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Article Excerpt
Patricia M. Gantt
Putting Black Culture on Stage: August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle
In "Putting Black Culture on Stage: August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle," Patricia M. Gantt offers an overview of Wilson's life and work, including his background, motivation, dramatic aesthetic, and themes. Taking each of the ten plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle in the order of its New York stage production, Gantt discusses the works' characters and recurring concerns. Throughout, she investigates Wilson's stated goal of drawing on black culture--in ail its sacred and secular particularities--to create art. Her critique aims at suggesting possible fields of future inquiry for teachers and scholars, and assesses Wilson's numerous contributions to American dramatic tradition.
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If it can be said that a single voice dominated the American theater from the 1980s through 2005, that voice definitely belonged to playwright August Wilson. Wilson, whom news analyst Gwen Ifill dubbed "the American Shakespeare," was a prolific writer with more than ten major plays, numerous theatrical commentaries, and other creative work to his credit (2001).Yet it is not merely the number of his productions that marks Wilson's dominance in modern drama, but his ability to put into words the ideas and experiences of everyday African Americans, who have long been caricatured, relegated to the periphery, or displaced altogether in drama created by playwrights from mainstream white society. His characters, while for the most part living out their lives in a single locale, grapple with themes and issues that all people must deal with. In constructing a thoroughly American world of recording studios, taxi stands, back yards, and kitchens, Wilson created a body of drama with universal appeal.
One of only seven Americans to have won multiple Pulitzer Prizes for drama, Wilson was, in addition to being one of this country's finest playwrights, one of its most ambitious writers. Early in his dramatic career, he assigned himself the objective of writing ten plays which, taken together, would depict African American experiences in the twentieth century. Each play was to be set in a different decade, and would reflect cultural issues vital for giving a more rounded picture of life in the United States. Wilson devoted almost three decades to the project, which he completed just before his death in 2005. (Radio Golf, the tenth play in the cycle, made its Los Angeles debut after Wilson had been diagnosed with liver cancer, a scant four months before he died.) In the course of pursuing this dramatic historiography of America, Wilson not only completed his mission, but did so in a manner garnering widespread public and critical applause, as well as numerous fellowships and awards. Having "envisioned theatre as a means to raise the collective community's conscience about black life in twentieth-century America," Wilson also proved himself to be a gifted writer whose themes and characters are so complex and so skillfully wrought that they merit the international acclaim they have received (Elkins 2000, xi).
It would be a mistake, however, to classify Wilson as either a historian or merely a didactic writer. He denied that his primary interest was history, although his plays are steeped in actual events. Rather, he was more concerned with exploring black culture. In an interview with Ebony's Charles Whitaker, Wilson said,
I write, like any artist, for an audience of one, basically, to satisfy myself. But I'm also trying to make an aesthetic statement. What I am trying to do is put Black culture on stage and demonstrate to the world--not to White folks, not to Black folks, but to the world--that it exists and that it is capable of sustaining you. I want to show the world that there is no idea or concept in the human experience that cannot be examined through Black life and culture. (Whitaker 2001, 17)
Further, according to Mike Downing, Wilson elected to present America through a black cultural lens because "white culture has access to all the mechanisms to promote its own agenda; whereas black culture has not had the same benefits. That's why he presses this agenda" (2005, 1).
Wilson did acknowledge himself to be "a race man," claiming the Black Power Movement of the 1960s as "the kiln in which I was fired," the experience that caused him to see how deeply embedded race and racism are in the culture of the United States (2001,12). He felt that race is the single most important aspect African Americans share, because it "allows for group identification and it is the organizing principle around which cultures are formed" (12). Since black Americans have the common legacy of slavery, Wilson says,"we [are] now seeking ways to alter our relationship to the society in which we live--and, perhaps more important, searching for ways to alter the shared expectations of ourselves as a community of people" (12). In both his staged plays and his theatrical criticism, Wilson calls for a new kind of drama, one that is created by black artists writing about black experience, staged by black directors. Wilson led the way in producing the drama he called for, with a body of work known around the world for its excellence.
Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27,1945, the fourth of six children. His parents were Frederick August Kittel, a baker of Austro-Hungarian descent, and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman of great inner strength, whose own determined mother had come to Pittsburgh from Spear, North Carolina, walking the entire way (Snodgrass 2004, 5). Wilson recalls the importance of the cultural training he obtained growing up in his mother's house:
I learned the language, the eating habits, the religious beliefs, the gestures, the notions of common sense, attitudes towards sex, concepts of beauty and justice, and the responses to pleasure and pain ... that my mother had learned from her mother, and which you could trace back to the first African who set foot on the continent. It is this culture that stands on these shores today as a testament to the resiliency of the African-American spirit. (Wilson 2001, 15-16)
Following the death of his father in 1969, Wilson elected to adopt his mother's birth name, rather than that of his father or of David Bedford, his stepfather. The playwright dedicated his first dramatic success, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), to his mother, and credits her for his habit of voracious reading and his love of words. Ironically, she died of lung cancer just months before Ma Rainey opened on Broadway.
Wilson's early childhood was spent in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a diverse locale that figures as the setting for all but one of his plays. Until high school he attended neighborhood Catholic schools. When in 1959 his stepfather moved the family to a mostly-white suburb, Wilson encountered pervasive racism as the only black student in his school, Gladstone High. When he was fifteen, a teacher who failed to recognize the extent of his talent falsely accused him of plagiarizing a report on Napoleon Bonaparte and challenged him to prove his authorship. Outraged and disgusted, Wilson threw the report into the trash and left school, spending his days educating himself at the neighborhood Carnegie Library, where he read widely and voraciously. (1) About that period, the writer says, "Those were my learning years. I read everything and anything that I could get my hands on, things that interested me: Anthropology was one, cultural anthropology; theology was another. I read books on furniture making. I read everything, novels, whatever" (Fitzgerald 2000, 1). He spent the next two years in a series of jobs until entering the U. S. Army, securing a discharge after one year.
Returning to Pittsburgh, Wilson began his writing career as a poet, rather than a dramatist. Much of his life over the next few years was spent in reading widely, buying hundreds of jazz records and playing them over and over, and listening to ordinary people speaking on the streets, all of which would form the foundation for his later work in drama. In 1965 he helped to establish the Centre Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop, one of a number of artistic communities he would be instrumental in founding. Three years afterward, along with Rob Penny, Wilson founded the Black Horizons Theatre Company. Wilson was married briefly (from 1969-1972) to Brenda Burton. During the seventies his poetry output intensified, culminating in the piece Wilson considers his best to date, 1973's "Morning Statement."
In 1976 Wilson attended Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, a play that, according to critics, "may be viewed as a theatrical response to the very complicated and dynamic sociopolitical situation [of apartheid]" (www.fbl0.unibremen.de 2005). From this experience, Wilson began increasingly to see theater as a critical ingredient of any discussion of cultural life in the United States. This vision, later articulated in the address entitled The Ground on Which I Stand (1996, 2001), transcends Wilson's own poetics, calling for African American artists to "seize the power over their own cultural identity and to establish permanent institutions that celebrate and preserve the singular achievements of African American dramatic art and reaffirm its equal importance in contemporary American culture" (2001, verso cover).
After acknowledging that the dramatic ground on which he stands was peopled first "by the Greek dramatists--by Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles--by William Shakespeare, by Shaw, Ibsen and Chekhov, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams," Wilson asserts that these dramatists constitute only a part of his heritage as an artist (2001, 11). He is also the inheritor, he states, of black activists like Nat Turner and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, men who affirmed the worth of black Americans "in the face of this society's urgent and sometimes profound denial'' (11). He then calls on all who have a stake in the theater, from critics to students of arts management to playwrights and actors themselves, to prevent black theater from stagnating. One of the key problems in the proliferation of the arts among black artists, Wilson argues, is basic finances: "If you do not know, I will tell you: black theatre in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital ... it just isn't funded" (17). Urging black artists to make a difference, he asserts their right "to amend, to explore, and to add our African consciousness and our African aesthetic" (2000, 17) to the theatrical traditions American theater has inherited from its European forebears. This address served as a rallying call to supporters of black theater. Part of its legacy has been an ongoing debate about the presence of cultural diversity on the American stage.
Early on Wilson felt so strongly that he could play a role in the development of American drama in this important direction, that in 1978 he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to write drama for Claude Purdy and to become a scriptwriter for the Science Museum of Minnesota. Soon Wilson was...
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