August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle

Finite and Final Interruptions: Using Time in Radio Golf

I n an interview with Suzan-Lori Parks shortly before August Wilson ’s death, Wilson noted that he had consciously included characters from the African American middle class in his play Radio Golf (2005)—figures mostly absent from his Pittsburgh cycle. The earlier plays had focused on the working class and the poor, often illustrating these characters’ struggle with what Wilson saw as the long-term effects of the Great Migration. Rather than an interruption—a hiatus between two fields that does not permanently break their relationship—Wilson spoke of this change as an irreversible rupture; a disaster for the continuity of black traditions. It was “a transplant that did not take,” as he once put it: “We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent two hundred years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North” (quoted in Rothstein, 8). Expanding on this theme in his conversation with Parks, Wilson argued that many African Americans who have since entered the tax brackets and ideological headspace of the privileged have continued this process: they have “adopted the values of the dominant society and have in the process given up some of their cultural values.” “There are ways to live life on this planet without being a consumer, without being concerned about acquiring hundreds of millions of dollars,” Wilson noted (Parks, 22). “These people that stack it up, man,” he declared. Parks laughed in response to this bluesy provocation and asked ironically, “What’s he going to do with it?” Wilson replied with no small vehemence: “He’s going to die!” (24). Even if one’s available resources multiply the posdavid lacroix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finite and Final Interruptions Using Time in Radio Golf Finite and Final Interruptions 163 sibilities for acquisition, the ability to use that which one has acquired eventually ends, punctuated with mortal finality. Among the injunctions that Wilson’s oeuvre lays upon its audiences is a call to fulfill two sets of demands illustrated in his talk with Parks: those created by the finitude of an individual human life and those necessitated by the continuity of that life with the finite lives of others. Radio Golf dramatizes the relationship of its black middle-class protagonist to these issues, ultimately suggesting that it is at least possible to conceive a world in which such a figure no longer acts only from self-interest. In addition to reinvigorating familiar tropes from African American literature—most notably a younger figure’s intellectual encounter with a range of black worldviews—Radio Golf makes the implicit claim that individuals’ use of their finite time both grounds and reveals their deeper ethical and political commitments. Attending to the use of time in the play not only foregrounds the choices made by characters, but also sheds light on how time is implicated in larger structures of privilege, access, and exploitation. One’s finite time may be multiplied by access to the time of others, or divided and subdivided at the command of others. For Wilson, recognition of the finitude of time is the only viable counterclaim to privilege. Moments that interrupt that privilege can make alternatives visible. InAfricanAmericanliterature,questionsoftimearerarelyframedfrom a standpoint of plenitude and privilege. As seen though Toni Morrison’s spectral and ancestral figures, the boomerang of history in Ralph Ellison’s InvisibleMan,BookerT.Washington’sadmonishmentstoproductivityand frugality, and the laments of ex-slaves like Equiano, Douglass, and Jacobs about their exclusion from Western measures of temporality, the control of one’s own time is always a hard-won accomplishment. Characters who take time for granted are rare, no matter how one conceives it. This condition characterizes most of the Pittsburgh cycle as well, and prior considerations of time in Wilson’s oeuvre have drawn out the implications of his characters ’ frequent inability to use their time as they see fit, or only to use it with some freedom after negotiating conflicting claims on it.1 But by 1997—the time of Radio Golf—much of this has changed, at least for some. The action of the play revolves around the house at 1839 Wylie Avenue, 164 david lacroix which has lain empty since Aunt Ester’s death in 1985. Taken for an abandoned property, the house is seized by the city of Pittsburgh and then sold to...