Playwright August Wilson dies at 60 : Portrayed history of black America

By Ed Siegel

August Wilson, the country’s preeminent African-American playwright, died yesterday at the age of 60 from liver cancer.

Mr. Wilson’s main body of work was a cycle of 10 plays, each set in a different decade in the 20th century, thus covering 100 years of African-American history and attitudes. They featured large ensembles of black actors playing characters debating how to carry themselves in the face of limited opportunities and resources. Although white racism was rarely mentioned, the legacy of slavery, segregation, and prejudice hovered over all the plays.

Mr. Wilson’s death leaves a major hole in the American theater. Of living American playwrights, only Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard have as significant a body of work as Mr. Wilson.

A family spokeswoman said Mr. Wilson died at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, surrounded by his family. The playwright disclosed in late August that his illness was inoperable and that he had only a few months to live.

He won two Pulitzer Prizes, for ’’Fences" in 1987 and ’’The Piano Lesson" in 1990. The latter play dealt with a brother and sister, neither with very much money, fighting over whether to sell the family piano. For Berniece it is not only an heirloom, but it tells the story, through a series of totem-like figures carved into it, of how their family suffered. The brother, Boy Willie, sees the sale of the piano as his only way of making it in America.

Nine of the 10 plays — which also included ’’Joe Turner’s Come and Gone," ’’Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom," and ’’Two Trains Running" — were set in Pittsburgh, where Mr. Wilson was born in 1945, one of six children in a two-room, cold-water apartment in the Hill district. His mother, Daisy, got by on cleaning jobs and welfare. He barely knew his biological father, a white baker from Germany, and changed his name when his father died in 1965.

Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company presented seven of the 10 plays, beginning with ’’Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" during the 1986-87 season.

Many of these played here en route to New York as Mr. Wilson and regional theaters such as the Huntington had a mutually beneficial relationship in which he would hone the plays on the road before they got to Broadway.

’’Like the city of Venice, everything has been said about August Wilson, but what demands repetition is that he’s arguably the finest playwright of the second half of the last century," said Nicholas Martin, artistic director at the Huntington. ’’And that with Lorraine Hansberry, he is responsible for making the real black experience part of the American consciousness."

’’He’s somebody who’s had a social message and a social impact far beyond the work itself," the Huntington’s managing director, Michael Maso, told the Globe in August. ’’It’s hard to imagine the breadth and scope of African-American theater that’s being shown in this country without August Wilson."

Born Frederick August Kittel in April 1945, Mr. Wilson was an avid reader since age 4, though not a very good student at his predominantly white parochial high school.

He dropped out, but his education continued in the public library — where he read prominent black authors such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison — and in menial jobs, including cook and stock clerk, where he studied rhythms of speech and patterns of behavior.

Mr. Wilson tried his hand at poetry, but found his calling as a playwright during the 1960s and ’70s, when he became involved in black nationalist politics.

Blues and jazz influenced him, too, and not only provided the soundtrack for most productions of his plays, but also underscored the way his characters speak, move, and relate to the world. His works are naturalistic, but the speech of his characters owes much to the poetry and music that he loved before becoming a playwright. As he said in the preface to ’’Three Plays": ’’I was cut out of the same cloth [as bluesmen] and I was on the same field of manners and endeavor — to articulate the cultural response of black Americans to the world in which they found themselves."

While the specifics of the dialogue were attuned to African-American life, the issues were universal, which made Mr. Wilson a favorite with white audiences as well as black. For instance, in ’’Two Trains Running," characters convene in a restaurant and one, reacting to the death of another member of the group, says: ’’That’s all you got. You got love and you got death. Death will find you . . . it’s up to you to find love. That’s where most people fall down at. Death got room for everybody. Love pick and choose."

The spiritual side of Mr. Wilson’s work was rooted in a mysticism attached to some of Wilson’s more memorable characters. In ’’Gem of the Ocean," set at the turn of the last century though it was the next-to-the-last of the cycle to be written, Aunt Ester is a 285-year-old woman who embodies African-American experience from the slave ships to 1904, when ’’Gem" takes place.

Aunt Ester, played by Phylicia Rashad at the Huntington and later on Broadway, is known as someone who washes souls by ridding them of sin and suffering through making them revisit the past — their own, as well as that of their people. Her Pittsburgh parlor represents community, continuity, warmth, and spirit.

Besides Rashad, such well-known actors as James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, and Charles S. Dutton appeared in Mr. Wilson’s plays.

Mr. Wilson was shaped in part by the black power movement of the 1960s, but while much of his nonfiction writing could be strident, his plays usually were nuanced and derived much of their power from the collision of ideas. Mr. Wilson’s black nationalism mixed with a more classic American theatrical sensibility.

Troy Maxson’s tunnel vision in ’’Fences" recalls Willy Loman’s in Arthur Miller’s ’’Death of a Salesman." Neither man can see the sociopolitical forces at work that will eventually undo them. Many of Wilson’s twisted souls, like Herald Loomis in ’’Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" recall Eugene O’Neill’s tortured protagonists, as do the confrontations between fathers and sons in some of his plays.

The difference was that where Miller and O’Neill saw their Jewish and Irish roots, respectively, as somewhat stifling and limiting, Mr. Wilson led a generation of playwrights, particularly writers of color, who embraced ethnicity as the key ingredient to their aspirations as well as their identity.

Outside of the theater, Mr. Wilson’s polemics could lead to controversy, as in his call for an end to color-blind casting.

’’We reject any attempt to blot us out, to reinvent history, and ignore our presence," he said in a 1996 speech at a Theatre Communications Group conference. ’’We want you to see us. We are black and beautiful. We have an honorable history in the world of men. . . . We do not need color-blind casting; we need some theaters to develop our playwrights."

Many theater professionals — white and black — took issue with the speech, notably Robert Brustein, founding director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and critic for the New Republic, who was never as enamored of Mr. Wilson as some other critics were.

The two ended up debating the issue at Town Hall in New York the following year.

Later this month, a Broadway theater, the Virginia, will be renamed for Wilson, a rare honor also bestowed on such theater greats as Eugene O’Neill, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Helen Hayes, and Al Hirschfeld.

Wilson, who was married three times, leaves his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero; their daughter Azula Carmen, and another daughter, Sakina Ansari, from his first marriage.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_ar...