What August Wilson Means Now
During two improbably fertile decades, starting in the 1980s, August Wilson (1945-2005) wrote a cycle of 10 generation-spanning plays portraying African-American lives in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. The scope of this accomplishment was matched by the resonant singularity of his voice, which audiences can experience afresh this year, through the film version of Wilson’s “Fences” and the Broadway debut of his early play “Jitney.” The New York Times critics Ben Brantley and Wesley Morris sat down to talk about listening to a great chronicler of the 20th century in the second decade of the 21st.
BEN BRANTLEY Watching “Fences,” I was pleased to note how felicitously Denzel Washington, the film’s star and director, acknowledged the importance of speech as the shaper of the Wilson universe. We hear him (and Stephen McKinley Henderson) speaking before we see them. Enter talking, as it were.
How does that language come across to you at this moment, Wesley? Charles S. Dutton, who has appeared in a number of Wilson’s plays, noted that the dialogue didn’t sound like anything he’d ever heard anywhere — not even when he visited Pittsburgh. There’s a sort of Shakespearean heightening of vernacular going on, isn’t there?
WESLEY MORRIS There is! But just like with Shakespeare, a good August Wilson actor will pull you all the way through the language so that it sounds utterly natural, and Denzel Washington is a very good August Wilson actor. You’re listening for two things with Wilson, as well as with lots of lyrical playwrights. First, there’s the handsomeness of the language itself, the way he insists that black vernacular is its own grammar. Then, you’re listening to hear what characters are saying to each other. It’s funny with “Fences,” because so much of it feels earthbound — and not because Troy Maxson (Mr. Washington) and his friend and co-worker Bono (Mr. Henderson) are riding on the back of a garbage truck.
It’s because at any moment a regular gripe session can burst into the ethereal. And you’re watching these two actors as well as Viola Davis, who plays Troy’s wife, Rose, and Mykelti Williamson, as Troy’s brother, Gabriel, and you get the sense that saying all of this is a kick because as an actor — but, let’s face it, as a black actor — how often do you get to work with this kind of rich, meaty poetry that’s also so particular to a people, which is to say so beautifully black? That, I imagine, is both the joy and the stress of doing Wilson. You want to be worthy of the words.
BRANTLEY Absolutely. I can’t think of another American dramatist since Tennessee Williams who writes with the generous lyricism of Wilson. It’s almost as much like the tragedies of ancient Greece as it is like Shakespeare, or perhaps grand opera, even though the characters belong to another social stratum, altogether, from the usual aristocrats of Verdi. Wilson found the divine in the down home. Those are exalted arias he wrote for the characters of Mr. Washington and Ms. Davis, in one of the greatest performances of the year.
Of course, when Wilson began writing his 10-play cycle in the early 1980s, there wasn’t anything else like it — not only in African-American theater but in American theater period. (O’Neill tried, but he didn’t get very far, in his trans-generational series of plays.) What sort of doors did that open, do you think, for other African-American dramatists and in the theater in general?
MORRIS A lot of doors. There’s always this assumption that black people should sing and dance in the theater. And the country’s racial history has kept a perfectly reasonable mode of artistic expression — the musical — warped with self-consciousness. Wilson wrote plays (sometimes about music and that warping), and lots of people saw them, gave them prizes, Tonys even. Gradually, it let producers and money people know that black nonmusical theater is viable, that there could be drama and ideas, and you could have artists as different as Suzan-Lori Parks and Lynn Nottage and Katori Hall and Anna Deavere Smith.
In Performance: Brandon J. Dirden
Brandon J. Dirden as Boy Willie in the Signature Theater’s revival of August Wilson’s “Piano Lesson.”
By Poh Si Teng and Erik Piepenburg on December 26, 2012. .Watch in Times Video »
There were two black playwrights when I was a schoolkid. Let me rephrase that. There were two black plays: “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Classic theater, on the one hand. Vegetables, on the other. I was too young to know about James Baldwin or Amiri Baraka. I was also too young for the Youngers of Hansberry’s play. But every year we’d read “A Raisin in the Sun,” out loud. We’d watch some production of it. And I never knew what that play was about — people who have to move out of their house, I guess.
Now that I’m grown, “Raisin in the Sun” seems like a book of the American bible to me — mad and sad and militant and resigned at the same time. Necessary. At some point, “Fences” became the third play. It was conversant in the same joy and blues of Hansberry and Ms. Shange. And it was alive in this different way. Wilson was a man writing from his loins. Just as I couldn’t have known as a boy that “Raisin” is as feminist as “For Colored Girls,” albeit to very different ends, I also didn’t realize how much Wilson was thinking about masculinity, matriarchy and their respective discontents. Or how much the themes in Hansberry’s work course through Wilson, in something like “Radio Golf,” which is a real meal of a political play.
BRANTLEY We do have to address the Hansberry connection, especially since “Raisin” has been so dismissed or at least seen as superannuated by certain members of subsequent generations of artists. (Remember George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum”?) One thing that occurred to me encountering “Fences” again was how much of the anger in Mr. Washington’s character — a garbage man who wanted to be a baseball star — pulsed through Walter Lee Younger in “Raisin.” Their aspirations are different. But they are both deeply aware of how much their world is shaped by being “underneath” a white ruling class. But to talk about the differences: Walter Lee wants to move into a white suburb with his family. Wilson thought that a vivid and original culture would be lost by African-Americans blending into the white mainstream.
That was a subject of “Radio Golf,” in which he distinguished between “Negroes,” whom he saw as emulating corrupt white capitalists, and “n-words,” to whom he ascribed a greater integrity and authenticity and defiant style.
That’s of a piece with his insistence that his plays (and movies) not be helmed by white directors. (That’s one reason it took “Fences” so long to get to the screen.) He also thought colorblind casting was wrong, that it uprooted African-Americans from their own enriching context. It would be fascinating to have known his take on the work of someone like the contemporary playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who sees the African-American identity as an existential and very mutable question, shaped by self-consciousness and self-editing.
MORRIS So this is the fashionabilty question, right? When does a modern master like Wilson stop being contemporary? Or if you’re a producer: How do you make him contemporary? Blackness is immutable in Wilson’s work — ineffable. So is place. Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins is among a school of meta artists where very little appears to be fixed. Looseness is the idea when it comes to being black, where its consequences could be a burden in a Wilson play. But blackness is a fact. What one does with it, for Wilson, is a different matter. One tension in a Wilson play is how much history (whether it’s the history of racism or of black culture) do we live with in the present and bring with us into the future. What do we keep? What do we sell?
Is it crazy to think the younger black postmodernists — these interrogators of blackness, these satirists of race — have an intellectual luxury afforded them by Wilson’s dogged devotion to place and history? What made Wilson such an Olympian figure was that he could fit the whole country in an office or a backyard and make the bigness of his ideas seem life-size. As for what he would have had to say about this mutability matter? I’d like to think he’d probably have written a play about it.
BRANTLEY I do think there are playwrights who, while taking advantage of the intellectual luxury you mentioned, are still dealing with the same subjects as Wilson — especially the legacy, and the burden, of black history in this country. That’s certainly been an abiding preoccupation for Suzan-Lori Parks, whose past haunts the present as enduringly as the slave ghosts in Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.” Its spectral presence shows up in so much of her major work, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” (in which two brothers keep re-enacting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) and her epic-in-progress “Father Comes Home From the Wars.”
What the voices of the dead summoned in a climactic séance of sorts in “Gem” keep whispering is “Remember me,” and I’d argue that’s an oeuvre-defining message not only in Wilson’s work but also in that of Ms. Parks and, for that matter, the essays of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
No one now believes, even after Barack Obama’s two-term presidency, that we’re living in a postracial society. Most of the writers descended from Wilson, no matter how different their styles, would agree that you can’t begin to deal with the present without remembering a past that has never been (and may never will be) come to terms with.
MORRIS So true, Ben. If anything, we’re living in a most racial society — some of us are just a little more “most” than others. We’re in a time of identity-first culture, a time in which those identities are being pitted against one another for political sport. That’s also because it’s a fundamental aspect of who we are as a nation. And all of these artists, including and especially George C. Wolfe, explore the legacy of that.
What I’ve come to love about Wilson is how much tradition meant to him. His most agitated characters breach or exploit it. Others are trying to uphold some notion of legacy without it crushing them. I’m thinking of “The Piano Lesson” and “Two Trains Running,” and “Fences,” the play more than film, which bypasses a lot of the play’s psychological underpinnings. Day-to-day work and day-to-day struggle operate in complete awareness of the larger African-American experience of work and struggle. That’s cultural tradition. That’s racial heritage.
BRANTLEY A couple of contemporary writers we didn’t mention, who I think are in their way in the Wilson tradition: Dominique Morisseau, who did a pulsing cycle on Detroit, and curiously, Tarell Alvin McCraney (who wrote the work on which the Golden Globe-winning movie “Moonlight” is based). His “Brother/Sister” plays are postmodern in their formal self-consciousness but combine the spiritual and the material in the way that Wilson does — giving a suprahuman dimension to a very specific everyday reality.
He, by the way, was an assistant to Wilson on “Radio Golf,” and I love a quote that Mr. McCraney gave about him in an interview: “August’s work is great and I love it. But I also thought, there’s room for me. As Alvin Ailey said: ‘All stories are old. The only thing that’s new is you.’”
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/theater/what-august-wilson-means-now.html
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