Wilson, August

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Wilson, August

April 27, 1945

The playwright August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, the fourth of six children. Growing up near the steel mills, in a neighborhood called the Hill that was populated by poor African Americans, Italians, and Jews, he had a childhood of poverty and hardship. He rarely saw his father, a German baker who visited only occasionally, and the family subsisted on public assistance and on his mother's earnings as a janitor. Wilson adopted his mother's maiden name in the 1970s as a way of disavowing his father.

Wilson's stepfather, David Bedford, moved the family to a white suburb when Wilson was a teenager. This change, however, also proved difficult. As a student at a predominantly white Catholic school in Pittsburgh, Wilson was ostracized by his white schoolmates and misjudged by his white teachers, who doubted his intelligence. He frequently found notes on his desk reading "Nigger, go home." When he was fourteen, he dropped out of school.

Wilson continued his education in the library, where he discovered the works of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and other African-American writers, as well as the poetry of Dylan Thomas, which contributed to his still-evolving aesthetic. In 1965 Wilson heard recordings of the blues for the first time, and their lyrical expression of the hardships of life was to become another major influence on his work. Except for a one-year stint in the army (1967), Wilson spent the middle 1960s writing poetry at night while holding a series of menial jobs during the day.

In 1968 he returned to Pittsburgh, where he became caught up in the black arts movement. Influenced by the plays and polemical writings of Amiri Baraka, Wilson and his friend Rob Penny founded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theatre in 1968—although he had no previous theater experience. Their aim was to use theater to provoke social change. His earliest one-act plays—Recycle (1973), The Homecoming (1976), and The Coldest Day of the Year (1977)—were written for this theater.

In 1977 Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he wrote a musical satire with a western theme: Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. This rambling verse narrative was staged a year later by the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles. While supporting himself by writing educational dramas for the Minnesota Science Center, Wilson wrote the plays Jitney! and Fullerton Street in 1982. Both were produced that year by the Minneapolis Playwrights' Center.

It was the play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, written in 1983 and first produced by the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, that gained Wilson national attention. Produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984 under the direction of Lloyd Richards, and later that year on Broadway with the same director, the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Ma Rainey, which is set in 1927 and depicts a day in the life of the famous blues singer, explores not only the exploitation of black artists of that era, but also reveals the high price such artists pay when they cut themselves off from their cultural past. Wilson's next play, Fences (1985), is set in 1957 and focuses on the frustrations of Troy Maxson, a Pittsburgh garbage collector who had been a star ball player in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play of the Year.

After noticing that he had fortuitously written four plays set in four separate decades, Wilson decided to continue to write a play set in each decade of the twentieth century. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Fences would then become part of a ten-play cycle that would chronicle the challenges that African Americans have confronted since Emancipation. In Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), set in 1911, Wilson explores the emotional and physical displacement experienced by former slaves in the early twentieth century. Produced on Broadway in 1988, it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Wilson's cycle continued with Seven Guitars (1994), set in the 1940s, and Jitney (1996), a revision of the earlier play, set in the 1970s.

The Piano Lesson (1987), set in 1936, concerns the ownership of a piano that had been built by the slave grandfather of a feuding brother and sister. The source of their contention is a 125-year-old piano that sits untouched in the living room of Berniece Charles. Her brother wants to sell it to buy land, but Berniece wants it left alone to revere. The Piano Lesson perhaps best expresses Wilson's view of black history as something to be neither sold nor denied, but employed to create an ongoing, nurturing cultural identity. Produced on Broadway in 1990, the play received the Drama Desk Best Play award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and Wilson won his second Pulitzer Prize for the play. In 1996 it was transformed into a successful television film.

Wilson's play about the 1960s, Two Trains Running (1990), is also set in Pittsburgh, in 1968. It explores the allegiances and frictions among a group of friends who find themselves confronted with the era's radical social changes and by a sense that they will be swept along by large forces beyond their control. It was produced on Broadway in 1992 and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

Seven Guitars (1995), Wilson's seventh play, is the story of Floyd "School Boy" Barton, a Pittsburgh blues singer who goes to Chicago in 1948 to record two songs. After he returns to Pittsburgh to rekindle a romance, he is jailed for ninety days on a phony charge. When he gets out, he discovers that his record is getting airplay, and he is asked to come back to Chicago to make additional records. However, he is killed by the demented Hedley before he can go, and the play is told in flashback after his death.

King Hedley II (2001), set in the 1980s, revisits characters and extends the storyline introduced in Seven Guitars. Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1985, the play fast forwards some thirty-seven years to highlight the struggles of Ruby's now adult son, King. After serving seven years for killing the man who disfigured him, King has returned to the house where Ruby and Tonya, who is pregnant with his child, now live. Symbolized by his attempts to raise flowers out of infertile soil, King, as he is called, seeks spiritual renewal but is instead set back by the revelation that Hedley is not his biological father.

Wilson's ninth play, Gem of the Ocean (2004), is set in 1904 and begins the day before Aunt Ester's 287th birthday in Pittsburgh's Hill District. Citizen Barlow, who believes he's committed a mortal sin, comes to Aunt Ester to get his soul washed. Aunt Ester gives Citizen a meal, a job, and a place to stay. She later sets him on a spiritual journey that leads him on a perilous road to redemption.

In 2005, August Wilson had begun writing the tenth and final play in his history cycle. Radio Golf, to be set in the 1990s, concerns two golf-loving real-estate developers who plan to destroy the former home of the now familiar clairvoyant Aunt Ester (she also appears in Two Trains Running ), who is now over three hundred years old.

See also Black Arts Movement; Drama