August Wilson

In Memoriam.


From Bloomberg…

August Wilson, U.S. Playwright on Black Segregation, Dies

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- August Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize- winning playwright whose works chronicled a century of racial segregation, the blues and black life in Pittsburgh's Hill District, died today after a battle with liver cancer, the Associated Press said. He was 60.

He died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, the news wire said, citing Dena Levitin, the playwright's personal assistant.
Wilson had been diagnosed in June by doctors at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, where he'd moved in 1990.
His central achievement was a series of ten plays, one for each decade of the 20th century. They included ``Fences,'' which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and traces a father-and-son conflict over a scholarship in the 1950s, and ``Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' set in 1927, which follows a group of blues musicians relating their stories of racial exploitation.

It’s odd that I haven’t seen paeans for August Wilson all over the blogosphere. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough. I can’t think of anyone more deserving, so I assume they’re on the way.

Here goes my $.02.

August Wilson differs for me from Arthur Miller or Bill Shakespeare in only one particular: I never met Bill Shakespeare, or Arthur Miller, but I did meet August Wilson once.

He spoke a few years ago at the annual Printers Row Book Fair that closes down Dearborn Street once a year for two days. It’s heaven; stall after stall of every kind and genre and condition of book you can imagine interlaced with writers reading, children’s books authors telling stories, hucksters (but literate huckster), BBQ vendors and an army of readers all drooling and calculating how much they could afford, and how many pounds of prose they could carry back home.

August Wilson’s venue was the airy, clattery, echoey atrium of the rehabbed Dearborn Street Station; an oddly located and poorly laid-out demi-mall that holds onto its solvency by its nails and used to feature several business that never seemed to be open, a decent “Bar Louie” restaurant where I sometimes sit and write, a SYDA Yoga center and a branch bank.

That day it was very much alive, but in a simultaneously high-wattage and low-key way. We weren’t waiting for an entertainer or a raconteur -- although it turns out we got both and in trumps – we were waiting for a giant. A genuine literary Titan.

You don’t just take out the lighters and scream “Freeeeebiiiiiird!” for Mr. August Wilson.

It was kinda like church, and from the look of the audience there were a lot of writers in the room and we were all thinking the same thing: an true Alpha Male Auteur was one minute away from booming through the door. Someone we’d all read, see performed live and on PBS, seen interviewed and beside whom everything I have ever written in my life looks like palsied crayola-and-poop construction-paper sketching that Mommy’ll post up on the fridge for just long enough to hide from me the Terrible Truth of my artless hackery.

I don’t go all spla when I see a celebrity (you see them a lot in Chicago, and fame is just…fame) but I do get very tentative when I meet someone I admire. Who I know won’t remember me five minutes after he or she has moved on, but who I don’t want to look back on their day and wonder who that embarrassing loudmouth prick was who wouldn’t leave them be, or the who peed himself while smiling like a blathering, K-mart-drive-thru-lobotomy-case.

I don’t wanna be those guys – or even be accidentally mistaken for those guys -- so I mentally drift to the back, but I do want to meet someone I genuinely respect and express a few words of authentic thanks and praise, so I mentally drift to the front. And that was the vibe I got: a lot of us wavering like tubeworms in uncertain-but-palpably-Christmas-Eve excitement.

This from Ebony Magazine from 2001 sums up that day pretty well…

“STANDING behind a lectern on a makeshift stage at Chicago's Printer's Row Bookfair--an annual celebration of literature and authors housed in what once was the city's old bookbinding district--playwright August Wilson, one of the featured speakers of the day, morphs into a cast of characters culled from his native Pittsburgh, the city that inspires and influences so much of his work. As the occasionally scatological dialogue spills from Wilson's mouth, the listeners are transported to a Black pool hall, a lunch counter or a barber shop, where wisdom and wisecracks mix in equal measure. In fact, the mini-drama Wilson plays out is so dead-on accurate, so true to the rhyme and ring of Black talk in Anywhere, USA, that it feels as though a tape recorder lodged in Wilson's brain has just been activated, issuing the jumble of voices.
…

It goes on

"I write, like any artist, for an audience of one," he says, "basically, to satisfy myself. But I'm also trying to make an aesthetic statement. What I am trying to do is put Black culture on stage and demonstrate to the world--not to White folks, not to Black folks, but to the world -- that it exists and that it is capable of sustaining you. I want to show the world that there is no idea or concept in the human experience that cannot be examined through Black life and culture."
And so, with unwavering honesty, Wilson has set about defining the human experience in decidedly, some might say defiantly, Black terms, using the medium of theater to amplify the voices of Black folks. His writing is an exercise in self-exploration and self-definition, with each character in each play standing as a monument to the strength, perseverance, complexity and, most importantly, the humanity of Black Americans.

"I find that White audiences are surprised to discover the humanity," he says. "They don't see us that way. They look at Black America in a glancing manner."

…
Wilson worked hard; he felt he didn't have time to dawdle. "It took me eight years to develop my voice as a poet," he says. "I didn't want that to happen as a playwright."
He still cranks out plays at a phenomenal pace (averaging one play every 16 months), but he's learning to take time for simple pleasures like playing around the house with his young daughter Azula. He says he has a good relationship with his daughter from his first marriage, Sakina, 31, who lives in Baltimore. But he admits that age, distance and the comforts that come with financial security make him a much different dad today than he was 30 years ago. "I wouldn't say I like fatherhood more now than I did when my older daughter was born, but I was a whole lot different at 53 than I was at 23," he says. "And my life is a whole lot different, too."

What hasn't changed is his devotion to writing, specifically writing about Black people. He has a lot of stories coursing around in his head, he says, and he wants to get them all down to help his younger daughter and other Black children make sense of the world and the place of African-Americans in it. So he'll write until the end.

"Retire? Even if I never write another play, I won't retire," he says. "I'm going to die with my pen in my hand."

In the end, to everyone but his or her close circle, a writer is their words, and August Wilson’s words were American opera; poetry slung down from Heaven and sung like honey thunder. With nothing but a pen he carved a living legacy out of the raw rock of American Apartheid that will last as long as humans stage dramas to explain themselves to themselves.

And he died too soon for me because I’m selfish and I want my heroes to live and fight and nobly prevail forever and ever.

They never do, but Wilson managed to finish his monumental American Cycle. He completed the work of his life, and how many people can reach their final act and lay down in the narrow house having done that?

On that day in 2001 he was a regular, funny, brilliant guy who put all of us wannabes at our ease, all while never giving up the undisputed title of a Great and Serious Man of Letters even for an instant. I got to shake his hand and say how much I admired his work, and he got to leave without the memory of me puking on his shoes out of sheer terror, so we both came out ahead.

I don't remember who, but pity whoever it was that had to follow him that day.

I pity whoever it is that has to follow him now.

‘Bye August, and many, many thanks.