Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience

5. Aristotle’s “Spectacle” and August Wilson’s “Spectacle Character”

143 FIVE Aristotle’s “Spectacle” and August Wilson’s “Spectacle Character” Joe Turner’s Come and Gone For a black actor to stand on the stage as part of a social milieu that has denied him his gods, his culture, his humanity, his mores, his ideas of himself and the world he lives in is to be in league with a thousand naysayers who wish to corrupt the vigor and spirit of his heart. . . . The idea of colorblind casting is the same idea of assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. For the record we reject it again. —August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand” August Wilson (1945–2005) was the most prominent African American playwright of the twentieth century, perhaps the best-known black dramatist ever.1 Wilson won critical acclaim and acceptance in the mainstream of American drama with plays like Fences (1985), which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, and The Piano Lesson (1990), which won the Pulitzer. Each of these plays represents a particular decade in Wilson’s Century Cycle. The Century plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, take on specific aspects of African American life: slavery, and then the Great Migration from the South to Northern cities; black artistic traditions, such as the blues, in cities like Chicago; segregation and the deferring of dreams 1 I part ways with Phillis Wheatley here and do not count the Roman Terence in modern constructions of blackness. I say this somewhat jokingly. 144 Aristotle and Black Drama endemic to “separate but equal”; and civil rights and integration, including the late twentieth-century ambivalence toward affluence experienced by African Americans, who Wilson sees are inextricably bound up with the past of slavery and Jim Crow life.2 Making these topics palatable for theatergoers , showing the essential humanity of black American experiences, was a Herculean feat. Yet, given his success, Wilson’s assertion that he was fired in the kiln of the Black Power movement, his rejection of color-blind casting in such American plays as Death of a Salesman, unsettles his European and American audiences.3 Yet easy classification of Wilson’s work as “black theater” is an erasure of the playwright’s study of European models, Aristotle’s Poetics in particular. Wilson is not a dramatist easily read in the context of classical reception. He never wrote Greek drama, if what is meant by that category is direct adaptation of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. Nevertheless, Wilson is among the most classical—the most Aristotelian—American playwrights. Wilson’s comments from the outset of “The Ground on Which I Stand” help ground them in what he thought was fertile soil: “In one guise the ground I stand on has been pioneered by the Greek dramatists, by Euripides , Aeschylus and Sophocles, by William Shakespeare, by Shaw and Ibsen, and by the American dramatists Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams” (2007: 493). Out of context, Wilson’s later comments on his understanding of black theater, quoted in the epigraph, belie his career-long engagement with the Greeks and subsequent European theater. Wilson’s approach to Aristotle was theoretical, specifically in questions about how drama does its work. Wilson’s study of Aristotle shows in his plays. He challenges Aristotelian theory specifically at the level of opsis, “sight” or “spectacle.” Racial distinctions are first taken in at sight, and therefore Wilson understood that dismantling race might also happen through opsis. As a playwright of deep conscience—and perhaps defiance— regarding the traditions he inherits, Wilson is not satisfied simply to accept Aristotle’s terms regarding opsis. In the context of Wilson’s visual embodiment of African American history onstage, his discussion of Aristotle’s opsis 2 The popularity of Wilson’s plays might best be noted in the proliferation of Wilson research. For full volumes on Wilson, see most prominently Nadel (1994), Shannon (1995), Elam (2006), and Bigsby (2007). This is not to mention anthologies in which specific essays on Wilson appear, such as Harris and Larson (2007). The interviews that I discuss in this chapter are from Bryer and Hartig (2006). 3 See Wilson (2007). Kevin Wetmore puts Wilson in a separate class of black playwrights from Adrienne Kennedy because of his opposition to color-blind casting, which Wetmore advocates throughout. See Wetmore (2003). Aristotle’s “Spectacle” and August Wilson’s “Spectacle Character...