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Article Excerpt
Sandra G. Shannon
Framing African American Cultural Identity: The Bookends Plays in August Wilson's 10-Play Cycle
In various interviews, August Wilson admitted that a" special relationship" exists between his so-called bookend plays: Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) and Radio Golf (set in 1997). In writing both, his mission was to" ... build an umbrella under which the rest of the plays can sit ... a bridge. The subject matter of these two plays is going to be very similar and connected thematically," he explained further, "meaning that the other eight will be part and parcel of these two. You should be able to see how they all fit inside these last two plays." This essay entitled "Framing African American Cultural Identity: The Bookends Plays in August "Wilson's 10-Play Cycle" examines the intertextual relationships within and among five of August Wilson's cycle plays while paying close attention to two of Wilson's plays that are strategically positioned at the beginning and end of a ninety-six-year time line.
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On April 28, 2005, one day after August Wilson's sixtieth birthday, the last play in his 10-play cycle--Radio Golf--opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. In late August of that same year, August Wilson divulged to the press that he was suffering from advanced liver cancer. On October 2, 2005, August Wilson died at age 60. The all-too-sudden passing of this two-time Pulitzer Prize winning and internationally acclaimed playwright suggests a troubling and ironic twist of fate that occurred only months after he had completed a 26-year-long magnum opus--a staggering body of dramatic work that virtually frames African American cultural identity in a series of plays set in fictive time frames that span from 1904 to 1997. While Wilson's death continues to be mourned extensively, we may take comfort in the completed cycle that he leaves behind as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
Some time during the early 1980s, August Wilson began touting his idea of writing ten plays chronicling decisive moments in the history of African Americans in the twentieth century. After succeeding at crafting individual plays set in two separate decades, Wilson decided to extend the reach of his proven talents and set his sights on an entire cycle of plays. He recalled in a 1984 interview,
As it turns out, I've written plays that take place in 1911, 1927, 1941, 1957, and 1971. Somewhere along the way it dawned on me that I was writing one play for each decade. Once I became conscious of that, I realized I was trying to focus on what I felt were the most important issues confronting black Americans for that decade, so ultimately they could stand as a record of black experience over the past hundred years presented in the form of dramatic literature. (Powers 2005, 4-5)
Understandably, then, August Wilson may be regarded as the consummate cultural architect. But instead of designing a blueprint for a new cultural construct, he directed his efforts toward resurrecting a culture already within a culture. In other words, he dedicated his energies as an artist toward retrieving and reconnecting the disparate parts of an African American cultural identity that already exists, albeit subsumed into the dominant western white culture. Wilson's notion of this reconstituted African American cultural identity urged a figurative and spiritual return to the starting place, which he saw as Africa. The blueprint for this job, of course, took the form of ten dramatic installments written at an unprecedented pace: Jitney (1979), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982), Fences (1983), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1984), The Piano Lesson (1987), Two Trains Running (1990), Seven Guitars (1995), King Hedley II (1999), Gem of the Ocean (2002), and Radio Golf (2005).
From this point of departure, Wilson wanted to write on a grand scale. He wanted to magnify the African American experience--to write around, through, and against recorded history in order to give voice to the nameless masses of Africans in America and to tap the never-ending supply of untold stories about African American life and culture in the United States. Inspired by the limitless possibilities of his aesthetic of excavation, August Wilson envisioned an ambitious plan and acquired a dogged determination to
write about the unique particulars of black American culture ... to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves. (Wilson 2005, viii-ix)
In addition to earning the title of cultural architect, August Wilson donned the title of cultural critic for his efforts to shape the cultural experiences of those who encountered his dramatic works. In numerous recorded conversations, he revealed a conscious plan to communicate in each of his plays certain types of African American cultural awareness: "I try to actually keep all of the elements of the culture alive in the work," he told me in a 1991 interview,
and myth is certainly a part of it. Mythology, history, social organizations--all of these kinds of things--economics--are all part of the culture. I make sure--I purposefully go through and make sure each element of that is in some way represented--some more so than other in the plays, which I think gives them a fullness and a completeness--that is an entire world. (Shannon 1995, 202-03)
As cultural critic and cultural architect, Wilson advanced critic Henry Louis Gates's affirmation that,
the black Africans who survived the dreaded "Middle Passage" from the west coast of Africa to the New World did not sail...
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