May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essyas on the Drama of August Wilson

Preface

ALAN NADEL Preface When I was nine years old I saw Orson Welles-I think it was on "The Steve Allen Show"-perform Shylock's speech from The Merchant of Venice. I was so struck by the power of the speech and its rendition that I read the play. It was not typical fare for a fourth-grader, and I'm not sure what I got from the experience, but I do remember discovering that the play was not just about prejudice but about money and, I guess, about the ways in which they are connected. I also remember feeling that it was about a similar connection between money and love and about the problems of a smart woman in a stupid world, a woman who reminded me of the women played by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell in the old movies I loved to watch on television. It was just about then that my parents took me to see Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind, a play based on the Scopes trial that tested the Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching ofevolution. This too, as I understood it, was about the destructive power of prejudice and the need to resist it. The same themes were being played out that year (and perhaps ever since) across my television screen as court-ordered desegregation was pitting the courage of six-year-old children against the fears of the governor of Arkansas. It is impossible to assess the exact impact ofthese and ofso many other events from 1956 and 1957 that remain vivid in my memory. But I know that that period marks a time when I became however crudely aware of the ways theater, film, even television constituted a gateway not only out to the vast suffering and success of others but also into my small personal sites of fear and fortitude, sites made slightly larger and more communal through my ability to recognize them elsewhere. I think this explains my love of theater and the profound effect it has had on me over nearly four decades. And I would like to think that this explanation is implicit in the inscription August Wilson wrote on my copy of his plays: "Mayall your fences have gates." Everything we know of history is circumscribed by fences. From the walls of the womb and the bars of the crib to x PREFACE colonial maps and the Berlin Wall, we can chart human civilization in the dust or the shadow of fences, and thus the frame of the proscenium may possibly stand as the sign of history, that is, of the fence opened by the gateway of drama. Literary criticism, one hopes, can also provide gateways through the proscenium arch to eliminate some barriers to understanding or open th~ written and the performed to new perspectives. That has been the goal of this collection. As such it represents my attempt to return in small part the great favor theater does for us all. And it represents my personal gratitude for the plays of August Wilson, which continually reconfirm the important social and historical power of drama. My gratitude also goes to all the contributors for their fine essays and to Maryemma Graham, who served as the helpful respondent at the Modern Language Association session where this collection was born. Permissions were provided by the Bearden Foundation for the Bearden prints and by Spin magazine for August Wilson's essay. I also greatly appreciate the University of Iowa Press for being accessible, cooperative, and encouraging and for sending the manuscript to a superb copy editor, Jan McInroy. Special thanks go to Emily Kretchmer, August Wilson's assistant during the time this book was compiled, for countless forms of help. And to my wife, Amy Perkins, with whom a running dialogue about theater and literature continues to invigorate rather than exhaust in ways that make projects such as this one seem possible and become rewarding. Finally, to August: may all your gates open both ways. MAY ALL YOUR FENCES HAVE GATES ...