August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle ed. by Alan Nadel (review)

As the collective shock and grief following August Wilson's death in 2005 subsided, editor Alan Nadel and his contributors took up the challenge of assessing the playwright's ten-play "Twentieth-Century Cycle," reading the plays against one another, teasing out their intertextualities, and considering them in the context of a now completed century. Conceived as a "companion" to Nadel's edited collection of critical essays, May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994), this volume addresses how "[t]he other five plays completing the cycle—in order of their New York productions: Seven Guitars, Jitney, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf—not only give that cycle some new dimensions, but also provide an overall shape that converts the cycle from an anthology to a loosely structured epic" (2). This timely contribution to Wilson scholarship assembles fourteen critical essays by fifteen contributors, introducing and elaborating upon significant themes that give shape to the entirety of the ten-play cycle.

In his introduction, Nadel deftly negotiates and highlights the organizational challenges that Wilson's oeuvre poses to editors, critics, and readers, given that it asks to be considered decade by decade although written (or revised, in the case of Jitney) and produced out of chronological order. Accordingly, the essays are grouped loosely around the order of Broadway production, with Jitney as the critically purposeful exception. The collection opens with Nadel's "Beginning Again, Again: Business in the Street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean" considering, as it does, two "firsts" of critical and thematic significance: Jitney, the first play of the cycle that Wilson wrote (and later revised to fit into his subsequent ten-play project) and Gem, the play representing the first decade of the cycle. The essays following Nadel's consideration of beginnings are loosely grouped around singular or comparative treatments of Jitney, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf. With occasional nods to the "unavoidably elegiac aspect of this collection" (12), Nadel's introduction effectively blends biographical and critical consideration of Wilson to prepare readers for the individual and collective impact of the volume's perspectives.

Along with Nadel, Sandra Shannon and Harry Elam Jr. constitute the critical links to the previous collection (as well as to their own considerable scholarship on Wilson). The editor positions Shannon's "Turn Your Lamp Down Low! Aunt Ester Dies in King Hedley II. Now What?" in the middle (marking the shift in the collection to Aunt Ester and Gem of the Ocean) and Elam's "Radio Golf in the Age of Obama" at the end. Nadel's collection thus effectively maintains a simultaneous focus on and critical dialogue with extant scholarship, the entirety of the ten-play cycle, and its bookends Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf—the last two plays that Wilson wrote.

Without exception, each essay takes a comprehensive view of the cycle, yet surprisingly avoids repetition. Rather, contributors appear to be participants in a conversation, recalling, for this reader, the pleasures of a rigorous seminar with knowledgeable and witty participants around the table. Dana Williams and Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, for example, both write on notions of black masculinity in Jitney. Likewise, Steven Tracy, Donald Pease, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Herman Beavers, and Shannon all consider intertextualities between Seven Guitars and King Hedley II.

Midway through the collection, Shannon shifts the conversation toward the formidable characters who anchor the cycle—namely, Aunt Ester and Black Mary, whom Wilson positions at the start of the century in Gem of the Ocean. Shannon argues that "[f]ocused by the century that Wilson has dramatized, Aunt Ester initiates and sustains the intertextual conversations that transcend those temporal limits. She not only ties the cycle together but also ties the cycle as a whole to the thousands of years and millions of individual histories that made the twentieth-century African American experience possible" (131). Vivian Gist Spencer and Yvonne Chambers trace...