August Wilson's Legacy

August Wilson's legacy lives. In fact it's probably only getting started. Audiences in Washington will have the opportunity to see all of his 10 plays this spring, in the order of the decades of the 20th century in which each is set, and that approach is likely to be repeated elsewhere in the coming years.

Within the theatre world, it's particularly vital. In the new issue of American Theatre, there's an interview with playwright Lucy Thurber, whose play, Scarcity, dealing with an American working class family, is printed in the issue. Thurber recalls a conversation with Wilson at the O'Neill summer playwrights conference. "I write about poor white trash," she told him. "Are you trash?" he asked her. "No," she said, "I'm just using it as a descriptive term to explain that part of the population." But Wilson said, "Again, I ask you, are you trash? Are the people that you grew up with trash? Are the people that you love trash?"

"That was a huge, emotional moment for me," Thurber said. "Where it cracked, this play was born. The language we use about ourselves is important. There is something about having the courage to talk with dignity and trust and faith about these parts of America that are us."

August Wilson wrote about the African American experience in America. But the way he wrote about it has clear lessons for all writers, as Lucy Thurber learned first hand.

Also in that issue, there is a piece by Teresa Eyring, executive director of the Theatre Communications Group that publishes that magazine as well as the August Wilson Century Cycle collection of his plays, described below. She notes that Wilson was involved in preparing for the publication, and that at the publication ceremony his widow, Constanza Romero, talked about what this publication would have meant to August, had he lived to see it. Eyring went on to extoll the process of developing each of Wilson's plays--a process that he and his collaborators essentially invented--as a model for other new plays.

Here is more about the August Wilson Century Cycle, published by Theatre Communications Group, and available for Christmas giving from your favorite booksellers:


T’is the season of the boxed set, but this one has more significance than the usual holiday gift repackaging. This is the first physical embodiment of a singular achievement—ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, which together tell a long story of African American survival. It is the first time the plays of August Wilson have been collected to tell that story chronologically.

Since Wilson completed the cycle shortly before his untimely death in 2005, the nature and extent of this achievement is slowly being recognized. No American playwright of any color has come close to a series of ten major plays like this, or participated in the acclaimed productions of all their plays. Many others helped this process in vital ways, but even so it’s fair to say that August Wilson transformed and enriched American theatre as no individual has ever done.

From Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) to Radio Golf (1997) and including Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Jitney and The Piano Lesson--each play is carefully true to its time, yet there are few historic events even mentioned, and the characters are ordinary people—predominately in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood. The most obvious virtue of these plays is their language—a version of black speech that is at once authentic and Wilson’s own poetry-- and this alone makes these plays unusually good to read as well as to see performed.

With this set it’s possible to feel the changes and the continuities in African American culture through the century. The reader is aided in this by recurring and even legendary characters, and by ancestors and descendants in the same family—and perhaps most hauntingly, in the fate of a single house.

In this boxed set, each play has a foreword by such luminaries as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, playwright Tony Kushner, writer Ishmael Reed, actor Laurence Fishburne and former theatre critic Frank Rich. Kushner writes that Wilson grappled with theological questions: “Eugene O’Neill, the playwright August Wilson most resembles, did that.” Reed writes that Wilson’s “ear was so good that his character’s words could be set to music.” Fishburne quotes favorite lines from “Two Trains Running” (he was in its first production, along with Samuel L. Jackson): “Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.”

There couldn’t be a better introduction to Wilson’s work than the intro to the series by New Yorker drama critic John Lahr. The cover for the set has a great photo of the author, taken in the last year or so of his life. The set lists at $200 and can be purchased for $126, so it’s definitely a gift item. And if you don’t have someone to give it to, think about gifting your favorite local library.

If you haven't seen an August Wilson play yet, take the next opportunity (which may be the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Fences next season) or you could even track down a used DVD or video of The Piano Lesson, which is the only Wilson play to be adapted for the screen so far (it was a TV production for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, directed by long-time Wilson collaborator, Loyd Richards. Or follow Toni Morrison's lead and read the plays, possibly the most readable around, even for people who don't usually read plays.