A Story To Tell -- Playwright August Wilson, Now Settled In Seattle's Misty Nest, Writes About The The Black Experience Like No Other Storyteller
THE STORYTELLER SITS ON the bus.
The No. 10 bus, as it happens, wending its way from Capitol Hill to downtown Seattle. In one of the front seats sits two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, an aptly named august personage if ever there was one.
This is the man who in 1984, when the first of his plays hit Broadway, was called "a major find for the American theater" by The New York Times. And this, from Time magazine: "America may have no finer playwright than August Wilson."
At 52, Wilson looks younger than you might expect, with keen brown eyes and skin as smooth as a sheet of new paper. He sits straight up, solid in his tweedy olive sports coat, striped dress shirt, suspenders, tie and dapper cap, clutching on his lap a brown briefcase filled with papers. ("No, not a play I'm working on," he says. "Stuff from the office I haven't dealt with. I don't carry around the play I'm working on. I'd be afraid to lose it.")
Wilson has lived in Seattle since 1990, even writing much of his latest play, "Seven Guitars," at Broadway New American Grill and B&O Espresso on Capitol Hill. But you would be forgiven for not knowing Wilson lives here, going solely by his plays. Most of them take place in and around the terrain of his youth: the ethnically diverse Hill District of Pittsburgh.
He doesn't have any plans to write a play set in the cloudy hills of his new hometown. "Not to say it's not possible," he says. "It's like I haven't looked at Seattle. I'm still looking there," he says, waving his right hand at some East Coast in the mist: "At Pittsburgh."
But, oh, the tales he tells of Pittsburgh! Both "Seven Guitars," currently playing at Seattle Repertory Theatre, and "Two Trains Running," opening at Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center at the end of this month, take place in Pittsburgh. That city is home to Wilson's everyday heroes: blues musicians, diner customers and boardinghouse residents, all searching for their place in this country and their spiritual place in the world.
Wilson has undertaken an immense task: to write the story of the African-American experience in this century, decade by decade. He does so through the tales of the individuals who populate his plays: ambitious 1940s blues musician Floyd Barton in "Seven Guitars," and 1960s diner owner Memphis Lee in "Two Trains Running." In this series he's written seven plays already, running from the 1910s through the 1970s.
The stories have won him accolades: not only the Pulitzers (for "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson"), but a Tony Award (for "Fences") and six New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, one for each of his latest plays.
It's not just on paper that Wilson is a fantastic storyteller. Ask him a simple question and you get stories: Nostalgic reminiscences. Wry little tales. Sharply observed anecdotes. His friends praise his intellect, his loyalty and generosity. Inevitably they end by saying: "Of course, he's a great storyteller."
THIS IS THE STORY of how August Wilson didn't learn to drive.
In 1980, he was trying. "I was comfortable enough that I had a little sports car," he says. "Then I ran two red lights. That was it for me." He gave up driving. That's why Wilson is on the bus this December day, and almost every day.
On this morning, he's taking the bus from his home on Capitol Hill down to Lowell's Restaurants at Pike Place Market, where he orders breakfast (coffee, sausage patties and eggs over hard). He writes in cafes around town: B&O Espresso, Broadway New American Grill, Cafe Minnie's, Mecca Cafe. "Place is important," he says. "Where I'm at and when I'm writing is going to affect what I do."
Although he has a computer, he still tends to scribble his ideas the old-fashioned way: pen and paper. He writes on everything from napkins to file folders; for a while he even bought boxes of file folders to write on. These days his paper of choice is 5-by-7-inch fliers, the ones lying around cafes, advertising rock bands and the like: "I like the colored ones because they're easy to find again."
On top of the cafe table, Wilson's hands are in constant motion: clutching fork and coffee cup, smoothing his forehead, punctuating his stories. It's as if they were seeking some outlet - the application of pen to paper, perhaps, or the clicking of typewriter keys - to disperse the nervous energy.
Come midmorning, Wilson walks to his one-room office in Pioneer Square, where he and a part-time assistant attend to the tasks of being one of America's most important playwrights: playing phone tag, arranging his schedule. His plays line the bookshelves; posters and black-and-white photos from the various productions are mounted on the walls.
At one point, Wilson was probably the most produced playwright in America and most likely the only one with six plays produced on Broadway between 1984 and 1996, says Benjamin Mordecai, associate dean of the Yale School of Drama and an independent theater producer who has produced all six of Wilson's Broadway plays. "He's certainly one of the very few most significant writers of the last 20 years," Mordecai says of Wilson. "He has an incredible ear for the poetry and dignity of the African-American experience that he has lived through. He writes of a very specific culture in a very specific place, but the themes are quite universal."
In each of his works, Wilson covers a significant moment for African Americans. "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" centers on a father and daughter who migrate from the South to the North in 1911 in search of their wife and mother. "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" features black recording artists dealing with the white-run recording industry in 1927. In "The Piano Lesson," two boys travel North in 1936 to sell watermelons and a family piano in order to buy land down South. "Seven Guitars" centers on a group of friends and the last days of blues musician Floyd Barton in 1948. "Fences," set in 1957, tells the frustration of a garbage collector, a former baseball player in the Negro Leagues. "Two Trains Running" unfolds in a 1969 diner with its owner trying to get a fair price for her diner from the city that wants to tear down the block. And "Jitney" is about Pittsburgh jitney drivers in 1977. Each of the plays tells the stories of the individual characters while also grappling with the larger issues of the times: black migration, the post-war economic boom passing blacks by, the civil rights movement.
Each play takes him about "two months and two years to write," he says. "Two months to get the idea and two years to write it." Wilson starts each project by choosing a year and a theme. For "Seven Guitars," "the year was relatively easy," he says. "It was a question of before or after the war. I chose after." African Americans had proved their loyalty during the war and there were more jobs, he says. "I wanted to touch on that period of hopefulness."
Then characters begin to emerge. For "Seven Guitars," he had imagined the piece as an all-male ensemble, seven blues guitarists, in a police lineup. "Then in my head, one of the guys came to me and said: `What the hell she doin' here?' " Wilson says. "I looked over and there was this woman sitting there. This is supposed to be an all-male play! I went over and asked her: `Excuse me, what are you doing in my play?' And she said: `I want my own space.' I said: `You mean you want your own scene?' She said: `No, I want my own space.' " Eventually, the woman became Vera, a prominent character in the piece. "The play changed from that point," Wilson says. "It was no longer about this police lineup. . . . Once I let one woman in, the others came right behind her. I was being foolish, trying to write a play about black Americans in the '40s and leaving out the women."
Wilson claims not to do any research for his plays: "To me, research is like putting on a straitjacket because you're limited to what your research uncovers as opposed to just coming from inside you. Most research I do is listening to the music of the period." Wilson hears song lyrics and asks: Why did this singer say this or that? "If a guy says: `I'm leaving in the morning . . .' you say: `What are the circumstances of his life? Who's he talking to? Why's he leaving?' . . . If you take the logical extension of things, it'll take you to a whole new world."
THIS IS THE STORY of August Wilson vs. Attila the Hun.
Later on this day, Wilson watches a rehearsal of "Seven Guitars" from the auditorium of Seattle Rep's Bagley Wright Theatre on Queen Anne. He gazes at the set: the back yard of an apartment, complete with fences, cramped buildings, a bench.
"That's my back yard," he leans over, whispering. "Seven Guitars" is set in the back yard of his childhood, complete with a neighbor who keeps a rooster. "Right there, somewhere where that bench is, is where I defeated Attila the Hun," he chuckles. He's always had a lively imagination, vanquishing foes like Attila with toy swords.
The sights, sounds, people and stories of his childhood resound in Wilson's plays. He was born Frederick August Kittel, the fourth of six children, to a white German baker father who was a "sporadic presence," he says, and Daisy Wilson, an African-American woman who worked as a janitor to support the family.
"I had a wonderful childhood," he says. "I wish I could go back. . . . I remember coming home from school and the parents would be sitting out on the front stoops, waiting for their kids to come home. . . . I miss that sense of community." Wilson still returns to Pittsburgh at least once a year to visit his mother's grave and to call on his siblings who live in the area.
Wilson tells these stories about how he started writing:
The story of how he learned to sign his name to his works: He wrote anonymous love poems to his seventh-grade crush, leaving them on her desk. "She would read these poems and then look over at Anthony Curry. Then her and Anthony started going together! And it was my poem!" He resolved from then on to sign his name to everything he wrote.
The story of how he quit school because he wrote so well: At age 15, he wrote an ambitious 20-page paper about Napoleon for a teacher - an African American - who doubted his authorship. Refusing to try to prove he wrote the paper, Wilson tore it up and walked out of school. He played basketball under the principal's window the next morning, hoping the principal would tell him to come back. Didn't happen. Not wanting his mother to know he had quit, he spent the rest of the school year in the library, voraciously reading everything from theology to biographies to furniture-making: "The whole world was there."
The story of when he decided he was going to be a Real Writer: He still remembers the day he bought his first typewriter, a used Royal, with keys that you really had to hit hard, Wilson says, demonstrating by pounding imaginary sticky keys in the air with his forefingers. "April 1, 1965. I spent $20 in one place. In 1965, $20 was a lot of money to me. I got the $20 for writing my sister's term paper, so the money was from writing. When I bought the typewriter, I made the decision I was going to be a writer. Not a bus driver or a lawyer or anything else."
He discovered the blues around that time, after buying a stack of old 78s, one of which included the stylins' of Bessie Smith. "The universe stuttered and everything fell to a new place," he wrote of that moment in the introduction to the book, "August Wilson: Three Plays." "It was my moment of epiphany," he recalls now. He built up a collection of thousands of 78s. For Wilson, the blues contained the history, culture and rich stories of his people.
In 1968, he started Black Horizons Theatre Company in Pittsburgh with friend Rob Penny. That was his introduction to playwriting. "I'd never really seen a play written down before," he says. He had been writing poetry and short stories, but decided to try his hand at plays. One of his early efforts was "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," a satirical musical set in an anachronistic Old West. He had originally written "Black Bart" as a series of poems. "I was so taken by the poems," says Claude Purdy, longtime friend of Wilson's and currently associate artistic director at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. "I thought they were innately dramatic, that they could be turned to a dramatic form." Purdy urged Wilson to turn "Black Bart" into a play. It became Wilson's first long-form theater piece.
It was around that time that Wilson discovered the works of black cultural nationalist writer Amiri Baraka. The blues and Baraka are two of what Wilson calls the "4 B's" - his four widely acknowledged influences. The other two are Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose storytelling skill he admires, and African-American artist Romare Bearden. "Bearden had accomplished in painting an expression as full and varied as the blues," Wilson says in the introduction to "August Wilson: Three Plays." ". . . `I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures,' Bearden had said. I took it as my credo."
Purdy, who later moved to St. Paul, encouraged Wilson to do likewise. It was there, around the late 1970s and early 1980s, that Wilson began seriously writing plays. He got a job writing scripts for a theater troupe attached to the Science Museum of Minnesota.
"When I was 18 years old, I wrote a letter to my sister," he says. "I told her I was going to write about the lives of the people on the Hill District. I think the short fictions and poems I was writing did that. The plays gave me a larger canvas to work on." In 1981 he started writing "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," which was accepted the next year for a workshop production by the prestigious Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn. That acceptance is still a high point for him: "It was like saying: I can play on this field." In 1984, "Ma Rainey" opened at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., beginning Wilson's fruitful relationship with then-Yale Rep artistic director Lloyd Richards. Since then, Yale Rep has premiered four more of his plays, all of which went on to Broadway.
Wilson moved to Seattle in 1990 (Nov. 16, 1990, he recalls sharply), "because I didn't know anyone here." He gets lots of invitations to speak, to attend play openings, but in Seattle "you can not be distracted by social obligations. You can stay home," he says. These days he's apt to be as busy writing as taking care of his new baby: 4-month-old Azula Carmen Wilson. Wilson also has a daughter from another marriage, 27-year-old Sakina Ansari Wilson, who is studying to be a naturopathic doctor in Baltimore. His wife, Colombian-born costume designer Constanza Romero (they met while she was a student at Yale, designing costumes for "The Piano Lesson"), is designing the costumes for "Seven Guitars." She brings Azula Carmen to the Rep on this day. Swinging his baby up and down, Wilson sounds like any new father: "I get up just to look at her, even if she's sleeping."
THIS IS THE STORY of August Wilson and African-American theaters.
In the summer of 1996, Wilson stunned the 500 people attending a conference of the Theater Communications Group, a national network of nonprofit drama institutions. Wilson presented a speech about the role of race in cultural identity, the underfunding of black theaters in America and, most controversially, his denunciation of color-blind casting, the practice of casting African Americans and other non-Caucasians in roles originally created for white performers. Since then he's had numerous debates on the topic in print and in person, most notably with Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. A live debate between the two in New York City last January, moderated by Anna Deavere Smith, drew a sold-out crowd and national media attention.
To understand Wilson's opposition to color-blind casting, you have to appreciate that much of his life's work has been about sussing out, articulating - and even helping to forge - an African-American culture and identity (emphasis on the African heritage) that doesn't take second place to the dominant European culture in America.
"To mount an all-black production of `A Death of a Salesman' or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture, is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans," he said in his 1996 speech.
Wilson believes that if a role was conceived for a white person, the black actor playing the role has to deny something in himself - everything from his culture to the way he talks and thinks. "You got all the actors working over there, celebrating European culture instead of here celebrating black culture," he says.
Wilson also contends that color-blind casting, and the inclusion of one or two African-American plays per year in mainstream, predominantly white theater companies, diverts funding from the development of black theaters. Most of the money given to encourage diversity in theater goes toward mainstream theaters mounting African-American plays, not toward the formation of black theaters, he says.
Critics of Wilson's arguments have seen contradictions. His plays have been mounted by numerous mainstream, predominantly white theaters. Most of his plays have premiered at Yale Rep, which has an ethnically mixed but mostly white audience. Couldn't he premiere his plays at a black theater such as Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey? "If I premiered a play, it would probably be with a theater I'd worked with for the past 15 years," Wilson says. "I feel I owe them something."
It may also seem contradictory that Wilson, whose works are celebrated by a mixed audience and who lives in an integrated but mostly white neighborhood, looks back with almost nostalgic fondness on the segregated communities of earlier decades. "If you look at black America in the '40s and '50s, you'll find a thriving black community that is culturally and economically self-sufficient," he says. In the Hill District, there used to be a black baseball league, black businesses, professionals - all "who lived in the community because they couldn't live anywhere else," he says. Things have gotten worse for black people since then, he believes. With integration, "the baseball league's gone, the doctor moves out of the neighborhood. . . . What happens to the culturally thriving community? It becomes a wasteland. And that's where we are now in 1997."
Wilson seems to embody other contradictions as well. A theme that echoes throughout most of his work is the idea of the South as African Americans' ancestral homeland in the United States. He believes the northward black migration at the beginning of this century - and the uprooting of a nascent Southern black culture - was a mistake: "a transplant that I don't think took. . . . I certainly think if we had stayed in the South that we would be a stronger people. We would've further developed the culture." And yet Wilson acknowledges he's not eager to move there: "That's one of the contradictions I have. The experience of black people in the South is not a very pleasant one - it was a horrific experience. So I'm always uncomfortable in the South."
Whatever the contradictions, Wilson is committed to developing black theaters. He is part of a group organizing a national black theater summit for this spring in New Hampshire, to talk about the future of black theater and what can be done to encourage its prosperity. (Wilson is teaching playwriting at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., this winter quarter.)
In the meantime, he's trying to finish his newest work-in-progress, "King Hedley II," set in 1985, revolving around the grown child of one of the characters in "Seven Guitars."
Taking a break from the rehearsal at the Rep, Wilson stops to buy a newspaper on a street in Queen Anne. His hands are empty - he's left his briefcase elsewhere - and they're jittery - they need something to hold. He enters the Mecca Cafe, finds a napkin, grabs a pen. He's trying to work out an idea for "King Hedley II." "I started with the idea of trying to understand why these kids were trying to kill each other in 1985," he says. The play explores "the so-called breakup of the black family. When you begin to think about this, you realize you have to go back and keep going back to 1619. You find out that the family structure of black America has always been different. . . . With slavery, I haven't yet worked out in my head what it's like to say: `You're going over to Georgia now and your spouse's gotta go to Alabama with Mr. Johnson. There's the breakup of the family right there."
After the 1980s play is complete, he'll have only the first and last decade of this century to go in the arc of what he calls "the odyssey of black people in America."
Wilson's hands have stopped fidgeting. The storyteller is writing his stories.
Janet I-Chin Tu writes about theater for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific Northwest magazine's photographer.