26 - Paper Answers

HomeWork 1:

Reflection 1:

Watch the 3 videos on storytelling below and after you have watched the videos write a reflection response (a full complete paragraph or two – of at least 300 words) about your thoughts on the importance of storytelling in your everyday life. Was there something said in these videos that you agreed with and aligned with your views? Or was there something, related to the art of storytelling, that you never thought about until you heard it in the video?

Try to avoid general interest comments but instead, try to speak to something very specific in the article that meant something to you or aligned with your thoughts on the importance of storytelling in your everyday life.

Video 1:

Video 2:

Video 3:

HomeWork 2:

Reflection 2:

After you read the PDF document attached named “Reflection 2” discuss in a reflection response (a full complete paragraph or two – of at least 300 words) the importance of August Wilson as an American storyteller and why his work is important to American audiences.

INTRODUCTION
A playwright, poet and polemicist, August Wilson (1945-2005) rose to
prominence and achieved international acclaim with a cycle of 10
plays, often called the Century Cycle or Pittsburgh Cycle. His plays
powerfully dramatize the pleasures and perils of African-American life,
experience, and history across the 20th century. The plays in the
Century Cycle – Jitney (1982); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984);
Fences (1987); Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988); The Piano Lesson
(1990); Two Trains Running (1991); Seven Guitars (1995); King Hedley
II (1999); Gem of the Ocean (2003); and Radio Golf (2005) – earned
Wilson multiple accolades, including the Tony Award for Best Play
(Fences, 1987), the Olivier Award for Best New Play (Jitney, 2002), and
two Pulitzer Prizes for drama for Fences in 1987, and The Piano Lesson
in 1990). Wilson is considered one of the most significant and
influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, often compared with
important writers like Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953). Wilson’s plays
continue to garner numerous productions around the globe annually
and remain among the most studied and written about contemporary
dramatic texts in the US. Several of Wilson’s works have also been
adapted for film, including the 2016 Oscar-nominated movie Fences
starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis as Troy and Rose Maxson.

DT+ FUNDAMENTALS

A Concise Introduction to:
August Wilson

Isaiah Wooden
American University

Last update: 06/02/2019

HISTORY
Born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. on April 27, 1945, Wilson’s early
upbringing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had an immense impact on his
playwriting. After his mother, Daisy Wilson, an African-American domestic
worker, and father, Frederick August Kittel, a German immigrant and
baker, separated during his childhood, he spent most of his youth with his
maternal family in and around the Hill District, a traditionally African-
American area of Pittsburgh that serves as the setting for nine of the 10
plays in the Century Cycle. As was the case for many African-Americans
living in the US during this era, Wilson’s family faced habitual racism. The
students and teachers at the predominantly white, parochial schools the
young Wilson attended were especially bigoted, bullying the budding
writer for being Black and poor. When a history teacher accused a 15-
year-old Wilson of plagiarising a paper he had meticulously researched
and written on the French military and political leader Napoleon
Bonaparte, the teenager decided to drop out of school, opting instead to
make frequent trips to the library to ‘self-educate.’ It was through this
process of self-education that Wilson began to discover and deepen his
knowledge of the artists and art forms that would become some of his
most significant influences as a writer.

Chief among those influences were blues music, writer Jorge Luis Borges
(1899-1986), visual artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988), and writer-activist
Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones (1943-2014). Wilson
affectionately called these “my four Bs,” and would emend the list to
include playwright-essayists James Baldwin (1924-1987) and Ed Bullins
(1935- ). Wilson considered the blues the most important of the “four Bs.”
A musical genre and form that emerged from the work songs, spirituals
and folk traditions of African-Americans living in the rural south of the US
at the end of the 19th century, Wilson recognised in the blues a model
and method for capturing, documenting and expressing the vagaries and
complexities of African-American life. He endeavoured to emulate that
model and method in his own writing. He also attempted to incorporate
elements of Borges, Beardon and Baraka’s singular aesthetics in his
work. Speaking about his influences in a 1999 interview with The Paris
Review, he explained that from Borges, Beardon and Baraka he learned
that he could create stories about a specific time, place and culture and
still have them resonate with universal themes; that it was possible to

render the fullness and richness of everyday life without devolving into
sentimentality; and that all art, even if it does not announce itself as such,
is political.

Interestingly, Wilson did not start out as a playwright but as a poet.
Energised by the revolutionary spirit of the Black Arts Movements that
Baraka and Bullins helped pioneer in the 1960s, he joined the Centre
Avenue Poets Theater Workshop in his early 20s, where he met and
collaborated with other Hill District poets, educators, artists and activists
interested in illuminating and commenting on the experiences of African-
Americans in and through their writing. In 1968, he joined forces with
fellow Workshop participant Rob Penny to launch the Black Horizon
Theater, which aimed to use the arts – performance, in particular – to
raise the political consciousness of Pittsburgh’s African-American
residents. While Wilson directed many of the plays the company
produced – and even acted in a few – he resisted writing his own, as he
continued to see himself first and foremost as a poet. He would not write
his first one-act play, Recycle, until 1973. He followed it up in 1976 with
The Homecoming, which Pittsburgh’s Kuntu Theatre produced, and The
Coldest Day of the Year, which did not receive a production until 1989.

Wilson’s career as a playwright began in earnest after he moved to St.
Paul, Minnesota in 1978 to take a job writing scripts for the Science
Museum there. With some encouragement from a friend, director Claude
Purdy, he reworked a series of poems about a character named Black
Bart that he’d started writing in 1977 into a musical satire called Black Bart
and the Sacred Hills. Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of
Penumbra Theater, a company launched in 1976 to spotlight African-
American voices within the Minneapolis-St. Paul theatre community,
agreed to grant the work its first professional production in 1981. The
collaborative relationship Wilson forged with Bellamy and Penumbra
would prove to be one of the most important of his career. Penumbra
presented early professional productions of all 10 plays in the Century
Cycle.

Wilson received a crucial break in 1980 when his play Jitney garnered the
Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis’ Jerome Fellowship. Focusing on a
group of unlicensed African-American cab drivers trying to survive in
1970s Pittsburgh amidst the push for ‘urban renewal,’ the play was

produced by the Allegheny Repertory Theater and Penumbra Theater in
1982. That same year, the National Playwrights’ Conference at the
Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, which had previously rejected Jitney,
Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, and another play Wilson wrote called
Fullerton Street, selected Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for a
workshop production. It was during his time at the O’Neill that Wilson
began collaborating with Lloyd Richards (1919-2006), who served as the
head of the National Playwrights’ Conference, dean of the Yale School of
Drama, and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater.

After Wilson fine-tuned Ma Rainey’s at the O’Neill, Richards produced and
directed the play at Yale Rep and on Broadway in 1984. Richards
subsequently stewarded Wilson’s Fences (1987), Joe Turner’s Come and
Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), Two Trains Running (1992) and
Seven Guitars (1996) on Broadway. He also directed the 1995 adaptation
of The Piano Lesson for television. Artistic differences about the latter
caused an irreparable rift in their working relationship, thus bringing an
end to their auspicious collaborations. Wilson chose Marion McClinton to
helm King Hedley II (2001) and Kenny Leon to direct Gem of the Ocean
(2004) and Radio Golf (2007) on Broadway, thereby bearing out the call
he made in a 1990 Spin Magazine essay to have Black directors oversee
his work. Wilson did not live to see the latter production or the
subsequent Broadway premiere of Jitney (2016) directed by Ruben
Santiago-Hudson.

Wilson announced that he had liver cancer on August 26, 2005. He died
from the disease on October 2, 2005 at the age of 60. In addition to the
lush representations of African-American life and experience included in
his poetry and plays, he left behind a formidable legacy of advocacy for
Black artists and aesthetic practices. The 1996 speech he delivered at the
Theatre Communications Group national conference, ‘The Ground on
Which I Stand,’ continues to serve as an important manifesto for artists
interested in transforming the professional theatre world by upending the
racial, class and gender asymmetries present throughout it. With his
successes on Broadway and various stages throughout the US and
across the globe, Wilson accrued tremendous influence, which he used
to create opportunities for other African-American artists. There are
countless Black actors, directors, designers and stage managers who got
their starts working on Wilson’s plays. There are also countless African

American playwrights – among them, Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin
McCraney, Dominique Morisseau and Lynn Nottage – who have
benefitted from the successful relationships Wilson cultivated with various
theatres in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2015, Denzel Washington announced that he had entered into an
agreement with HBO to produce films of all 10 plays in the Century Cycle.
In addition to introducing Wilson’s work to new audiences, the films
promise to further highlight the significance of Wilson’s accomplishments.

METHODS

When Wilson began feverishly writing Jitney in a Twin Cities fish and chip
restaurant, he did not intend the play to be part of a larger series of
works. Indeed, it was only after he completed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
that he realised that he had written three plays set in three different
decades: Jitney in the 1970s; Fullerton Street in the 1940s; and Ma
Rainey’s in the 1920s. Wilson explains:

“Once I became conscious of that, I realised I was trying to
focus on what I felt were the most important issues
confronting Black Americans for that decade, so ultimately
they could stand as a record of Black experience over the
past hundred years presented in the form of dramatic
literature.” (Powers, 1984, p.52).

Wilson considered the 10-play cycle “a 400-year-old autobiography.” With
the project, he aimed to craft a dynamic portrait of African-American
experience and to represent silenced and suppressed aspects of African-
American history. He was especially interested in exploring the
particularities of life in the Hill District, the backdrop for all the plays in the
cycle except Ma Rainey’s, which unfolds in Chicago.

It took Wilson more than 25 years to complete the Century Cycle, which
he did not write in chronological order. He finished Gem of the Ocean, set
in the 1900s, in 2003; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in the 1910s, in
1988; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, set in the 1920s, in 1984; The Piano
Lesson, set in the 1930s, in 1990; Seven Guitars, set in the 1940s, in 1996;
Fences, set in the 1950s, in 1987; Two Trains Running, set in the 1960s, in
1992; Jitney, set in the 1970s, in 2000; King Hedley II, set in the 1980s, in
2001; and, Radio Golf, set in the 1990s, in 2005. Wilson explicitly wrote
the plays to be in conversation with one another. Thus, there are
characters, themes, plotlines and idiomatic expressions that repeat and
resonate across each. Critics have often highlighted this intertextuality as
one of the cycle’s greatest triumphs. They also frequently herald Wilson’s
emphatic embrace of the Black vernacular. Writing for the New York
Times in 2017, Ben Brantley exclaims:

“I can’t think of another American dramatist since
Tennessee Williams who writes with the generous lyricism
of Wilson. It’s almost as much like the tragedies of Ancient
Greece as it is like Shakespeare, or perhaps grand opera,
even though the characters belong to another social
stratum, altogether, from the usual aristocrats of Verdi.
Wilson found the divine in the down home.” (Morris, 2017).

The enthusiasm Brantley expresses for Wilson’s rich language and
dramaturgy is reflected throughout much of the critical writing on the
Century Cycle.

While Wilson’s work generally received high praise from audiences and
critics alike, his forays into cultural commentary tended to spark
controversy. Robert Brustein, scholar, critic and founding artistic director
of Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater, took particular umbrage
with Wilson’s ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ speech. Wilson called
Brustein, who offered some of the harshest reviews of his earliest work,
“a sniper, naysayer, and cultural imperialist” during the remarks. Brustein
replied in American Theatre Magazine:

“August Wilson is more comfortable writing plays than
apostolic decrees. His speech is melancholy testimony to
the rabid identity politics and poisonous racial
consciousness that have been infecting our country in
recent years. Although Wilson would deny it, such
sentiments represent a reverse form of the old politics of
division, an appeal for socially approved and foundation-
funded separatism.” (Brustein, 1996).

The barbs the pair traded in print ultimately culminated in a 1997 public
town-hall debate moderated by playwright-performer Anna Deavere
Smith in New York City. There was very little during the discussion on
which Wilson and Brustein agreed.

Although Wilson often resisted suggestions that he wrote political plays,
his work, nevertheless, transformed the cultural politics of theatre.
Indeed, like Baldwin, Baraka and Bullins before him, Wilson made a
forceful case with his work for the vitality and necessity of theatre that
explores the human condition through the lens of African-American
history and culture.

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