August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle

Introduction

A t a turning point in his career, August Wilson was faced with a crucial decision. He had won the National Playwrights Conference competition, which gave his play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in Connecticut. The conference director, Lloyd Richards, who at the time was also dean of the Yale School of Drama, wanted to do the play at the Yale Repertory, but Wilson was more attracted to a lucrative Broadway contract. When he read that contract closely, however, he discovered he would be signing away control over the play. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—a play about about the role of black music in a white industry, the problem of artistic control, and the conflict between communal production and commercial—concerns not only how the products of the black community have been altered by their conversion into white commerce, but also how the community itself has been damaged in the process. In other words, the play, like Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, explores the different inflection property rights have when framed by black American history, with its origins in chattel slavery. Conflict over the meaning of property—implicit, arguably, in all of Wilson’s drama—becomes particularly cogent in the last two plays that Wilson completed, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf. These plays culminate the writing of Wilson’s ten-play, twentieth-century cycle, and, set in 1904 and 1997, respectively, they also bookend the time span that the cycle chronicles. In Gem, a black man has died in order to prove that his life is worth more than a bucket of nails, and in Radio Golf, another black man abandons his mayoral aspirations to affirm the property rights of a Pittsburgh home once owned by his great aunt that legitimately belongs to his cousin. In Ma Rainey, in other words, even before Wilson had fully envisioned the cycle that would trace the arc of black ownership in the Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Introduction twentieth century, he grappled with some of its basic issues. These entail the relationship of human worth to human labor to human production to physical property, as all of these factors are weighed on the imbalanced scale of America’s racial history. Clearly, the Broadway producers who wanted to acquire Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, who wanted to put their own property rights above those of August Wilson, didn’t understand the property they were pursuing. When Wilson raised objections, he was told that the contract wasn’t that important: “In this industry,” they said, “we go a lot on faith.” “As long as the words don’t mean anything,” Wilson responded, “why don’t you write the contract my way?” The producers told him to call his agent; instead, he called Lloyd Richards, and together they mounted a production at Yale that eventually, under Wilson’s careful artistic control and Richards’s equally careful direction, went to Broadway, where it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Two years later, in similar fashion, the two brought Fences to Broadway, then Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, and Two Trains Running. These plays, the first five in the cycle to reach Broadway, amassed two Drama Desk Awards, five New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, an American Theatre Critics Association Award, a Tony Award, and two Pulitzer Prizes. As a group, those first five plays have garnered the greatest body of critical attention, including the essays inMay All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (Iowa, 1995), the companion piece to this collection. The 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. Several factors effect that shift. The first is the revised Jitney, converted from a solitary play written in the historical present of the 1970s to the play Wilson used to represent the 1970s decade in the ten-play project that Wilson conceived after Jitney was first written and performed regionally. As the play that reunites the cycle with the history of its own origins, therefore , it multiplies the historical dimensions of the cycle as a whole. In that Introduction 3 play...