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"I'm
in a restaurant, writing on a napkin one time, and this waitress, she's about
17 years old, and she goes, Do you write on napkins because it doesn't really
count? Bingo, that's exactly what it is: it seems that if you're scribbling
on a napkin, you're just scribbling on a napkin. It frees you up, it doesn't
count." - Playwright August Wilson
by Bondo Wyszpolski
Marion McClinton claims that August Wilson is one of America's top three playwrights, up there with Eugene O' Neill and Tennessee Williams. What he's really saying is that Wilson is the greatest living playwright in this country, a statement at first glance as bold as it is audacious. After all, what about Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd, David Mamet, Neil Simon, or Terrence McNally?
McClinton, of course, has quite a stake in the matter. He not only directed Wilson's Jitney, which played the Mark Taper Forum earlier this year, but is again at the helm for the playwright's newest, King Hedley II, the eighth in an ambitious ten-play cycle that chronicles the African-American experience across the 20th century. Even so, there's no doubt that August Wilson is a modern master, a writer who has already picked up numerous awards including two Pulitzer Prizes, for Fences (1987) and for The Piano Lesson (1990), and a Tony (Fences).
The ingredients that enrich Wilson's work, elevating it to the highest realms of art, seem to be a combination of the melodious and the insightful, the sociological and the mythological, a kind of syncretism that's reminiscent of, let's say, cinema verite on the one hand, and magic realism on the other. The result is a lyrical tapestry rarely if ever seen on the American stage.
Wilson was born in 1945 and raised in the troubled Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where most of his plays take place. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter. He was in L.A. recently to oversee King Hedley II since it's still something of a work-in-progress. The play is ambitious and demanding, and long. Reviews to date have been generally favorable, although lengthy monologues in the second half have some critics complaining that they are tedious. True or not, these monologues - poetic, and eloquently drawn - are akin to signature jazz solos. Musicality adorns the play at every turn.
It's a point I comment upon. Sitting beside me at an outdoor table in the courtyard at the Music Center, Wilson recites from memory one of his favorite speeches from Fences, and which illustrates the texture found in all his work. Lyons is talking to Troy: "Let me have the ten dollars. I told you Bonnie working." Troy replies: "What that mean to me? 'Bonnie working.' I don't care if she working. Go ask her for ten dollars if she working. Talking about 'Bonnie working.' Why ain't you working?"
Wilson clicks his fingers to the rhythm and the flow: at the end of every sentence is the word 'working,' a percussive ring that keeps the conversation snappy and aloft.
Wilson says he can write in all kinds of situations, and he'll write on whatever's handy.
"I started my new play on a luggage tag. I was going to the airport and then in the car I got an idea, and the only thing I got to write on is this luggage tag, and that was my first line of dialogue for Aunt Ester; I wrote on this luggage tag. That's how it started."
Presumably Wilson is referring to his next installment in his dramatic decalogue, set in 1904. Aunt Ester, by the way, appears (offstage) in Two Trains Running, and at the opening of King Hedley II she has just died - at the grand and weathered age of 366.
So who is this woman whose life spanned the black man's presence in the Americas? Well, she's not exactly a black counterpart to Uncle Sam, but a kind of open-armed Statue of Liberty for African-Americans, a woman with a larger than life presence whose wisdom was as old as the hills. In his book-length biography of Wilson, Peter Wolfe calls her a prophetess and says that she "descends from the witches and enchantresses of universal legend." She's something the white man doesn't have - although now the black man doesn't seem to have her either.
"I've written on anything and everything," Wilson is saying. "I'm in a restaurant, writing on a napkin one time, and this waitress, she's about 17 years old, and she goes, Do you write on napkins because it doesn't really count? Bingo, that's exactly what it is: it seems that if you're scribbling on a napkin, you're just scribbling on a napkin. It frees you up, it doesn't count." Which means you can do some of your best writing that way. "But then you get to the point where it counts and you got to open that yellow tablet."
The initial draft is always written by hand, not on a computer. "We've been together a long time, my handwriting and I," he says. "We have a certain relationship that's important.
"I got this idea that I would write King Hedley II on file folders, because I had a whole stack of them," Wilson continues." They were just sitting there so I started writing on them - and I probably did about twelve folders before I suddenly realized what an absurd, inane idea [it was]." Questions he hadn't thought of began to surface, and not just those of keeping the slippery fellas in sequence. He laughs about it though, as an experiment that went astray.
"I write in tablets but I'm not organized, so King Hedley is actually in a stack of tablets; sometimes just two pages in a whole tablet has something to do with King. I can't tell you how many times I went through there, trying to find the play. I promised myself the next time I will get some very specific color tablets or something that's gonna identify them, because I think there are parts of the play that are lost simply because the tablet is mixed in with another pile of tablets somewhere - they're just scattered all over."
It seems he's still exploring the physical materials of his craft, I say.
"In a sense, the tools that you work with have a lot to do with what you produce, and I don't want to do the same thing, I want to so something different. That's why [I tried] the file folder idea, and it was going great; I had some great stuff in those file folders. I guess it's very similar to a painter who says, I've worked in oils, now I want to use acrylic, or now I'll do collage. You're experimenting with your tools and how you use them."
With the tools safely stashed we can look at process. Wilson recounts how King Hedley II took off (or almost didn't, perhaps) a year ago this past August. He was home in Seattle with the house to himself, his wife and young daughter having decamped to visit relatives for a month. As he tells it, he had ideas, notes, snatches of dialogue - and an August 16th deadline in the form of a scheduled reading at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.
Wilson retreated to his basement study, "and I sat there for ten days and didn't write a word." Finally, on the eleventh day, he reminded himself, "It's getting close, you better get going, you know. So, between the 11th and the 16th of August I took all this material - these tablets and notebooks - and came up with the play."
In January of this year, under the comma-laden title "Grandeur, Betrayal, Murder, But, No, It's Not An Opera," New York Times writer Ben Brantley reviewed an early version of King Hedley II after it opened in Pittsburgh. Brantley was impressed, but felt it was overly crowded with ideas and images.
Since then, I say to Wilson, I guess there've been a lot of tiny changes.
"Oh, no, there's been some major changes, not just little changes. I wasn't satisfied. We did a good show there, but I was still trying to find [the heart] within there and I couldn't see it; it's the old thing of being so close to it that you can't get a view of it. Even up in Boston I was still confused, trying to figure out what this play is about and trying to see it. And in between Boston and L.A. it suddenly came into focus and I could see the whole thing, I saw what it should be, and so I did a major rewrite between Boston and here."
This, then, was perhaps the flowering of all that groundwork last year in Seattle.
"The ten days that I sat there in the basement, and I say sat there doing nothing, that was really preparation for getting ready to do this work: I was doing a lot of mental, spiritual preparation for this journey that I was about to embark on. I didn't know where it was going to lead me or how I was going to come out; the only thing I know for certain is that it's gonna alter me.
"Sometimes you don't want to walk down that road," Wilson says, "you don't want to go through there because, basically, you're walking down the landscape of the self and you have to confront parts of yourself that maybe are painful to confront. And you have to be willing to do that because at the end of the journey the idea is to come out with a stronger, brighter spirit, and be all the better for having made the journey."
Initially, King Hedley II seems not only pessimistic, but fatalistic and inevitable, like Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, with the lightning bolt comes illumination. It's a tumultuous, operatic ending, complete with a macabre dice game and Biblical fury. I don't want to give anything away, but this is Wagner and Euripides and the thunderbolt of Zeus all in one.
When the smoke clears, it's not quite the end of the world. These people aren't bowing out quite that easily, least of all King's wife, Tonya.
"There's always new life somewhere," Wilson says of his plays; "here with Tonya being pregnant. King dies, but then he lives. When the king is dead, long live the king; it passes from one to the other."
Wilson came of age in the Sixties; is that the decade for which he feels the most affinity?
"No, not really," he replies. "For some reason I've always liked the '40s. I think of the '40s and I think of these guys with these big hats, the jazz in the distance, and I wish I was living back in the '40s. I think it was black America culturally at its strongest, prior to the Supreme Court 1954 outlawing of segregation, when we were all isolated, all outside the door, and we had communities that were economically as well as culturally viable." Businesses were black-owned, Wilson continues, out of necessity since blacks were barred or simply discouraged from intermingling with whites.
"We even had our own baseball league," he adds. "We don't have nothing now. [Today] you got a virtually all-black basketball league but it's owned by whites." To hear Wilson tell it, the black infrastructure suffered when desegregation enticed blacks away from the insular communities and into white-owned businesses, where the choice of goods was undoubtedly more appealing. With the economic base undermined, life changed.
"We were better off in the '40s, being segregated," Wilson reiterates, "because we had our own, we had to make do for ourselves; and now, if you go in the same communities, [there's] absolutely nothing there. If it were allowed to grow there's no telling what it would have become."
I quote this at length for two reasons, one, most of his plays feel as if, without a great deal of effort, they could be transposed to the 1940s, and, two, Wilson's push to reinvigorate black theater seems to this observer both a progressive move to empower black art and a nostalgic move to recreate a nurturing environment on the order of the black baseball league.
Wilson talked at length about what it would take to get the black community to support black theater and black playwrights. The formula could be as simple as five theaters doing five plays each season, doing 25 plays a year altogether, doing 75 plays over three years, and somewhere in there will be a couple of great plays. It would be a Herculean task, but then, isn't that what Wilson seems to specialize in?
In this light, however, his comments on colorblind casting are not so controversial after all. Wilson engaged in a much-publicized debate with Robert Brustein of Harvard's Repertory Theatre, the former arguing for and the latter against, but ironically both arguing for serious art in a world where - black or white, brown or yellow - most of what makes it to the big stage is simply entertaining fluff.
"I'm opposed to the idea of colorblind casting," says Wilson, "because it's taking African-American talent and putting it in the use and celebration of European art. Basically it's as simple as that. You take a black person and you say, 'Here, you play King Henry IV, you play Shakespeare; these are all white characters, but you suppress your humanity for the moment and go up there and pretend you're the King of England."
Wilson then turns it around, having us imagine a white cast in King Hedley II. "The white person has to pretend they're someone other," he says; "it's putting white talent in the use of black art, that's why it doesn't work."
All this feeds into the larger issue of identity, and to that end there's a kind of literary folklore (via a shaman, prophet, madman, etc.) that's often interwoven into Wilson's plays. These works both acknowledge and continue the oral tradition that's much more a part of black tradition than white.
"That's my primary goal, actually," Wilson says, "to present the culture and to demonstrate its ability to sustain you, to offer sustenance, so that when you leave your father's home you are fully clothed in manners and a way of life that is sufficient."
Lastly, of course, as one decade links to the next, it's all about continuation and connection. Wilson is currently at work on his 1904 play, which by its very nature will be his most historical work. But when he approaches his '90s play, I suggest, he'll have to wrestle with the implications of an aggressive form of music that's a lot different from when Percy Sledge was singing "When A Man Loves A Woman" in the 1960s.
"As a reflection of culture it's very exciting - we're talking about rap, now - very exciting and very robust; I call it the spiritual fist of the people. But it's interesting you mention Percy Sledge, 'cause he's got a song called "Warm And Tender Love." How did we get from "Warm And Tender Love" to "My Bitch." I'm trying to figure what the hell happened.
"I think it's Aunt Ester dying," Wilson continues, putting it in quasi-symbolic terms. "I think it's losing that connection with the tradition so that you no longer know who the hell you are in the world and what you're supposed to be doing."
When he was a young man, Wilson says, it was always "Yes, ma'am;" no one questioned being polite to one's elders. This is not to say crime didn't exist: "Back then you stole the purse, too, [like now], but you didn't beat them up."
Wilson will certainly have his hands full when he confronts the electric currents of a younger generation. Maybe that's when he'll really lament the passing of old Aunt Ester.
King Hedley II is onstage at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles through October 22. Our review runs this issue. ER