Born on April 27, 1945, August Wilson grew up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His childhood experiences in this black slum community would later inform his dramatic writings, including his first produced play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, which was staged in 1981.
Then, in 1984, August Wilson was catapulted to the forefront of the American theatre scene with the success of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, produced at Yale and later in New York in 1984. The play was voted Best Play of the Year (1984-85) by the New York Drama Critics' Circle.
Wilson continued to work in close collaboration with Lloyd Richards of the Yale School of Drama, and by early 1990's, had established himself as the best known and most popular African-American playwright. Wilson also set for himself a daunting task--to write a ten play cycle that chronicles each decade of the black experience in the 20th century. Each of Wilson's plays is a chapter in this remarkable cycle of plays and focuses on what Wilson perceives as the largest issue to confront African-Americans in that decade.
His second play, Fences--set in the 1950's--tells the story of Troy Maxon, an illiterate garbage collector who has become embittered by a white-controlled system that has denied him the baseball stardom he feels he deserves. Fences opened on Broadway in the spring of 1987 to enormous critical acclaim and earned Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize.
In April of 1988, Joe Turner's Come and Gone opened on Broadway, again to enormous critical acclaim. This play--which documents the 1910's--tells the story of Harold Loomis, a black man cruelly imprisoned for seven years by the white authorities for an unknown offense. Finally free, Loomis sets out in search of his wife Martha who he hasn't seen in ten years. Joe Turner's Come and Gone was voted Best New Play of the Year by the New York Drama Critics' Circle.
The Piano Lesson--set in 1930's--opens with the arrival of Boy Willie at his sister Berniece's house. Willie dreams of buying the same Mississippi land that his ancestors once worked as slaves, but in order to raise the capital for this purchase, he must convince his sister to part with a family heirloom, a piano that is both a reminder of the family's enslaved past and a tribute to their survival. The Piano Lesson was named Best Play of the Year by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. It also earned Wilson his 2nd Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as a Drama Desk Award.
Wilson's other awards include the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (1985, 1987, 1988), the Whiting Foundation Award (1986), the American Theatre Critics Award (1986, 1989, 1991), the Outer Circle Award (1987), the Drama Desk Award (1987), the John Gassner Award (1987), the Tony Award (1987), the Helen Hayer Award (1988), and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1987, 1990).
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WILSON, August 1945-2005
Genre: Plays
Personal Information: Born Frederick August Kittel in 1945, in Pittsburgh, PA; son of Frederick August (a baker) and Daisy (a cleaning woman; maiden name, Wilson) Kittel, and stepfather, David Bedford; married second wife, Judy Oliver (a social worker), 1981 (marriage ended); married Constanza Romero (a costume designer); children: (first marriage) Sakina Ansari.
Nationality: American
Addresses: Office: c/o John Breglio, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.
Career: Writer. Cofounder (with Rob Penny), scriptwriter, and director of Black Horizons on the Hill (theatre company) Pittsburgh, PA, 1968-78; scriptwriter for Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul, 1979.
Awards/Honors:
Award for best play of 1984-85 from New York Drama Critics Circle, 1985, Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award nomination from League of New York Theatres and Producers, 1985, and Whiting Writers' Award from the Whiting Foundation, 1986, all for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; Outstanding Play Award from American Theatre Critics, 1986, Drama Desk Outstanding New Play Award, 1986, New York Drama Critics Circle Best Play Award, 1986, Pulitzer Prize for drama, Antoinette Perry Award for best play, and award for best Broadway play from Outer Critics Circle, all 1987, all for Fences; John Gassner Award for best American playwright from Outer Critics Circle, 1987; named Artist of the Year by Chicago Tribune, 1987; Literary Lion Award from New York Public Library, 1988; New York Drama Critics Circle Best Play award, and Antoinette Perry Award nomination for best play, both 1988, both for Joe Turner's Come and Gone; Drama Desk Outstanding New Play Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Best Play Award, Antoinette Perry Award for Best Play, American Theatre Critics Outstanding Play Award, and Pulitzer Prize for drama, all 1990, all for The Piano Lesson; Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award, 1991; Antoinette Perry Award nomination for best play, and American Theatre Critics' Association Award, both 1992, both for Two Trains Running; Clarence Muse Award, 1992; recipient of Bush and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships.
Writings:
* Jitney (two-act play), first produced in Pittsburgh, PA, at the Allegheny Repertory Theatre, 1982.
* Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (play; first produced in New Haven, CT, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1984; produced on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, October, 1984; also see below), New American Library (New York City), 1985.
* Fences (play; first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1985; produced on Broadway at 46th Street Theatre, March, 1987; also see below), New American Library, 1986.
* Joe Turner's Come and Gone (play; first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1986; produced on Broadway at Barrymore Theatre, March, 1988; also see below), New American Library, 1988.
* The Piano Lesson (play; first produced in New Haven at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1987; produced on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre, 1990; also see below), New American Library, 1990.
* (And author of preface) August Wilson: Three Plays (contains Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone), afterword by Paul C. Harrison, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh), 1991.
* Two Trains Running (first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1990, produced at Walter Kerr Theatre, 1992), New American Library/Dutton, 1993.
* Seven Guitars (first produced in Chicago at Goodman Theatre, 1995),
* The Piano Lesson (teleplay; adapted from his play), "Hallmark Hall of Fame," CBS-TV, 1995.
Also author of the plays The Homecoming, 1979, The Coldest Day of the Year, 1979, Fullerton Street, 1980, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, 1981, and The Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, 1983. Author of the book for a stage musical about jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton. Work represented in A Game of Passion: The NFL Literary Companion, Turner, 1994, Selected from Contemporary American Plays, 1990, and The Poetry of Black America, Adoff. Contributor to periodicals, including Black Lines and Connection.
Works In Progress:
A screenplay adaptation of Fences.
Sidelights:
August Wilson has been hailed since the mid-1980s as an important talent in the American theatre. He spent his childhood in poverty in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lived with his parents and five siblings. Though he grew up in a poor family, Wilson felt that his parents withheld knowledge of even greater hardships they had endured. "My generation of blacks knew very little about the past of our parents," he told the New York Times in 1984. "They shielded us from the indignities they suffered." Wilson's goal is to illuminate that shadowy past with a series of plays, each set in a different decade, that focus on black issues. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars are part of this ambitious project.
Wilson has noted that his real education began when he was sixteen years old. Disgusted by the racist treatment he endured in the various schools he had attended until that time, he dropped out and began educating himself in the local library. Working at menial jobs, he also pursued a literary career and successfully submitted poems to black publications at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1968 he became active in the theatre by founding--despite lacking prior experience-- Black Horizons on the Hill, a theatre company in Pittsburgh. Recalling his early theatre involvement, Wilson described himself to the New York Times as "a cultural nationalist . . . trying to raise consciousness through theater."
According to several observers, however, Wilson found his artistic voice--and began to appreciate the black voices of Pittsburgh--after he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978. In St. Paul Wilson wrote his first play, Jitney, a realistic drama set in a Pittsburgh taxi station. Jitney, noted for the fidelity with which it portrayed black urban speech and life, had a successful engagement at a small theater in Pittsburgh. Wilson followed Jitney with another play, Fullerton Street, but this work failed to strengthen his reputation.
Wilson then resumed work on an earlier unfinished project, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a play about a black blues singer's exploitation of her fellow musicians. This work, whose title role is named after an actual blues singer from the 1920s, is set in a recording studio in 1927. In the studio, temperamental Ma Rainey verbally abuses the other musicians and presents herself--without justification--as an important musical figure. But much of the play is also set in a rehearsal room, where Ma Rainey's musicians discuss their abusive employer and the hardships of life in racist America.
Eventually, the musicians are all revealed to have experienced, in varying degrees, racist treatment. The most resigned member is the group's leader, a trombonist who has learned to accept racial discrimination and merely negotiates around it. The bassist's response is to wallow in hedonism and ignore his nation's treatment of blacks, while the pianist takes an intellectual approach to solving racial problems. The group's trumpeter, however, is bitter and cynical. He is haunted by the memory of his mother's rape by four white men. Tensions mount in the play when the sullen trumpeter clashes with Ma Rainey and is fired. The manager of the recording studio then swindles him in a recording rights agreement, and a subsequent and seemingly insignificant incident precipitates a violent act from the trumpeter, who has simply endured too much abuse. The London Times's Holly Hill called the play's climactic moment "a melodramatically violent act."
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom earned Wilson a trip to the O'Neill Theatre Center's National Playwrights Conference. There Wilson's play impressed director Lloyd Richards from the Yale Repertory Theatre. Richards worked with Wilson to refine the play, and when it was presented at Yale in 1984 it was hailed as the work of an important new playwright. Frank Rich, who reviewed the Yale production in the
New York Times, acclaimed Wilson as "a major find for the American theater" and cited Wilson's ability to write "with compassion, raucous humor and penetrating wisdom."
Wilson enjoyed further success with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom after the play came to Broadway later in 1984. The Chicago Tribune's Richard Christiansen reviewed the Broadway production as "a work of intermittent but immense power" and commended the "striking beauty" of the play's "literary and theatrical poetry." Christiansen added that "Wilson's power of language is sensational" and that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was "the work of an impressive writer." The London Times's Hill agreed, calling Wilson "a promising new playwright" and hailing his work as "a remarkable first play."
Wilson's subsequent plays include the Pulitzer Prize- winning Fences, which is about a former athlete who forbids his son to accept an athletic scholarship, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which concerns an ex-convict's efforts to find his wife. Like Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, these plays underwent extensive rewriting. Guiding Wilson in this process was Lloyd Richards, dean of Yale's drama school and director of the school's productions of Wilson's plays. "August is a wonderful poet," Richards told the New York Times in 1986. "A wonderful poet turning into a playwright." Richards added that his work with Wilson involved "clarifying" each work's main theme and "arranging the material in a dynamic way."
Both Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone were praised when they played on American stages. The New York Times's Frank Rich, in his review of Fences, wrote that the play "leaves no doubt that Mr. Wilson is a major writer, combining a poet's ear for vernacular with a robust sense of humor (political and sexual), a sure instinct for cracking dramatic incident and passionate commitment to a great subject." And in his critique of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Rich speculated that the play "will give a lasting voice to a generation of uprooted black Americans." Rich contended that the work was "potentially its author's finest achievement yet" and described it as "a teeming canvas of black America . . . and a spiritual allegory."
In 1990, Wilson claimed his second Pulitzer Prize, this time for The Piano Lesson. Set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this drama pits brother against sister in a contest to decide the future of a treasured heirloom--a piano, carved with African-style portraits by their grandfather, an enslaved plantation carpenter. The brother wants to sell it to buy land, while the sister adamantly insists that the instrument carries too much family history to part with. Acclaim for the play was widespread, although some commentators were put off by the supernatural elements that came to play in the climax of this otherwise realistic piece. "When ghosts begin resolving realistic plays, you can be sure the playwright has failed to master his material," wrote Robert Brustein in the New Republic. Brustein also found the play overlong and repetitious, and asserted that Wilson's focus on the effects of racism was limiting him artistically. Others praised the work unreservedly, however, including Clive Barnes of the New York Post. He declared: "This is a play in which to lose
yourself--to give yourself up . . . to August Wilson's thoughts, humors and thrills, all caught in a microcosm largely remote for many of us from our own little worlds, yet always talking the same language of humanity." Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote that Wilson has given "miraculous voice" to the black experience, and William A. Henry Ill of Time dubbed the play's piano "the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie" in the Tennessee Williams classic. Barnes concluded: "This is a wonderful play that lights up man. See it, wonder at it, and recognize it." Wilson later adapted The Piano Lesson for a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" television production. It was judged a success by John J. O'Connor, who wrote in the New York Times: "If anything, The Piano Lesson is even more effective in this shortened version."
Two Trains Running continued Wilson's projected ten-play cycle about black American history. The play, which came to Broadway in 1992, is set in a run-down diner on the ver8e of being sold. Reactions by the diner's regular patrons to the pending sale make up the body of the drama. Some critics, such as the New Yorker's Mimi Kramer, found the play less subtle and dramatic than its predecessors, but Newsweek's David Ansen praised the "musical eloquence" of Wilson's language, which he felt enhanced a "thematically rich" work. And Henry wrote in Time that Two Trains Running is a "delicate and mature" play that shows Wilson "at his lyrical best."
Two Trains Running was followed in 1995 by Seven Guitars. Set in the 1940s, it recounts the tragic story of blues guitarist Floyd Barton, whose funeral opens the play. Action then flashes back to recreate the events of Floyd's last week of life. Seven Guitars was the first major production of a Wilson play without the direction of Richards, who was forced to abandon the project due to illness. The task of directing fell to Walter Dallas, whose staging at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago William Tynan characterized as "skillful" in a Time review. Yet the critic's overall assessment was mixed. "Part bawdy comedy, part dark elegy, part mystery," he wrote, "August Wilson's rich new play, Seven Guitars, nicely eludes categorization. . . . But though full and strong in its buildup, the play loses its potency as it reaches its climax.... Though Floyd is as charming and sympathetic a protagonist as we could want, the surprising truth is that his death has little effect on us. We leave the theater entertained and admiring but not truly moved." Vincent Canby differed markedly in his judgrnent, writing in the New York Times: "Though the frame of 'Seven Guitars' is limited and employs only seven characters, Mr. Wilson writes so vividly that the play seems to have the narrative scope and depth of a novel. When the curtain comes down, it's difficult to remember which characters you've actually seen and which you have come to know only through stories recollected on stage... 'Seven Guitars' plays with such speed that you begin the journey one mmute, and the next thing you know, you re leaving the theater on a high."
Further praise came from Newsweek reviewer Jack Kroll, who called Seven Guitars "a kind of jazz cantata for actors," with "a gritty, lyrical polyphony of voices that evokes the character and destiny of these men and women who can't help singing
the blues even when they're just talking." The play, he continued, "bristles with symbolism" and with "anguished eloquence." Kroll found the protagonist's death "shocking, unexpected, yet inevitable" and the characters overall "not victims, wallowing in voluptuous resentment," but "tragic figures, bursting with the balked music of life."
Discussing Wilson's body of work, Lawrence Bommer stated in the Chicago Tribune, "August Wilson has created the most complete cultural chronicle since Balzac wrote his vast 'Human Comedy,' an artistic whole that has grown even greater than its prize-winning parts." As for the playwright, he has repeatedly stressed that his first objective is simply getting his work produced. "All I want is for the most people to get to see this play," he told the New York Times while discussing Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Wilson added, however, that he was not opposed to having his works performed on Broadway. He told the New York Times that Broadway "still has the connotation of Mecca" and asked, "Who doesn't want to go to Mecca?"
Biographical/Critical Sources
PERIODICALS
* African American Review, spring, 1996, p.99.
* Boston Globe, February 3, 1995, section 3/ p. 47.
* Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1984; June 8, 1987; December 17, 1987; December 27, 1987, pp.4-S; January 20, 1993, p. section 1, p.20; January 24, 1993, section 13, pp.8-9; January 26, 1993, section 1, p. 16; January 15, 1995, section 13, pp. 16-17, 21.
* Chicago Tribune Book World, February 9, 1986, pp.12-13.
* Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 1984, pp.29-30; March 27, 1987, pp.1, 8; March 30, 1988, p.21.
* Ebony, January, 1985; November, 1987, pp.68, 70, 72, 74.
* Esquire, April, 1989, pp. 116, 118, 120, 122-27.
* Essence, August, 1987, pp.51, 111, 113.
* Journal and Constitution (Atlanta), October 17, 1993, p. Ni; October 13, 1994, p. Dli; January 9, 1995, p. D5.
* Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1984; November 7, 1986; April 17, 1987; June 7, 1987; June 8, 1987; June 9, 1987; February 6, 1988.
* Maclean's, May 28, 1990, p. 62; May 18, 1992, pp.56-57.
* Massachusetts Review, spring, 1988, pp. 87-97.
* Nation, April 18, 1987, p.518; June 1, 1990, pp. 832-33; June 8, 1992, pp.799-800.
* New Republic, May 21, 1990, pp. 28-30.
* Newsweek, April 6, 1987; April 11, 1988, p.82; April 27, 1992, p.70; February 6, 1995, p.60.
* New York, April 6, 1987, pp.92-94; May 7, 1990, pp. 82-83.
* New Yorker, April 6, 1987, p.81; April 11, 1988, p.107; April 30, 1990, p.85; April 27, 1992, p.85.
* New York Newsday, April 20, 1987, p.47.
* New York Post, March28, 1988; April 17, 1990.
* New York Times, April 11, 1984; April 13, 1984; October 12, 1984; October 22, 1984, p. CiS; May 5, 1985, p.80; May 6, 1986; May 14, 1986; May 19, 1986, p. Cli; June 20, 1986; March 27, 1987, p. C3; April 5, 1987, II, pp.1, 39; April 9, 1987; April 17, 1987; May 7, 1987; December 10, 1987; December 11, 1987; March 27, 1988, pp.1, 34; March 28, 1988, p. CiS; January 30, 1989, p.69; April 17, 1990, p. C13; March 10, 1991, section 2, pp.5, 17; January 25, 1995, pp. C13-C14; February 3, 1995, p. D26; February 5, 1995, section 2, pp.1, 5.
* New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1996, p.22.
* New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1987, pp.36, 40, 49, 70.
* People, May 13, 1996, p.63.
* Saturday Review, January-February, 1985, pp.83, 90.
* Theater, fall-winter, 1984, pp.50-55; summer-fall, 1986, pp.64; summer-fall, 1988, pp.69-71.
* Theatre Journal, December, 1994, pp.468-76.
* Time, April 6, 1987, p.81; April 27, 1987; April 11, 1988, pp.77-78; January 30, 1989, p.69; April 27, 1992, pp.65-66; February 6, 1995, p.71.
* Times (London), November 6, 1984; April 18, 1987; April 24, 1987.
* Variety, February 26, 1996, p.175.
* Vogue, August, 1988, pp.200, 204.
* Washington Post, May 20, 1986; April 15, 1987; June 9, 1987; October 4, 1987; October 9, 1987.*
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