August Wilson: The Black American Theatre’s Most Obsessive, Strident Voice

August Frederick Kittel Wilson, a prolific American writer whose plays, like Eugene O’Neill’s, Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ are produced throughout the U.S. regularly soon became the most important voice in the American theater after Lorraine Hansberry, a position that he maintained until his death in 2005 with a string of acclaimed plays starting from Ma Rainey’s Black BottomIn 1984, the theatre world was opened for the first time.

August Wilson mostly relies on the “4 B’s”http://www.the. BAmiri is a playwright who also lues Bakara; Argentinian author, Jorge Luis BRomare, orges and Romare, painter BHe can tell from his experience what he thinks he should tell when composing his plays. He doesn’t have a particular way of writing plays.

Wilson admitted that the blues had always been his greatest inspiration, in an interview with Sandra G. Shannon “I have always consciously been chasing the musicians, It’s like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians… So I’m trying to close the gap.” 1

Wilson was greatly influenced also by Amiri Barraka, a playwright who was part the Black Art movement in the 1960’s. Wilson learned a lot from Baraka through his writing. “learned sociology and political commitment” and to include the emotions of anger and violence in his works. Wilson disagreed with Baraka’s call for a violent revolution and believed African Americans should develop an understanding of the importance of democracy. “collective self-reliance grounded in black history and culture”Jorge Luis Borges’ preoccupation seems closer to his own.

Wilson was influenced not only by good writing but also by art as he claimed, that when he saw the painter Bearden’s work that was the first time that he saw black life presented in all its richness. He was so moved that he there and then resolved that he wanted to do just that-as he wanted his plays to be the equal of Bearden’s canvases. Wilson thus started creating authentic sounding characters that have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing African Americans in each decade of the twentieth century.

Wilson’s plays were not written chronologically, but one consistent theme runs through them all: the feeling of disconnect among blacks after they have been relocated from Africa to seek employment in the north industrializing areas of Chicago or New York.

Wilson lamented the failure of Africans to create their own traditions, which would have been a better response to the world. [African Americans]Their sense of self-identity has been lost. Wilson believed that all black people should seek to discover their roots to heal and regain their identity. The plays he wrote are meant to illustrate the struggles of the black community to find their identity and then escape it.
Wilson’s ten plays, each set in an entirely different decade in the 20th century, allow him to examine, sometimes in subtle ways, how slavery has shaped the world. This cycle is called “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or his “Century Cycle,” set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African-American experience then, is unprecedented in American theater for its concept, size, and cohesion. Nine of the plays are set within Pittsburgh’s Hill District. It is an African American neighborhood with a legendic literary value like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.

The plays do not necessarily form a single story but some characters may appear in multiple plays. Even later plays might feature children of earlier characters. Aunt Ester is a character. “washer of souls”Who is 285 years of age in Gem of the OceanIt takes place in her house at 1839 Wylie Avenue and 322 in. Two trains runningWho dies during 1985’s events of “King Hedley I1” is the one most commonly mentioned in this cycle One way, Radio GolfMost of the action is focused on Aunt Ester’s home, which was demolished and rebuilt several years later.

Many plays feature a mentally impaired or a visually impaired character. Each play has a unique individual, such as Hedley [Sr.]In Seven guitarsHambone, or Running Two TrainsMany of the ideas in the plays were derived from various sources, such as photos, conversations, and lyrics taken from blues songs by Wilson, who is an observant writer. His immersion into blues music culture has influenced almost every character to sing blues during key moments in his plays.

Play FencesHis vision of a man holding his baby led to the idea. Joe Turner’s Come and GoneFrom the illustration of a mill worker in distress, taken from a collage made by Romare Bearden (an acclaimed black artist who Wilson has said had a strong influence on his art).

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 provision for hot water or a telephone above a grocery store at Bedford Avenue in an economically-depressed neighborhood inhabited predominantly by black Americans, as well as Jewish and Italian immigrants.

Frederick August Kittel was his father, a German immigrant baker. He rarely spent any time with his family. Wilson revealed that Wilson’s father was rarely present. He grew up with his mother in a black cultural milieu. Daisy Wilson, an African American woman who cleaned houses in North Carolina and was born to Daisy Wilson. Daisy’s mother was from North Carolina and her mother was a North Carolina cleaning lady. Daisy had left home to find a better life and had to raise six children on welfare. She relied heavily on the earnings from cleaning house jobs and received welfare checks. This allowed Daisy to clothe, guide, educate, feed and provide for their needs. He claims that she struggled to feed Wilson and her other children. Despite all this. Wilson said that his childhood was wonderful. As a family they shared many of the same things: sitting down together and eating dinner at a specific time, saying the rosary each night at seven o’clock in the evening, They also listened to radios, even though they didn’t own a television.

August Wilson’s induction into the racism and race-consciousness that was to be a constant theme in his works started in the late 1950s, when his mother married a black man, David Bedford, causing them to move from the Hill to a then predominantly white working class neighborhood, Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility with bricks being thrown through the windows at them. Though there was now racial unity if not harmony in the home, the relationship between Wilson and his stepfather was rocky even when he was a teenager. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, David Bedford would become a source for Wilson’s protagonist Troy Maxson a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation in his play Fences, which won 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 which to Wilson was transforming:him enabling him to unlock information and to be better able to understand the forces that are oppressing you. Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson consumed books voraciously, at first reading the Nancy Drew mysteries his mother managed to buy for the family. He was five years old when he got his first library card at the Hill District library. He made such good use of it that he soon wore it out and cried when he lost it. By the time he turned 12, he was already an established patron. In the library, he was an established client. Wilson wasn’t an outstanding student. Wilson was often distracting and he quickly developed the reputation of shouting answers in class.

His mother took him to St. Richard’s school on the Hill, then to Central Catholic High School. He was the sole black student at school and was often harassed and taunted. Threats and abuse drove him away in 1959, just before the end of his freshman year but the next school at which he enrolled, Connelly Vocational High School proved unchallenging.

He switched to Gladstone High School which was right across the street. Although he was meant to go to 10th grade, because he hadn’t finished Central’s 9th grade at Central yet, he needed to continue with 9th-grade subjects. Because the work was so far behind the ones he’d done before, he became bored. He decided to enroll in the after-school college club which was managed by one of his teachers.

He was accused by his teacher of plagiarising for writing a detailed 20-page essay on Napoleon, which he doubted a black student could complete on his own. The parochial school he attended was predominantly white. He often found notes at his desk that were racist. “Nigger go home.”He was so sick of it, he quit school in 10th grade at 15 years old and hid his feelings from his mother for some time.

“I dropped out of school, but I didn’t drop out of life,” as he recalled leaving the house each morning and going to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland “where they had all the books in the world. … I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.”

At home, Wilson’s family had to endure racial taunts at the mostly white Hazelwood area of Pittsburgh. Wilson, at the age of 15, began his education in high school. “Negro” 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 educate himself that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have bestowed anyone.

Richard Wright, Wilson also was fascinated by the power and beauty of words. He was fascinated by language and became an avid listener. The snippets from conversations were used to build stories inside his head.

Wilson, in his late teens had committed himself to becoming a writer. Wilson knew what he wanted in life, and even though it caused tension with his mother (who wanted him to become an attorney), he decided to pursue this goal. His inability to find direction led her to force him from the family home. He then got enlisted in the U.S. Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but somehow got himself discharged a year later, and went back to working odd jobs such as porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher

August Kittel’s decision to change his name to August Wilson, in tribute of his mother who had died after the death of her father in 1965 was symbolic. It marked his beginning of a serious writing career. He also bought a second-hand typewriter that year, using twenty dollars his sister Freda gave him in exchange for a term paper on Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. It was also the year that he discovered and first heard the blues, when he heard a tune sung by Bessie Smith entitled “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine.” He was mesmerized by the emotions that Smith’s sassy delivery exuded. This is where he found his creative vision. The blues had a big impact on Wilson, for through the blues, as well as his experiences listening to the tales of the older folks, he learned that “both the history and culture of African Americans had their roots in an oral, rather than a written tradition. By stages it would lead to the understanding that this oral tradition consists of an extended riposte to a set of values and codes imposed on blacks by white America”This is what he said. These two things stimulated his literary and theatrical prowess.

His literary development moved up one stage 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 in a local restaurant, gathering inspiration from tales swapped by elderly men at a nearby cigar store. He also received an important component of his education. You can find more information here. “Pittsburgh”As he described it once “is a very hard city, especially if you’re black,”He said that each day was difficult. Had to be constantly negotiated. The reason he felt so poor was the fact that he didn’t have a father growing up. He went to Centre Avenue at the age of 20 to learn how to become a man from his community.

He had many fathers in that community: the elderly men who chatted in Pat’s Place and on the street corners, the people of diners where Wilson sat to listen; artistic friends. He was the father of both his small Pittsburgh community and larger Pittsburgh which, in opposing him, stimulated and defined the artistry.

Wilson was also a keen reader of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman, and Amiri Baraka poems and plays. Wilson loved these works for their rhythmic beats and street-smart language.

Wilson received his literary education from Pittsburgh’s Halfway Art Gallery. Here he met some people and found an audience to read his poems. “Pittsburgh’s black literati.”The Center Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop was formed by them. In the late ’60s, as a part of this talented group of poets, educators and artists of the future, young men, whose regular haunts were at the Halfway Art Gallery and the Hill Arts Society, Wilson remembered that he always had a napkin and a pencil ready by him. While he published some poems in magazines throughout the years, Wilson never became a recognized poet.

We have already identified literary and artistic influences that August Wilson had on his works. Apart from these there were ideological as well as political influences on his life and works much of which came from Malcolm X. Malcolm X bore such a strong influence on Wilson that he gave him the sense of direction he needed to resist the easy temptations of the streets. Malcolm X was the one who gave Wilson, a young man without a father, a glimpse of black manhood. It is as a mark of his devotion to him, that Wilson even possessed an album of his speeches which one expects he must have been listening to over and over again thus forming part of his linguistic landscape along with those familiar voices and discussions in the pubs and restaurants he frequented.

Wilson said so: “When we saw or heard Malcolm we saw or heard ourselves. Whatever the self was: Malcolm the Bad Nigger. Malcolm the Boisterous. Malcolm the Defiant. Malcolm the Brave. He was all these and more” It is then not surprising that this theme pervades Wilson’s male protagonists, as each seeks to “survive as a black man in America” .

The writings of Malcolm X in this way had great influence on the orientation of Wilson and on his writings. Wilson through him took up the banner of cultural nationalism which meant black people working toward self-definition, self-determination, as Wilson put it. “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.” He became involved in the debates of the ’60s and continued up to his death to consider himself “a black nationalist and a cultural nationalist.” following various black identity movements and fighting for social justice.

From poetry which he did not have such a successful publishing record in, August Wilson moved on to the area where he was to gain his fame, 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 program, her first and only Broadway show.” But his first brushes with theater had been off-putting. In 1965, he saw a 30-minute excerpt of The Rhinoceros at Fifth Avenue High School. “That was the first theater I recall, and I wasn’t impressed.” He met some of the actors in John Hancock’s 1966 Pittsburgh Playhouse company, but he stayed for only 20 minutes of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s a Man. But in 1968, when Mr. Penny wrote a play and the Tulane Drama Review had a special issue on black theater “… was the first time I’d seen black plays in print — there hadn’t been any plays on the Negro shelf at the library. So we did them all.”

In 1969 Wilson and his friend Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, founded the black activist theater company Black Horizons on the Hill District of Pittsburgh focusing on politicizing the community and raising black consciousness. Through this theater formed to promote “black self-awareness,” Wilson produced and directed plays that “challenged both the aesthetic and the ideological premises of the reigning Caucasian theater”. Black Horizons also gave him the chance to present his own early plays, mostly in public schools and community centers.

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

In 1976 Dr. Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson’s one-act play The 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 saw a whole, professional play.

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

To find the voice that would make him famous as a playwright, Wilson thought that he needed to gain distance from his roots which opportunity came in 1978 when he visited his friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul, Minnesota in response to his earlier invitation to join him. Purdy urged Wilson to write a play and Wilson felt more ready than ever before for as he told the New York Times.. “Having moved from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, I felt I could hear voices for the first time accurately..” In ten days of writing while sitting in a fish-and-chips restaurant, Wilson finished a draft of Jitney, a play about jitney drivers set in a gypsy-cab station in Pittsburg which he submitted to the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and which won him a $200-a-month fellowshipIt is. Jitney was revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle on 20th century PittsburghThis is a.

At Saint Paul, Minnesota Claude Purdy helped him secure a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota where he was also writing short plays for its Children’s Theater. Wilson’s satirical play, “Black Bart and the Sacred Hills,” a musical satire based on the story of the life of an outlaw of the Old West was adapted from his poems at Mr. Purdy’s suggestion and became an item in a workshop production four years later..

Though the drama written during this period does not show much genius, “Yet behind the self-consciousness of these early works is a notable ease with words and a poetic melding of the colloquial and the profound”

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

Wilson once explained that St. Paul and Seattle — cool, northern, Scandinavian cities — appealed to him precisely because of their unlikeness to Pittsburgh, allowing him to look back more intently at the true material of August Wilson Country, source of his rich stream of stories, characters, images and conflicts.

August Wilson died on October 2, 2005 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle after in a rare and dramatic moment, initiating a month long wait for his departure after he announced on August 26, 2005, through his hometown newspaper, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that he 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 to mortality at his approaching 60th birthday when he said, “There’s more [life] behind me than ahead. I think of dying every day. … At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.”When in May 2005, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and the next month his doctors determined it was inoperable, he showed that he was indeed prepared, telling the Post-Gazette, “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”

Wilson has won many prizes and awards 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’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 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 until 1995. He also had Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Humanities Medal, the 2003 Heinz Award in whereHumanities and Arts and the only high school diploma issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Wilson received the Freedom of Speech Award at the 10th Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival held in Aspen, Colorado, and sponsored by HBO.

On October 16, 2005, the Virginia Theatre in New York’s Broadway theatre district was renamed the August Wilson Theatre, the first Broadway theatre to be named after an African-American. In addition, a street has been renamed August Wilson Way.

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

He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in suburban Pittsburgh on October 8, 2005. His survivors, his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and his two daughters, Sakina Ansari and Azula Carmen were amongst friends, relatives, writers, producers as well as City officials at the graveside.

WORKS CITED

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

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