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

Introduction

ALAN NADEL Introduction In less than a decade, August Wilson has become one of the most significant playwrights in the history of American theater and one of the most important contemporary African American writers. A prolific writer, Wilson began writing plays in the 1970s, and in the latter part of that decade he embarked upon an ambitious project to write a cycle of plays about African American life, one set in each decade of the twentieth century. He has now completed six plays in the cycle, five of which-Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), and Two Trains Running (1992)-have run on Broadway in an eightyear period, and by the time Two Trains reached Broadway, Wilson was well into writing the seventh play. Clearly Wilson is one of the most productive of American dramatists and, equally, one of the most vigilant historicizers of African American experience. He is also, without question, the most lauded American playwright ofthe 1980s. His five Broadway productions have earned him, in eight brief years, four New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards (Ma Rainey, Fences, Joe Turner, Piano Lesson), two Drama Desk Awards (Fences, Piano Lesson), an Outer Critics Circle Award (Fences), five Tony nominations, one Tony (Fences), and two Pulitzer prizes (Fences, Piano Lesson). As many have noted, however, Wilson's success could never have been predicted from his origins in poverty: He was raised by his mother and barely knew his (white) father. He grew up as one of six children in a two-room, cold-water flat located in the Pittsburgh Hill district (the area, it has been suggested, that inspired the television series Hill Street Blues). He dropped out of high school after being unjustly accused of plagiarizing a report on Napoleon. Subsequently, he worked in marginal jobs. During the 1960s he also wrote poetry and became involved in the Black Power movement. These two interests-writing and political action-intersected when he cofounded a black activist theater company in Pittsburgh. In 1978 he moved to St. Paul, where he wrote scripts for exhibitions at the Science Museum of Minnesota and became involved with the Playwrights' 2 INTRODUCTION Center in Minneapolis. At that point in his life, he began to concentrate his energies on the cycle of American dramas focused on black life in the twentieth century, from which all of his subsequent plays have come. The first, jitney, set in 1971, was produced at the Allegheny Repertory Theater. The second, Ma Rainey, won a national competition run by the National Playwrights Conference that gave it a staged reading at the O'Neill Theater in Connecticut, where it caught the attention of the conference director, Lloyd Richards, who was the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater and the dean of the Yale School of Drama. Ma Rainey and all of Wilson's subsequent plays were directed by Richards and premiered at the Yale Rep. When I met August Wilson, during the New York previews of Two Trains Running, he told me about an occasion on which he had wandered into a bar in Boston, to discover not only from the composition of the crowd but also from its general demeanor (not to mention his difficulty in getting the bartender 's attention), that it was a de facto whites-only bar. Under the circumstances , Wilson wanted merely to finish his drink and leave expeditiously. Then he heard rhythm and blues coming from the jukebox, and it changed his attitude. He began to savor his drink slowly and to make elbow room for himself at the crowded bar where he had been squeezed back. "You can't say," he reasoned, "that you want my music here but you don't want me." In many ways, this story may be seen as a metaphor for Wilson's dramatic enterprise. Establishing himself over the past decade as the leading playwright in contemporary American theater, Wilson has created elbow room at the bar by making visible the connection between African American culture and the dominant white culture that has taken it for granted. This enterprise is as problematic as is the unique piano in The Piano Lesson, on the surface of which was carved by Boy Willie's and Berniece's great-grandfather the images of their slave ancestors. In antebellum America, their great-grandmother and their grandfather had been traded for that piano; their father had died to retrieve it. It...