Act One, Scene One
Setting: The Goodman Theater,
170 N. Dearborn St.
Time: The Present.
Cast: August Wilson, 55, playwright, poet, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, steadfast and passionate chronicler of the black experience in 20th Century America. While he gestures frequently when speaking, his hands always return to a default position: fingers laced serenely across his stomach, like an architect surveying his creations.
It moves in the blood, your history does. It lives behind your eyes. It leaks into your speech.
Where you are is a blend of where you’ve been and where you’re going. It is never simply the place where you stand.
“What’s wrong with society today is that we don’t have that sense of history,” Wilson said. “A lot of times we’re acting in a vacuum without knowing how we connect.”
This is a watershed moment for Wilson. It is likewise a watershed moment for Chicago. On Monday, the city’s Goodman Theater premieres the first play in its new facility: Wilson’s “King Hedley II,” the eighth in his 10-play saga about the fate of African-Americans since 1900.
The playwright and the city are united in ways that twist deep beneath the surface. Though he makes his home in Seattle and sets the majority of his plays in his native Pittsburgh, the link between Wilson and Chicago goes back to the Goodman’s 1986 presentation of “Fences” and later the world premiere of “Seven Guitars.” Over the years, all of his plays have been produced at the theater; on Nov. 9, Wilson delivered the keynote address at the opening of the new Goodman.
But another kind of history preoccupies Wilson in his work: the complicated, exhausting, too often tragic record of African-American life in a century that has seen such progress for so many others.
From the proud black laborer eaten up by anger in “Fences,” Wilson’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, to the jazz musicians who let the harsh discordance of racism drown out their sweet sounds in the 1982 play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to the conflicted, self-lacerating title character of “King Hedley II” (played by Richard Brooks in the Goodman production), Wilson obliquely asks a simple question: When will it change? When?
The prologue to “King Hedley II,” spoken by a character called Stool Pigeon, could serve as the playwright’s creed: “Everything done got broke up. Pieces flying everywhere. Look like it’s gonna be broke up some more before it gets whole again. If it ever do. Ain’t no telling . . . The people wandering all over the place. They got lost. They don’t even know the story of how they got from tit to tat . . . The people need to know that. The people need to know the story.”
And so Wilson tells the story in play after play, in plays that are funny and sad and wise and profane and profound and sacred, in plays featuring characters with bad and good hearts who talk, talk, talk the whole night and clear through to the next afternoon. It’s the kind of talk that sounds earthy and ordinary but, if you listen long enough, seems to generate enough thrust and power to lift those characters a few inches off the ground. It’s the kind of talk that is always just a few wistful syllables away from music.
It all comes from the mind and heart of a man raised in a poor section of Pittsburgh, one of six children born to a baker and a cleaning woman. His mother, Daisy, had high hopes for him, Wilson said; those hopes did not include the profession of writer.
“She thought I was wasting my life. She said, `You could have been a lawyer or a doctor, but you’re standing on a streetcorner.’
“In 1977, my mother finally said, `OK, OK, OK, you’re a writer.’ Then she said, `Why don’t you write something they’ll put on TV? Then you’ll be a writer.’ I said, `Mom, that’s not how it works.'” Wilson paused, then added, “I got my first play on Broadway in 1984. She died in 1983.”
Finding his voice as a writer was as much a matter of trust as talent.
“I had to learn to write the way black people talk,” Wilson said. “To create art, I always thought you had to change language. I wasn’t writing realistic dialogue. I was forcing words into their [characters’] mouths that they weren’t saying.”
Then in 1979, after years of writing poetry that left him vaguely but persistently dissatisfied, he wrote “Jitney,” a play about cab drivers set in 1977. He didn’t think he would be able to write dialogue–but suddenly he found himself writing it, and writing it the way he heard it in his head: infused with the colors and vernacular of the African-Americans to whom he had listened all his life.
Veteran Chicago director Chuck Smith, a Goodman artistic associate and professor at Columbia College, said Wilson’s uncanny ear for dialogue is one of the secrets of his power: “These are stories I’ve heard over the course of the years through my grandparents and the older members of my family.
“A phrase that’s used quite a bit on the South Side is that a story is told in `the first voice.’ These are African-American stories told by African-Americans. The rhythms and cadences are familiar.”
Still, though, how did an obscure, struggling young man such as Wilson first find the confidence and courage to push his way through?
“I had,” Wilson said quietly, “a belief in myself that was larger than anyone’s disbelief.”
In 1984, that belief paid off, when “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was a hit at regional theaters and then on Broadway. Wilson never looked back; in the ensuing years, he has steadily made good on his stated intention to write a play about the African-American experience in every decade of the 20th Century. Once “King Hedley II” is launched, he will begin work on a play set in the 1900s. Then will come one for the 1990s. Then it’s on to a novel, Wilson said.
And if the great success had never happened to him–if the Pulitzers (for “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson”) and the Tony award (for “Fences”) and the international acclaim had never come his way–would he still be writing?
Wilson laughed. “Oh, yeah. I didn’t write plays to get produced. Why, if you came over to my house, I’d pull ’em out and read ’em to you. The plays would still be in existence. For me, that’s the only important thing. For me, there’s nothing in life that can compare to those moments of sitting there with that blank page, then to have something emerge out of it. You keep pressing, wrestling with it, then–bingo!–it starts to emerge. Then you’re really excited. You begin to see the shape of something. You think, This might be something after all. Then at one point you put it all together, type it, then walk around the house with it for three days, holding it, like, `I did this!’ It needs a lot of work, it needs a lot of rewriting, but there’s a structure.”
Rewriting: To most authors, the idea is a torment, especially when suggested by others. But Wilson relishes the rehearsal period of a play, during which he often rewrites huge chunks at the behest of directors, actors and friends.
It’s almost as if the play were fluid and not fixed in type, a supple, sensitive, ever-changing entity that responds instantly to its surroundings. “I always say, `I don’t write with a hammer and chisel,'” Wilson said. “It’s just words on paper. Words are free. Start over and write something different. Explore that.”
“King Hedley II” has undergone many transformations since its first stagings in Seattle and Pittsburgh.
“For me,” Wilson said, “you have to find the play. I’m fortunate to have all these opportunities to go back. It’s viable, it’s workable, but there’s always room to improve as you find out what you’re trying to say.”
Some critics have faulted Wilson on two scores: the fact that his plays often restate similar themes such as the ugly residue of racism and the corrosive effects of retribution, and that his protagonists are usually male.
Kim Pereira, a theater professor at Illinois State University, disagreed with the first charge. “I don’t think he’s trying to write something entirely new each time. He’s encapsulating the experience. It’s the same story in a different key. The more sensitive ear will sense the differences.”
Wilson is “right at the top” of contemporary playwrights, said Pereira, author of “August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey” (University of Illinois Press). “He’s had a tremendous impact. He’s contemporary, but with classical overtones. What’s fascinating about Wilson is that you get the sense of a black stage reality–not black figures in a white world, but black figures in their own world.
“He understands the theater, and he trusts the people who do the play.”
Students, Pereira said, are especially responsive to Wilson’s work. “The search for identity is extremely urgent in their lives, so they are fascinated by his work.”
The gender question is more complex. Wilson conceded that he finds it difficult to write from what he called “the other side of the table”–i.e., from a female perspective. Unquestionably, his most memorable characters are men; the women are mostly wives and girlfriends who fret and fume while the men get to express their souls’ torment in exquisite, excoriating language.
But “King Hedley II” represents an advance for Wilson’s female characters. Tonya and Ruby, Hedley’s wife and mother (played by Yvette Ganier and Leslie Uggams in the Goodman production), are fully drawn, intriguing characters central to the play’s tragic unspooling.
Tonya, who is pregnant and frightened, delivers a speech filled with heartfelt ferocity: “I ain’t raising no kid to have somebody shoot him. To have police shoot him. Why I want to bring another life into this world that don’t respect life? I don’t want to raise no more babies when you got to fight to keep them alive.”
The language in Wilson’s play is blunt, slangy and forceful; it’s the language of the streets, filtered through a poet’s sensibilities. In “King Hedley II,” a character curses God. Wilson knows that the epithet may offend some people, but he’s ready for the fallout. In the Seattle production, he said, an audience member greeted the scene with the cry, “That’s blasphemy!”
At a similar moment in a production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Wilson recalled, 300 members of a church group rose and stalked out in protest.
Wilson, moreover, has done some protesting of his own. He is a longtime champion of efforts to increase the number of black cultural institutions. It is not enough, he argued, to maintain venues such as the Goodman that produce black-written plays on a regular basis, laudable as that is. What are needed are institutions established and run by blacks.
He believes that only a steadfast commitment to articulating the African-American experience in African-American cultural institutions can produce the kind of art that will change things. “History has certain political dictates and duties attached to it. I just think that’s crucially important.”
To call a play such as “King Hedley II” historical may be unintentionally misleading; audiences may expect powdered wigs and bustles or recognizable figures from high school textbooks: Washington, Lincoln, King. But in this play, as in all his plays, Wilson is writing a different kind of history: the subterranean kind, the kind that’s right next door or down the block or just across town, not locked away in a list of treaty signings.
This is history with a lower-case “h,” the history of African-Americans whose lives are continually blighted by poverty, racism and self-loathing, by what they do to themselves as well as what is done to them. Each decade in the 20th Century about which Wilson writes has a different connection with history; in “King Hedley II,” that connection is very nearly severed.
“If you don’t value the tradition, then you lose it. In the ’80s, it seemed to me that we lost the connection,” Wilson said. “The tradition isn’t to go out and kill somebody for $15 worth of narcotics. That’s not part of the tradition.”
He wrote “King Hedley II” the same way he writes all his plays: first in longhand. “I can’t write on a computer,” he said. Holding out his hand and curving it around an imaginary writing instrument, he indicated the link between flesh and pen. “We’ve been together a long time. I don’t want to abandon that.”
Once he finished “King Hedley II”–at least for the time being–he kept right on going, Wilson said with a smile. “When I wrote `The End,’ I didn’t get up. I forced myself to sit there and start the next one. If you ran into me and said, `What are you working on?’ I would say, `I’m working on this new play.’ I’m always working on something.”
His plays follow suit. They are always working, too, long after the lights have been switched off and the theater doors sealed. The plays continue to work away in your mind; no matter their fates, the characters and their bright yearnings go on and on, with no end in sight, just the way history does.
AUGUST WILSON’S HISTORY LESSON
With the opening of “King Hedley II,” August Wilson is two plays away from completing his decade-by-decade chronicle of African-American life in the 20th Century. The plays, the year of their premieres and descriptions of their contents:
“Jitney” (1979): A group of illegal cab drivers in 1977 stands uneasily on the cusp of cataclysmic social change.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (1982): Based on a real-life blues singer, the play chronicles a 1927 recording session in Chicago that turns tragic.
“Fences” (1986): A proud husband and father, Troy Maxson, is distraught at a world that seems to be changing before his eyes in this play set in 1957.
“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (1988): Released from prison in 1911 after seven years, Harold Loomis searches for his wife, Martha.
“The Piano Lesson” (1990): Set in 1936, a brother and sister quarrel over the fate of a piano, a family heirloom decorated with African carving.
“Two Trains Running” (1991): A diner in 1969 Pittsburgh is slated for demolition, prompting the regulars to contemplate big changes.
“Seven Guitars” (1995): The death of a blues guitarist in 1948 brings together his old friends.
“King Hedley II” (1999): The title character is a headstrong young black man living in 1985, a time of crisis for African-Americans, when joblessness, drug addiction and violence threatened many black communities.
Still to come: Plays set in 1904 and the 1990s.
— Julia Keller
