AUGUST WILSON - Part 2: THE WRITING LESSON
Memories Inspired by Patti Hartigan's biography of the playwright
August Wilson’s plays, under the guidance of director Lloyd Richards (his greatest champion), a supportive producers, using a circuit of regional theaters around the country to refine and promote his work, before landing on Broadway. I got hip to this fact began planning weekend trips around his work, getting wind that a piece called ‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’ was being performed at D.C. the Arena Stage in D.C. in fall 1987, so I caught the Metro Liner. And, to honest, there was some romantic calculation behind these trips, since I used Wilson’s plays as out of town dates for possible mates. After all art and the heart are intimately connected.
‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’ may be Wilson’s most fully evolved play when it comes dealing with the legacy of slavery, the echoes of Africa in the African-American psyche, and competing philosophies of what path moved black folks forward in a still racism, post- enslavement America. The centerpiece of the play happens at the end of the first act when an West Africa inspired Juba dance rises mere celebration into a spiritual tumult that sends the play’s central character, Herald Loomis, back into the Middle Passage. It was an amazing moment, one that would get deeper as the play, though often brilliant, was skillfully pruned.
I didn’t yet realize how Wilson was using these regional performers to edit and craft his work. But that would come into focus when I attended two productions of ‘The Piano Lesson,’ one in New Haven at the Yale Repertory Theater in December 1987 and the other at the Huntington in Boston in January 1988.
The play centers around a profound but simple struggle. It is 1936 and Berniece Charles wants to hold onto a piano that has faces of enslaved relatives carved into it to honor their memory; her brother Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy property back in Mississippi. Wilson is asking “How should black people deal with the legacy of enslavement?” through this conflict. There’s humor. There are lovely monologues. There’s Sam Jackson, in one of his first showy roles as Boy Willie, bringing the pathos, passion and ribald humor he will soon be celebrated for.
There is also a ghost. The dead spirit of Sutter, slaver who owned their family, haunts the play and Berniece’s house. The second act wrestled mightily with how tangible Sutter’s ghost and what role his presence meant about Berniece and Boy Willie’s debate. On the train back from New Haven that night I was inspired by much of ‘The Piano Lesson’ but a bit confused by Wilson’s message. A month later I flew in on a Friday night to see ‘The Piano Lesson, probably more focused on trying to maintain a long-distance relationship, than seeing the play. Sadly, the relationship wouldn’t evolve, but the tickets she purchased for us would be the gift that keeps on giving.
The first act of ‘The Piano Lesson’ was very much the same as in New Haven. Perhaps because the text was so familiar, I ended up focusing on how the actor’s had refined their performances. Starletta DuBois as Berniece, Carl Gordon as Doaker and Rocky Carroll as Lymon all seemed more nuanced than in New Haven. Carroll, in particular, playing the comic relief/side kick role that was a staple of Wilson’s plays, was hilarious in act 1 and poignant in act 2. However, for Boston and Broadway Boy Willie, the then better-known Charles Dutton had replaced Jackson and wasn’t nearly as complex in the part. (Dutton would later recruit Carroll and Gordon for his well-liked Fox sit-com ‘Roc.’)
The evening’s revelation was the second act. It felt like a new play, as Wilson and Richards had altered the second act in two months of rethinking. It was tighter, shorter and its ending, now more mysterious than confusing. I felt like I’d been granted access to a great writer’s revision. To see Wilson so radically redraft a piece was an object lesson for in artistic boldness.
Throughout ’87 I’d been engaged in the difficult process of writing ‘The Death of Rhythm & Blues,’ an history of black popular music, a book which remains my most ambitious work. Taming that unruly beast of a book into a coherent narrative of blues, soul and R&B had frustrated me, so I’d come up with a cutesy concept for how to start each chapter. Along with practical editorial advice from my editor Wendy Wolf and free-lance editor Patti Romanowski, Wilson’s willingness to so brutally reexamine the second act of ‘The Piano Lesson’ led me to abandon my bells and whistles, honing down on what was really essential to tell that story. I’ve always tipped my cap to August Wilson for the good reviews when ‘The Death of Rhythm & Blues’ was published in ’88.
[More on August Wilson’s world in part 3]