I Call Him August

It's a journalistic convention to refer to people by their last names, and as an elder of accomplishment and authority, he certainly ought to be called "Mr." Plus there is the unfortunate precedent of black men being called by their first names only, another way of calling them "boy."

But Mr. August Wilson is always going to be August to me, because that's how I knew him. It's what I called him and what others we knew in common called him. And more than anything now, it expresses how I feel about this great playwright and teacher, his works and his life. It's all personal to me. Not personal only, but certainly that.

I met August Wilson in 1991 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut. I was there to write a magazine piece, and he was one of my first interviews. It was the O'Neill and its artistic director, Lloyd Richards, who pulled an unfinished Ma Rainey's Black Bottom out of the submissions pile, and brought August to the summer conference where a dozen or so plays went through the "O'Neill process," which ended up with a bare-bones production. Not only did Lloyd Richards then become its director at Yale and forward to Broadway, but August returned with his next several plays in subsequent summers. By all accounts, he flourished in this process, arriving as a quietly suspicious but willing participant and becoming a confident enthusiast. It was nearly a decade later, and he was back at the O'Neill for the first time not as a playwright but as a dramaturg, an advisor on the text of someone else's play. (He returned as dramaturg at least once more, and as playwright a couple of more times, including in 2002 with Gem of the Ocean.)

By the end of the interview we had begun to explore what we had in common, like the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. August was a year older, and in many ways his neighborhood in the city of Pittsburgh was farther away than the 35 miles to the town where I grew up, but we did have a number of common points of reference.

The conference summer lasts a month, and that year I was there for two weeks of it. So I spent a fair amount of time with and around August, talking and listening (mostly) over communal meals in the dining hall, over tons of coffee and on one occasion, a few too many beers. August was dramaturg to the playwright I was principally following, but the atmosphere at the O'Neill was so open and embracing that it was only natural to have that much daily contact. We even had a kind of adventure, which I'll describe later.

One evening as a few of us at our table lingered after dinner, August spontaneously launched into the stories his characters were telling him. That's when I first heard of Aunt Ester. Later I learned that he often does this, testing out ideas and stories for the play he's working on. He was a mesmerizing storyteller in person as well as on the page and the stage.

Even though I was not strictly speaking part of the process at the O'Neill, I discovered that I was part of that summer's community (and one of the playwrights volunteered that my presence was positive.) The thing about the O'Neill is that once the bond of that summer is formed, it remains. So whenever I saw August again, whatever the circumstances, I was greeted warmly, and he talked to me as a friend. Once was at the Public Theatre in Pittsburgh, when he was preparing the first professional production of Jitney.

The Public was another node in the network that began for me at the O'Neill, and involved others who directed and acted in his plays, and brought their own work as playwrights to Pittsburgh. August not only provided opportunities for African American theatre artists, but those who worked with him seemed to carry his spirit with them. He was always a presence.

I'm not making any great claims for this limited relationship. But it was enough for me to feel personal affection as well as admiration, and to feel his loss in a personal way. These feelings can't ever be detached from the feelings evoked by seeing or reading his plays. And that's why I'm comfortable only calling him August.

My account of that summer's conference, including my Smithsonian article, is here. I was thrilled to discover in the course of research that I'm quoted about the O'Neill from this article, in a book, "The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson" by Sandra G. Shannon, I wrote more about him at the time of his death and various memorials in 2005 , here.