August Wilson: A Life

My journey in the performing arts began when I joined The Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus as a singer at the age of ten and later as an actor at fourteen. These experiences gave me an appreciation for language, rhythm, and the sounds that words produce. I have dedicated over thirty years to this profession as an actor and director. Throughout this time, I have focused on bringing the text to life in rehearsals and performances, especially in the works of August Wilson. Therefore, I was thrilled to read Patti Hartigan’s new biography, August Wilson: A Life, which blends the complexities of the playwright’s life with his vivid portrayals of African American culture on stage.The book begins by discussing Wilson’s early life and how various factors—such as his education, the racism of the mid-twentieth century, an absent father, and feeling like an outsider in both the white and Black communities—influenced his life. Born in 1945 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, then known as Little Harlem, he was one of six children born to Daisy Wilson, who worked as a domestic worker and raised her family alone after her German husband, Frederick August Kittel Sr., abandoned them. August was Daisy’s first son; she always supported him and made him believe that he could achieve anything he wanted. His mother’s adoring gaze made Wilson feel unique and valued through what James Baldwin famously called “the crucial, the definitive, the all-but-everlasting judgment.” Wilson was determined to repay his mother by working hard and making her proud. But his high IQ and the color of his skin made him a target for bullying, and he eventually dropped out of school at fifteen years old after being accused of plagiarizing a term paper on Napoleon Bonaparte. Wilson never graduated from high school but spent entire days at the neighborhood Carnegie Library, which he considered the source of his artistic education.In his early years, Wilson strongly desired to become a successful poet. Despite working as a porter, a sheet metal worker, or a short-order cook, he would spend hours writing verse. During the height of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, Wilson admired Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as a role model. Wilson dressed formally, wore a coat and tie, and often recited with an English accent. He frequented the Halfway Art Gallery, a local rendezvous for Pittsburgh’s so-called Beat culture, and developed a network of lasting contacts with Black literati who greatly aided the neophyte cultural nationalist in his search for substance and voice by educating him about important contemporary writers. Thirty years later, Wilson referenced the vital influence of that period in his 1996 keynote address, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” at the annual conference of the Theatre Communications Group.The first dramatic production that piqued his interest in writing plays was Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, written in collaboration with South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1972). Another Pittsburgh friend, Claude Purdy, whose theatrical experiences spanned the globe, heavily influenced him throughout the early and mid-1970s. Purdy showed Wilson a copy of The Art of Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual in 1977, which, according to Wilson, was akin to first hearing Bessie Smith: “What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence. . . . My response was visceral. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn’t thought before and have never ceased to think of since” (86). On a literary level, in addition to the theatrical realms of Fugard and the striking scenes of Bearden, the Argentine fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges inspired Wilson’s handling of structure and suspense as he learned his craft.In 1982, a then-unknown Wilson submitted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and caught the attention of artistic director Lloyd Richards. Richards recognized the unmistakable signs of a first-rate dramatist and initiated a history-making collaboration with the young playwright. By late July, Ma Rainey was ready for its debut performance, one to which New York critics were invited with the understanding that the script-in-hand readings were still far from their final form. Frank Rich, lead drama critic of the New York Times, was in the audience and his subsequent article on the front page of the Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section on August 1 was titled “Stage View: Where Writers Mold the Future of the Theater.” Rich praised three plays he had seen at the O’Neill, but his most striking comments were about Wilson. “I was electrified by the sound of this author’s voice,” he wrote, highlighting how Wilson utilized “the beauty and meaning of torrents of words.” Rich compared Wilson to O’Neill, claiming, “He works in the same poetic tradition as the man who inspired the O’Neill Center’s mission and who gave American theater its past” (123). Rich’s effusive praise effectively launched Wilson’s career.Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom reached Broadway in 1984 and was followed by Fences in 1987. While Fences was still playing in New York, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone premiered in 1988. All but one of the ten plays in Wilson’s American Century Cycle, in which each play is set in a different decade of the twentieth century, was eventually produced on Broadway. Richards directed six of them and two earned Pulitzer Prizes. Wilson barely completed the last play of his cycle, Radio Golf, before passing from liver cancer in 2005 at the age of sixty. His ability to finish his grand project distinguished him from Eugene O’Neill, who had abandoned his similarly ambitious cycle on American history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed” in the 1930s.Hartigan identifies Richards as Wilson’s most important mentor, friend, and father figure. In addition to his insight into the world of Wilson’s characters, Richards shared with Wilson his shrewd business savvy gained from years on both the artistic and commercial ends of play production. Richards essentially took Wilson under his wing and tutored him in terms of his playwriting skills and the sometimes crude realities of commercial theater. Hartigan thoroughly demonstrates how gaining the attention and respect of Richards and having access to the facilities of the O’Neill Center and, ultimately, the Yale Repertory Theatre bolstered Wilson’s confidence and artistic development. All of his plays up to and including Seven Guitars (1996) followed the same route: from the O’Neill, to Yale, to other nonprofit regional theaters around the country, and then to Broadway. Other fringe benefits for Wilson that stemmed from his association with Richards included making essential contacts with a network of producers and agents. As a result of those relationships, in addition to his own die-hard determination to succeed, Wilson gained independent footing in the theater world and eventually broke with Richards.The dissolution of the bond with Richards, according to Hartigan, was the watershed event in Wilson’s professional life. But she includes many other fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of Wilson’s life and play productions, including the firing of actor Delroy Lindo from the pre-Broadway run of Gem of the Ocean and the qualms of James Earl Jones regarding the unresolved nature of the father-son relationship in Fences. Hartigan also delves into Wilson’s personal life to detail his three marriages, the subject of fatherhood, and their effects on his plays. Religion played a significant role in Wilson’s divorce from his first wife, a Muslim woman, and this conflict arises in several of his early plays. In addition to conducting many interviews, Hartigan carefully examined letters and other published materials to depict Wilson, including his chain-smoking habit, accurately.Another notable relationship Hartigan details was between Wilson and his coproducer, Ben Mordecai, who served as the managing director of the Yale Repertory Theatre. After Richards withdrew from partnership with Wilson, Wilson and Mordecai formed a joint venture called Sageworks, which gave Wilson significant control over the destiny of his plays. Additionally, he received both a writer’s and a producer’s share of the profits. He was paid to work on a single play as it transferred to productions in Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington. This process allowed him to observe, reconceive, and rewrite his plays on the long road to New York.While some readers might prefer a more critical analysis of Wilson’s works and inclusion of voices from actresses such as Mary Alice, Phylicia Rashad, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Michele Shay, who all portrayed iconic roles in Wilson’s plays, Hartigan’s biography consistently engages with the story of how Wilson fashioned poetry from his life experiences in Pittsburgh and endured periods of struggle as he matured and found his true voice writing for the stage. Wilson emerged as the leading Black playwright during the 1980s and 1990s and his successes helped to pave the way for contemporary playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Patti Hartigan’s excellent biography acknowledges August Wilson as an authentic pioneer, on par with Eugene O’Neill, in the history of the American theater.