AUGUST WILSON - Part 1

The First Major Biography Sparks Memories of Words and Music

While August Wilson was alive, I attended all ten of his American Century plays, catching ‘Radio Golf’ at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum in July 2005 just four months before his death. I used to say Wilson was my favorite living writer. Now that’s been dead nearly two decades, I’d call him one of my all-time favorite writers with a place on my personal Mount Rushmore alongside Chester Hines, Raymond Chandler and Ralph Ellison. The first major biography of the playwright was just published by former Boston Globe staffer Patti Hartigan as ‘August Wilson: A Life’ (Simon and Schuster, 531 pages, $32.50). The sections on Wilson’s ancestors and early life in Pittsburgh really establish his emotional journey, the impact of his family ties to the American South and Africa, and the struggle to find his voice as a writer. There’s plenty of juicy behind the scenes details, including his power struggle with his star, James Earl Jones, for control of his biggest commercial hit, ‘Fences.’

I’m still making my way through Hartigan’s book, but reading it pulls me away from her narrative to my entanglements with Wilson’s work and the world of his plays: I saw the original ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ production on Broadway in 1984; ‘Fences’ three times in Broadway with Jones and then Billy Dee Williams in the lead; ‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’ in Washington, D.C. and Broadway; ‘The Piano Lesson’ in New Haven, Boston and twice in Broadway; ‘Two Trains Running,’ ‘Seven Guitars,’ ‘Gem of the Ocean’  and ‘Radio Golf’ in Los Angeles before each reached New York; ‘Jitney’ off Broadway seventeen years before it opened in the Great White Way; and ‘King Hedley II’ opening night in NYC. Yes, I was an August Wilson stan, who traveled by train and plane to hear his words spoken.

The rare two disk recording of ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ featuring the original cast and a blurb from a column I wrote in Billborad about the play. It was released on Manhattan Records in 1985.

For me, Wilson was a spellbinding poet for whom drama is more a vehicle than a destination. Large sections of his plays lack the conflict you’d expect from such a celebrated dramatist. Yet as lyrical soliloquies strung together by threads of narrative his plays evoke a subtext of African American struggle, including the battle of spiritual versus secular religion, African versus European philosophies. Scenes evolve into operatic monologue in which a speaker – Slow Drag in ‘Ma Rainey,’ Troy Maxim in ‘Fences,’ Bynum the conjure man in ‘Joe Turner,’ Holloway in ‘The Piano Lesson’ – riff in enchanted phrases Lester Young would love. Most action stops as a single character steps up and solos. Although many black writers attempt it, few can capture the essence of colloquial African American language and infuse it with multilayered lyricism without seeming hokey or contrived.

Ma Rainey’s band in the original Broadway production of the play (left to right) Charles S. Dutton, Robert Judd, Leonard Jackson and Joe Seneca.

Wilson’s death didn’t end my love affair with his words, but definitely made the future a little less exciting. Unless his estate unearths something fresh from his files, I’ll never have that joy of hearing a new August Wilson monologue again. Mortality, a concept you don’t always contemplate deeply when you’re young, becomes an uneasy companion in middle age. Each time a connection to your youth is broken it brings you close to your own end, whether you’re comfortable admitting it or not. In Wilson’s plays someone dies, has died or is about to die. He wasn’t afraid of it as a topic, acknowledging that it may be the only topic worth dramatizing. It is the great unknown, which is why the certainties of faith are so damn comforting – at least we think we know want’s going to happen when our heart stops.

Wilson’s work was also centered around the rhythms and cadences of black life. He understood the world through the blues, which was in the DNA of all the music I’ve written about since I could find people who’d pay me for my opinion. In his work Wilson created a synthesis of the literary and the musical that transported me. I didn’t start writing to be August Wilson but, at some point, I was writing what I wrote because of him.

[PART ONE OF A MULTIPART ESSAY]