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The shattered mirror: what August Wilson means and willed to mean.

Article Excerpt
Sergei Burbank

The Shattered Mirror: What August Wilson Means and Willed to Mean

This personal and analytical essay combines an appraisal of August Wilson's history cycle with one multi-racial actor's account of his career thus far in American theater. His struggles in navigating the rigid, outdated and mutually exclusive dual-racial structure provide an insight into Wilson's fundamental (mis)reading of American society. The paper argues that Wilson's dramatic genius will be more fully appreciated when the audience for his plays is less restricted by outdated racial thinking than audiences today. Combining personal anecdotes with quotations from Wilson's plays and interviews, this essay seeks to separate Wilson's political stance, which articulated a mutual irreversible antagonism between black and white America, from his nuanced portrayals of human relationships, arguing that the latter will make these plays last the test of time.

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August Wilson will be remembered in a century's time as one of the nation's greatest playwrights. But the central paradox of his work, that is, portraying the protean shape of black identity in America using portraits of specific moments in time, will be the paradox of Wilson's legacy as well. Of America's greatest playwrights, Wilson may prove to have the greatest shelf life: his works will be better received and more profoundly understood in a generation's time than they are now; this is because we are too close to the trauma Wilson outlined to fully appreciate its dimensions.

Wilson's work revealed Black Americans to be forcibly infused aliens, shaping their destiny as best they could within a strange culture. This stands true for Wilson as well: no matter how much of a master he became at playwriting, he essentially served behind enemy lines as his characters trod the boards: not a natural scion of America's theatrical birthright, he adapted as best he could--and then thrived.

Like centuries-long improvisation, the protean identity of black Americans was forged in motion, on the fly, always shifting from external pressures and events: historic facts, happenstance, personal experiences.

In Wilsons eyes, this cognitive failure on the part of the theatrical establishment to properly acknowledge and accommodate the distinctive voice of Black Americans boiled down to a (sometimes willful) omission of memory and a paucity of cultural vocabulary.

Although he insisted that contemporary blacks shared a direct lineage from Africans who "made the journey in chains [in] the hold of a ship," (Newsweek, 1997) the American stage had no adequate language for the experience of slavery because white Americans had no interest in developing such a language. It was deemed better to engage in color-blind casting as a means of addressing injustices committed offstage rather than change the form itself onstage.

The indifference on the part of an overwhelmingly white theatrical establishment to telling the Black American story--as opposed to the simpler alternative of casting Black actors in Shakespeare--was one obstacle with which Wilson contended. The other obstacle was the eagerness of his subjects to forget the past as well. As Wilson said: "Blacks in America want to forget about slavery--the stigma, the shame. That's the wrong move. If you can't be who you are who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our books, which is the blues. And we forget it all" (Freedman, 2005, 15).

Africans have lived in the new world long enough for their cultural context to change completely. The most enduring alliance on the Supreme Court exists between "strict constructionists" Antonin Scalia (a Catholic conservative) and Clarence Thomas (the descendant of slaves, and also a conservative). Justice Thomas professes allegiance to a narrow interpretation of the Constitution from a moment in history when neither the document nor its authors professed any particular allegiance to Thomas' ancestors. His "forgetfulness" stands as a testament to how well-integrated (to the point of psychosis) the descendants of slaves have become.

As he addressed his central paradox, Wilson's content (the story) and practice (the performance) were intertwined: the careers of many black actors were sustained and elevated through his work, because his work describes an experience belonging to an entire swath of the American population, one that had previously existed on the margins of the stage.

There are times when I, too, will myself to forget that I am (partially) descended from slaves. It's not whiteface, exactly, but more of a studied neutrality: "I won't bring up the past if you won't." Principles, especially uncomfortable historical truths unpleasant to all, become expendable in the face of theatrical employability. But events will conspire to remind me.

Once, backstage at an adaptation of a Vaclav Havel play for which I was cast using the "color-blind" method Wilson so abhorred, a white actress sat on my (definitively not-white) lap in the instantaneous intimacy theater breeds among its practitioners.

Having spent some time backstage, I barely took note of the new cargo on board, or the constant prattle that came along with it. Somewhere in the drone of words I discerned she was sharing her family history, and somewhere in the unending palaver a string of words jutted out of the drone like a craggy rock under bare feet "and then my brother...

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