doubting that a black child could do it alone, writing a 20-page article on Napoleon as well written as Wilson presented, accused him of plagiarism. This mostly white parish high school also gave him a strong dose of racism, often finding notes on his desk that said “Nigger go home.” Sick of this, he dropped out of tenth grade in 1960 at the age of 15 and for a time did not tell his mother.

“I dropped out of school, but I didn’t give up on life,” he recalled as he left the house each morning and headed to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland, “where they had all the books in the world.” “I felt suddenly released from the limitations of a pre-established curriculum that worked on a book in eight months.”

At home, Wilson’s family had to endure racial teasing in the mostly white Hazelwood area of ​​Pittsburgh. At age 15, Wilson began to educate himself, starting in the “Black” section of the public library, reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, Wilson made such extensive use of the Carnegie . Library to find out that later they gave him a title, the only one they have given to someone.

Like Richard Wright, Wilson was caught in the power of words. His fascination with language made him an avid listener, absorbing conversations he overheard in coffee shops and on street corners, and using the conversation’s titbits to build stories in his head.

At the end of his adolescence, Wilson had devoted himself to the task of becoming a writer. By then, he knew what he wanted to be, a writer, even though this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. But when he continued to work odd jobs, she was so fed up with what she considered her lack of direction that she was forced to leave the house. He then enlisted in the US Army. USA For a period of three years in 1962, but somehow he was discharged a year later, and returned to work odd jobs as a doorman, cook, gardener, and dishwasher.

August Kittel changing his name to August Wilson thus honoring his mother after his father’s death in 1965 marked the symbolic starting point of his serious writing career. For that same year, he bought a used typewriter, paying it with twenty dollars that his sister, Freda, gave him for writing an end-of-course paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. It was also the year he first discovered and heard blues, when he heard a tune sung by Bessie Smith titled “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Like Mine”. He was mesmerized by the emotions that Smith’s blatant surrender exuded. The source of his artistic vision dates back to this time. The blues had a great impact on Wilson, since through the blues, as well as his experiences listening to the stories of older people, he learned that “both the history and the culture of African-Americans had their roots in an oral discourse, in rather than a written tradition. In stages it would lead to the understanding that this oral tradition consists of an extended response to a set of values ​​and codes imposed on blacks by white America. ” These two things stimulated his literary and theatrical skills.

His literary development went a step further when at the age of 20 Wilson moved into a boarding house, rented a room, and began writing lines of poetry on paper bags while sitting at a local restaurant, gathering inspiration from tales. exchanged for older men at a nearby cigar store. Here he got the other important part of his education. For “Pittsburgh,” as he once described it, “it is a very difficult city, especially if you are black,” so each day what he said was tough. had to be continuously negotiated. The deprivation was that he grew up without a father. So when he was 20, he went down to Center Avenue to learn from the community how to be a man.

That community provided him with many parents: the old men chatting at Pat’s Place or on street corners; the inhabitants of the diners where Wilson sat and listened; like-minded friends with artistic inclinations. His true father was both the small community that nurtured him and the largest Pittsburgh that, by opposing it, stimulated and defined his art.

Additionally, Wilson expanded his literary landscape by immersing himself in the works of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman, as well as the poems and works of Amiri Baraka that enchanted him due to his lively rhythms and street language.

Wilson’s literary education continued at the Halfway Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, where he found an audience for his poetry, and became acquainted with some of “Pittsburgh’s black writers.” Together they formed the Center Avenue Poet Theater Workshop. In the late 1960s, as part of this talented group of future poets, educators, and artists, young men, whose regular dens were at the Halfway Art Gallery and the Hill Arts Society, Wilson recalled that he always had a napkin and pencil. prepared by him. Although some of his poems were published in some small magazines in the following years, he did not achieve recognition as a poet.

Earlier we identified primarily literary and artistic influences on August Wilson’s works. Apart from these, there were both ideological and political influences on his life and works, many of which stem from Malcolm X. Malcolm X had such a strong influence on Wilson that it gave him the sense of direction he needed to resist the easy temptations of streets. Because it was Malcolm X who offered the young orphan Wilson a vision of black manhood. It is as a sign of her devotion to him that Wilson even owned an album of his speeches that one hopes to have heard over and over again, thus becoming part of his linguistic landscape along with those familiar voices and discussions in the pubs. and restaurants he frequented.

According to Wilson himself: “When we saw or heard Malcolm, we saw or heard ourselves. Whatever the self: Malcolm the evil black. Malcolm the boisterous. Malcolm the brave. He was all this and more.” It is then not surprising that this theme permeates Wilson’s male protagonists, as each seeks to “survive as a black man in America.”

Malcolm X’s writings in this way greatly influenced Wilson’s orientation and writing. Through him Wilson took the flag of cultural nationalism, which meant that black people worked toward self-definition, self-determination, as Wilson put it. “It meant that we had a culture that was valid and that we were not willing to change it to participate in the American dream.” He became involved in the debates of the 1960s and continued until his death to consider himself “a black nationalist and a cultural nationalist.” following various movements of black identity and fighting for social justice.

From poetry in which he did not have such a successful editorial record, August Wilson moved to the area where he was to gain fame, the theater. August Wilson first became aware of the theater through Pearl Bailey in Hello Dolly, around 1958, 1959. “My mother was in New York and brought back the show, her first and only Broadway show.” But his first brush with the theater had been unpleasant. In 1965, he saw a 30-minute excerpt from The rhinoceros at Fifth Avenue High School. “That was the first theater I remember, and it didn’t impress me.” He met some of the actors in John Hancock’s 1966 Pittsburgh Playhouse company, but was only 20 minutes away from Bertolt Brecht’s. A man is a man. But in 1968, when Mr. Penny wrote a play and the Tulane Drama Review had a special issue on black theater “… it was the first time I saw printed black works, there was no play on the black shelf in the library. So we did them all.”

In 1969, Wilson and his friend Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, founded the Black Activist black theater theater company in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, focusing on community politicization and black consciousness. Through this theater formed to promote “black self-awareness,” Wilson produced and directed plays that “challenged the aesthetic and ideological premises of today’s Caucasian theater.” Black Horizons also gave him the opportunity to present his own early works, primarily in public schools and community centers.

His first work Recycling, based on the unfortunate termination in 1972 of his 1969 marriage to Brenda Burton. It was held for audiences in small theaters and community public housing centers. Soon after, his friend Claude Purdy moved to St. Paul to work with his black theater group Penumbra, inviting Wilson to join him.

In 1976, Dr. Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theater at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson’s one-act play. Homecoming. When Wilson saw that same year, Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is dead, A comic-tragic account of life under apartheid at the Pittsburgh Public Theater was the first time he had seen a complete professional play.

Wilson, Penny, and the poet Maisha Baton also started the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring together African American writers and assist them in their publication and production.

To find the voice that would make him famous as a playwright, Wilson thought he needed to distance himself from his roots, an opportunity he had in 1978 when he visited his friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul, Minnesota, in response to his earlier invitation to join. the. Purdy urged Wilson to write a play, and Wilson felt more prepared than ever for what he said to the New York Times.. “After moving from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, I felt I could hear voices for the first time with precision ..”. In ten days of writing while sitting at a fish and chip restaurant, Wilson finished a draft of Collective, a play about jitney drivers set at a gypsy taxi station in Pittsburgh, which she presented to the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and earned her a $ 200 a month scholarship. Collective It was revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-game cycle in the 20th century in Pittsburgh.

In Saint Paul, Minnesota, Claude Purdy helped him land a job writing educational scripts for the Minnesota Science Museum, where he was also writing short plays for his Children’s Theater. Wilson’s satirical work “Black bart and the sacred hills, “A musical satire based on the life story of an Old West outlaw was adapted from his poems at Mr. Purdy’s suggestion and became an item in a production workshop four years later …

Although the drama written during this period does not show much genius, “However, behind the self-awareness of these early works there is a remarkable ease with words and a poetic fusion of colloquial and profound.”

In 1981, Wilson moved to Seattle, where he would develop a relationship with the Seattle Repertory Theater, which would ultimately be the only theater in the country that would produce all of his plays, including his ten-play cycle and his one-man show. How I learned What I learned.

Wilson once explained that St. Paul and Seattle, cold northern and Scandinavian cities, attracted him precisely because of their difference from Pittsburgh, allowing him to look more closely at the true material of August Wilson Country, source of his wealth. flow of stories, characters, images and conflicts.

August Wilson died on October 2, 2005 at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle after a rare and dramatic moment, initiating a month-long wait for his departure after announcing on August 26, 2005 through his city’s newspaper The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who had been diagnosed with liver cancer in June 2005 and had been given three to five months to live. The previous December, August Wilson’s thoughts had turned into mortality as his 60th birthday approached when he said, “There’s more [life] behind me than ahead. I think about dying every day. … At a certain age, you should be prepared to go anytime. “When in May 2005, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and the following month his doctors determined that it was not working, he showed that he was truly prepared and told the Post Gazette, “I have lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”

Wilson has won many awards and accolades, including two Pulitzer Prizes, Best Drama, for Fences in 1987 and for The piano lesson in 1990; seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Ma Rainey black background1984 to Fences, 1987, and for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone1988; Tony Award for Best Drama for Fences1986-87; American Theater Critics Award, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1998 and Harold Washington Literary Award, 2001.

August Wilson had received many honorary degrees, including more than two dozen honorary doctorates with one from the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as a member of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1992 to 1995. He also had the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Humanities Medal, the 2003 Heinz Prize for Humanities and Arts, and the only high school diploma issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Wilson received the Freedom of Expression Award at the 10th Annual US Comedy Arts Festival. USA, Held in Aspen, Colorado, and sponsored by HBO.

On October 16, 2005, the Virginia Theater in the Broadway theater district of New York was renamed the August Wilson Theater, the first Broadway theater to be named after an African American. In addition, a street was renamed August Wilson Way.

The playwright’s historic home on Bedford Avenue, where his mother raised him and his other children, was dedicated as the state’s official historic landmark on May 30, 2007.

He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in the Pittsburgh suburbs on October 8, 2005. His survivors, his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and their two daughters, Sakina Ansari and Azula Carmen, were among friends, family, writers, producers and City. officials at the grave.

WORKS CITED

1. Shannon, Sandra G. La Dramatic vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C .: Howard University, 1995.

Further reading

books

• Criticism of black literatureGale, 1992.
• Contemporary playwrights6th ed. St. James Press, 1999.
• August Wilson: A Casebook (Casebooks on Modern Dramatists, Volume 15), edited by Marilyn Elkins, Garland Publishing (November 1, 1999),
• Elkins, Marilyn. ed. August Wilson: A Case Book. New York: Garland, 2000.
• Gates, Henry Louis and Alan Nadel. eds. May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the August Wilson Drama. U of Iowa, 1993.
• Shafer, Yvonne. August Wilson: A Research and Production Book. Westport CN: Greenwood, 1998
• Shannon, Sandra G. August Wilson’s dramatic vision. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1996.
• Shannon, Sandra G., MacMillan, Palgrave.August Wilson and black aesthetics, (2004)
• Wang, Qun. An in-depth study of the main works of African-American playwright August Wilson: Vernacularizing the Blues on Stage. Lewinston, New York: Mellen, 1999.
• Wolf, Peter. August Wilson. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Newspaper publication

• African American magazineVol. 27, no. 4, 1994, pgs. 539-59; Spring 2001, p. 93)
• Don, April 1989, pp. 116-27.
• New York Times MagazineMarch 15, 1987, pgs. 36-40, 49, 70; September 10, 1989, p. 18-19, 58-60.
• Theater, Autumn-Winter 1984, pp. 50-55.

Resources about August Wilson:

August Wilson’s full website.

Rubén, Paul P. “Chapter 8: August Wilson”. PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL: http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/wilson.html.

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