AUGUST WILSON - PART 3: OF ACTORS AND FIRE
Memories inspired by Patti Hartigan's new biography of the master playwright
Following Wilson’s Century Cycle, from regional theaters to Broadway, put me in contact with “Wilson’s Warriors,” the community of black actors who’d perform in multiple productions of his of plays. Most aren’t household names and many have passed. But two of my favorites, in particular, left their mark on Wilson’s canon and still impact popular culture. Though Wilson’s work featured showy roles lead actors – James Earl Jones and Mary Alice in ‘Fences,’ Laurence Fishburne in ‘Two Trains,’ Keith David in ‘Seven Guitars’ -, I often found in the soul of his plays resided in his clever, sometimes nefarious, often hilarious secondary characters.
The first performance of ‘Seven Guitars’ I witnessed was at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles where Ruben Santiago-Hudson played Canewell, an itinerant harmonica player and sage raconteur. Hudson was an actor who’d been on my radar screen for some time as he shined in supporting parts of all kinds. He’d amused me during a Shakespeare in Central Park production when he’d performed the Bard with a playful Puerto Rican accent.
In ‘Seven Guitars, where his musical partner Floyd Barton was a willful, impractical dreamer, Canewell had his feet on the ground, seeing the world for what it was. Where Floyd was vainglorious, Canewell was just plain confident. Midway through the first act Canewell waxes poetic on why he preferred a knife to a gun as a weapon of choice, not simply advocating one mode of killing over another, but debating the merits of tradition versus modernity with funny punch lines. I’d love to quote from that passage of text but, by the time ‘Seven Guitars’ reached Broadway that dialog had been cut by Wilson, so it isn’t in the play’s published text. Just as with the Boston rewrite of ‘The Piano Lesson,’ I was impressed with Wilson’s ability to edit out prose other writers (eg: me) would have cut fingers off to have composed.
RUBEN SANTIAGO-HUDSON AND KEITH DAVID IN ‘SEVEN GUITARS.’
Years later I ran into Hudson at a social event and mentioned the monologue to him. Boom! He just started reciting it off the top of his head like an MC doing a free-style. He’d loved “knife versus gun” as much as I had, but said Wilson felt it unbalanced that section of the play. Hudson also told me something I’d always suspected – that dialogue and situations cut during the long out of town journey to Broadway – often ended up recycled into other productions.
Aside from being an able interpreter of Wilson’s work, Hudson would become one of his primary artistic inheritors. His one man show, ‘Lackawana Blues,’ (later expanded into an award winning HBO film), was an natural extension of Wilson’s work as Hudson’s language and precise recreation of a specific African-American milieu was in keeping with the Wilson tradition. After Wilson’s passing, Hudson would direct many of Wilson’s plays on stage and pen the screenplay for the film version of ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ that starred the late Chadwick Boseman.
Towards the end of his life Wilson returned to one of his first plays, ‘Jitney,’ a piece about a black owned taxicab company in the 1970s. The piece was originally performed in Pittsburgh in 1982 and then rewritten for a wonderful off-Broadway production in 2000. That cast was stacked with dynamic performers, but none were as compelling as Stephen McKinley Henderson, who played Turnbo, a lecherous middle-aged man with a poison tongue, who could have been a one note antagonist. However Henderson’s delivery was sly and vulnerable as he came onto the young girlfriend of another driver. No way this woman was gonna pay Turnbo no mind and that knowledge made us feel sad for the character even when he did tried to destroy the relationship of the young lovers.
STEPHEN MCKINLEY HENDERSON IN ‘JITNEY,’
A few years later I’d be an executive producer of an HBO film, ‘Everyday People,’ and sat in on casting sessions. We were looking for a smallish, perhaps dark-skinned actor for the role of the host/manager at a Brooklyn diner on its last legs. Henderson, who was round and very fair skinned, wasn’t what we had in mind. Well, once Henderson sat down and said a few words of dialogue, the auditions for that part were over. Whatever we thought the character looked like didn’t matter. Henderson’s performance WAS the character. You’ve seen Henderson in scores of TV and film projects over the years with his next big role in Dune 2 as House of Atreides advisor Thufir Hawat.
In 2005 I attended a performance of Wilson’s tenth play, ‘Radio Golf,’ in Los Angeles and was very excited because there was going to be a talk back with the playwright afterwards. Sadly, it was announced that Wilson had not made it down to L.A. for the opening. Not long after I got word that Wilson was dying of liver cancer. He passed away on October 2, 2005. Just fourteen days after Wilson’s death at theater at 245 West 52nd Street was named in his honored. I was not in NYC for the naming ceremony, so I decided to have own service to honor of the impact he’d had on me.
I brought the Playbill from ‘Ma Rainey’s Broadway run with me, stood in front of the August Wilson Theater and lit that publication on fire. I received some frightened looks from late night revelers, but I held the Playbill until the flames consumed the slick paper and I let it fall to the ground. I stomped out the fire with my feet, said a prayer for the blessing of Wilson’s words, and thought of Troy Maxim, Boy Willie, and Canewell as I headed east towards on 52nd Street.