August Wilson, Doubling, Madness, and Modern African-American Drama

August Wilson, Doubling, Madness, and Modern African-American Dramal HARRY J. ELAM, JR. My first association with August Wilson came in the spring of [987 when I was cast in the Studio Theater's production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in Washington, DC. This was the second professional production of the play, and so August Wilson came in from Minneapolis to see the production. It was a hit and ran for over twelve weeks, well into the swelteringly hot and humid DC summer. I played Ma's stuttering nephew, Sylvester. Sylvester's - and my - shining moment occurs well into the second act, when, after unsuccessfully stuttering through two previous attempts to record the intro to the title song, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," with Ma's coaxing hell steps trembling up to the mike and produces a stammer-free rendition. "Alright, boys, you done seen the rest ... now, I'm gonna show you the best. Ma Rainey's gonna show you her black bottom" (Wilson, Ma Rainey 69-70). After perfonnances, older black women would amble up to me and say, "Son, let me hear ya' talk!" And I would explain that I really did not, in fact, have a speech problem. Sylvester marks Wilson's first venture into a fonn of character that becomes a repeated trope in his dramaturgy, one he develops through Gabriel in Fences, Hambone in Two Trains Running, Hedley in Seven Guitars. and Stool Pigeon in King Hedley II: figures who appear mentally or physically handicapped. Paradoxically, in Wilson's works those characters who appear mentally impaired, besieged by madness, unable to grasp the reality of the world around them, represent a connection to a powerful. transgressive spirituality , to a lost African consciousness, and to a legacy of black social activism . By "madness" here I mean a condition within these figures that operates on both symbolic and literal planes. Their madness has both individual and cultural significance; it both constrains and empowers these characters. Unlike the others, Sylvester does not suffer from madness; his sense of consciousness or activism is rather nascent. Nonetheless, his act of delivering the song intro without stuttering is a moment of personal and collective transcendence that Modern Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 611 612 HARRY 1. ELAM, JR. benefits the gathered community. As such, it serves as precursor to the redemptive acts and transgressive rituals performed by these other figures in Wilson's subsequent dramas, rituals that will be the focus of this paper. [n addition, as demonstrated by Ma Rainey's gestures of accommodation and support toward Sylvester and even by the comments of the older black women who hovered around me after performances, Sylvester's difference and deficiency do not isolate him from the community in Wilson's work. Repeatedly, others - women in particular - act to incorporate and nurture this difference within the bounds of the community. Wilson's mad figures operate in ways that reconnect their particular African-American community spiritually and psychologically to its history, to the African in African-American experiences . Madness enables these characters to mediate both figuratively and literally against discord, for harmony, and for communal and cultural change. RACIAL MADNESS Significantly, through his use of madness, Wilson repcats and revises a concept that [ want to suggest has played a critical role in African-American modernism , its cultural practices as well as its social directives and philosophical treatises: the notion of "racial madness." This term refers to a trope that became operative in clinical practice. literary creation, and cultural theory in the modern period as artists, critics, and practitioners in al1 these arenas identified social and cultural roots for black psychological impairment. While [ will ground racial madness within a particularly American context, I want to point out that in his theory and practice Frantz Fanon - the Algerian psychiatrist/ philosopher whose seminal works of the 1950S and 1960s became manifestos for black revolutionary change in the 1960s and 1970S and have re-emerged at the forefront of postcolonial studies in the 1990S - believed that the madness, the mental disorder and the melancholia of the colonial subject, was a direct product of the social and political circumstances of colonialism. As Fran,ois Verges argues, Fanon...