R.I.P. August Wilson

One of our best living playwrights has died. That’s a huge obituary in the New York Times there … Great information on the life and work of August Wilson.

As seems fitting, his last play Radio Golf (which just premiered) was the closing chapter in a theatrical cycle he began a decade ago. Amazing. He “finished” his work.

From the obit:

Mr. Wilson did not establish the chronological framework of his cycle until after the work had begun, and he skipped around in time. Although “Radio Golf,” the last play to be written, was set in the 1990’s, “Gem of the Ocean,” which immediately preceded it in production (it came to Broadway in the fall of 2004), was set in the first decade of the 20th century.

His first success, “Ma Rainey,” which took place in a Chicago recording studio in 1927, depicted the turbulent relationship between a rich but angry blues singer and a brilliant trumpet player who also wants to succeed in the white-dominated world of commercial music. From there Mr. Wilson turned to the 1950’s, with “Fences,” his most popular play, about a garbageman and former baseball player in the Negro leagues who clashes with his son over the boy’s intention to pursue a career in sports. His next play, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” considered by many to be the finest of his works, was a quasi-mystical drama set in a boardinghouse in 1911. It told of a man newly freed from illegal servitude searching to find the woman who abandoned him.

The other plays in Mr. Wilson’s theatrical opus are “The Piano Lesson,” set in 1936, in which a brother and sister argue over the fate of the piano that symbolizes the family’s anguished past history; “Two Trains Running,” concerning an ex-con re-ordering his life in 1969; “Seven Guitars,” about a blues musician on the brink of a career breakthrough in 1948; “Jitney,” a collage of the everyday doings at a gypsy cab company in 1977; and “King Hedley II,” in which another troubled ex-con searches for redemption as the Hill District crumbles under the onslaught of Reaganomics in 1985.

As the cycle developed, Mr. Wilson knit the plays together through overlapping themes and characters. Many of the primary conflicts concern the dueling prerogatives of characters poised between the traumatizing past and the uncertain future. The central character in “Radio Golf” is the grandson of a character in “Gem of the Ocean.” The guiding spirit of the cycle came to be Aunt Esther, a woman said to have lived for more than three centuries, who was referred to in several plays and who appeared at last in “Gem.” She embodied the continuity of spiritual and moral values that Mr. Wilson felt was crucial to the black experience, uniting the descendants of slaves to their African ancestors.

I found the text of a talk August Wilson gave on writing – and he opens with this gem of a sentence – it makes me love him:

When I discovered the word breakfast, and I discovered that it was two words, I think then I decided I wanted to be a writer.

Ha!

I feel so fortunate that I actually saw the Broadway premiere of Fences, starring James Earl Jones and Mary Alice. I really didn’t know what I was walking into. I was a kid. I had seen mostly musicals on Broadway. I was not prepared but I remember vividly thinking, suddenly, in the middle of it: “Okay so this is something I will remember forever. This is a once in a lifetime thing.”

Years later (or it felt like years – maybe 5 or 6 years? I was in my early 20s) – I saw Larry Fishburne in Two Trains Running in Los Angeles before it opened in New York. (Roscoe Lee Browne was in it as well.) It was so long ago, but I still remember the specifics of the blocking, which tells me the play made a huge impression on me. I always knew he was a good actor, always had been a fan (Apocalypse Now was my first encounter with him, but I think my favorite role of his is the renegade chess player in Searching for Bobby Fischer). Fishburne looked at HOME on the stage. And him and Roscoe Lee Browne together was an Actor Match made in Heaven. When it opened on Broadway, the review called Fishburne “the jewel of the production”. True, true.

The original review for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (premiered in NYC in the mid 1980s, Wilson’s first success), closes with these lines:

Mr. Wilson can’t mend the broken lives he unravels in ”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” But, like his heroine, he makes their suffering into art that forces us to understand and won’t allow us to forget.

Yup.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wilson. And thank you.