`We’re not better off,” playwright August Wilson says of black America today. “Our condition has worsened since the ’40s.
“In 1940, we had a segregated society, blacks were not allowed to play on white baseball teams, they had their own league, and they sold their own peanuts and chicken sandwiches in separate ballparks.
“Black women couldn’t go downtown and shop at white stores, so they shopped in our own. By the ’60s, blacks had entered the white sports world and had begun shopping and eating in white establishments. But our economic base had been destroyed. We came to terms with our identity-a positive thing-but we haven’t developed a community base within American society to replace the one we lost.”
Wilson is well-positioned to analyze African-American issues. In an unparalleled series of five Broadway plays, he has refracted the black experience throughout the 20th Century, each work set in a different decade, with an artistry that earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and widespread acclaim as the most invigorating new voice of our theater.
The fifth, “Two Trains Running,” opening Monday at the Goodman Theatre, with three members from last season’s original Broadway cast, directed by longtime colleague Lloyd Richards, is set in a 1969 Pittsburgh diner. The teens, ’20s, ’40s and ’50s were tackled earlier.
At this point, Wilson is entitled to sit back and reflect on what all this writing and thinking has come to mean for him. But what he says is darker, more disturbing and more radical than almost anything in the dramas themselves.
“Some 35 million blacks who continue to struggle in northern cities ought to go back South and begin to rebuild a cultural foundation we left,” he says. “We’ve simply been fumbling around up here. For the past 50 years, we’ve made little inroads. We as a people have suffered a fragmented culture in an attempt to transplant what was an agrarian, land-based economy to the north.”
Strong, even shocking words, maybe, but, like his plays, Wilson’s thoughts are subtle, gently coated with his extra-special sensitivity.
“When something doesn’t work, you return to your strength and go back to the culture you uprooted,” he says. “You start over. If we were to transplant ourselves to Georgia overnight, as I’m suggesting, we’d suddenly have to feed people. We’d have to build houses. We’d have to provide food, clothing and shelter, and that very process creates an economic base. We haven’t taken on that responsibility in years. We haven’t taken matters into our own hands. We’ve left them up to others. It wouldn’t be easy, but 50 years from now, we’d be in a much better position than we are now.”
The image of a failed northern wasteland is at the heart of “Two Trains Running,” a work that focuses on a handful of everyday Pittsburgh blacks who quietly, almost leisurely are witnessing the economic decay of their once vital neighborhood just outside the diner’s door. Malcolm X gets some conversational attention; Jimi Hendrix, along with dozens of other key black and white figures of the time, aren’t mentioned at all.
Conversation, as in all Wilson’s efforts, is crackling, effusive and hypnotic, but through the discussions that take place in Memphis Lee’s restaurant, we learn that this neighborhood has fewer and fewer businesses, and less and less employment for its residents. Lee’s diner is destined for demolition, while the 57-year-old proprietor is one of the neighborhood’s few surviving “successes”-he owns the place and plans to wrestle a profitable buyout from the city. The other success is the neighborhood undertaker.
Throughout, Memphis mourns the land he abandoned in Jackson, Miss., when he was run off by white swindlers. He is determined to beat the white man at his own game this time, and then return home, to see what’s left of his land: “I still got the deed.”
Clearly the plot line parallels Wilson’s belief-more than two decades after the setting of this play-in the need for northern African-Americans to reconsider their agrarian roots.
“What else can he do?” Wilson asks of Memphis’s situation. “Where else can he go? He can’t open a business anywhere else in town. He’s black and its the ’60s.”
Another character represents the need to stand up and demand fairness. Hambone is a mentally disturbed figure who whines incessantly about a crooked white businessman who he believes once cheated him. The incident transformed Hambone into an inarticulate simpleton, recalling Ma Rainey’s nephew Sylvester and Gabriel in “Fences.”
“It’s a part of the black condition that can’t be ignored,” Wilson says. “Powerlessness is the way I’d put it.”
Meanwhile, the Wilsonian saga continues. He is moving ahead with a playa set in the ’40s, a murder mystery (a new form for the playwright) to be called “Seven Guitars,” about a jazz musician whose death is explored in a series of flashbacks. “The point is not who killed him but the content of his life. Barton was in and out of jail and a vagrant in some ways. But one of the issues I find fascinationg is the separate relationships between these ’40s musicians and the black and white communities.
“Blacks saw them as valuable citizens and carriers of culture, at the forefront of our emerging identity and self-determination. Whites saw them as vagrants, thieves and drunkards and put them in jail.
“In the South, for a time, you could actually be jailed for a crime on the books known as `worthlessness.’ That astonishes me. We live in a truly strange world.”
