For most of us, our real first taste of literature comes when our keisters are fixed firmly, if reluctantly, in the hard chairs of a high school English class.
There’s the smell of sweat and hair spray and the hip cologne in which someone has vastly overindulged, and that funky odor from a book bag in the third row that might be attributable to a week-old burrito — but who really cares to speculate? — and there’s the turgid feel of time as it slows to an arthritic crawl while you wait . . . for . . . the . . . final . . . bell.
In the midst of all that misery, however, there’s also the rare, glorious moment when homework turns into an epiphany.
That’s how it is sometimes for students who read an August Wilson play, say two teachers who have introduced hundreds of high schoolers to the earthy rhythms of the late playwright’s works, to the explosive power of his plots and brittle verisimilitude of his characters.
`Something new’
“These kids have a wide reading experience, but August Wilson is something new,” says Bill Lovaas, an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School.
A teacher for more than three decades, Lovaas assigns “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” in American literature and American studies courses.
His colleague, Mike Dorame, also teaches Wilson’s plays and reports much the same reaction: Students often are surprised by the works.
“It takes a while for the characters to grow on them,” Dorame adds. “Wilson’s characters are abrasive.
“But by the end, they really like it.”
Wilson, who died last week at 60, is naturally the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention. The critical essays in the wake of his death appeared in all the usual places and said all the usual things — he’s a major figure in the American theater, he won big prizes, his language is authentic and inspired, his epic cycle of plays about the black experience in 20th Century America will long endure, he’s a giant of a writer in an age of diminished expectations.
But there’s another side to Wilson’s work. There’s the moment in a high school English class when a kid reads aloud from “The Piano Lesson,” and even though he’s not a professional actor and even though he might utter the words in a shy, halting way, so as not to be embarrassed in front of his peers, something special happens, and the classroom is transformed, and none of the kids sitting there is ever quite the same again.
It might be the moment when Boy Willie, the character who wants to sell his family’s piano and buy the land upon which his ancestors worked as slaves, declares:
I ain’t gonna just take my life and throw it away at the bottom. I’m in the world like everybody else . . . I’ll tell you something about me. I done strung along and strung along. Going this way and that. Whatever way would lead me to a moment of peace. That’s all I want. To be as easy with everything. But I wasn’t born to that. I was born to a time of fire.
Both Dorame and Lovaas ask their students to read the plays aloud in class, and that’s when the magic happens, they say. That’s when Wilson’s language — which is, to put it charitably, a bit blunter and more profane than what you’re likely to hear in your average classroom — really grabs hold of the students, and what seemed like mere words on the page suddenly becomes something different. It becomes the love and rage and tenderness and woe of the African-Americans whom Wilson chronicles in his plays.
First and last time
Because not every student will continue to study literature in college, this is, for many, the first and last time they’ll be dealing with a Wilson play.
It’s a moment beyond the reach of critics, outside the province of theater historians.
“Prose can be so passive,” Lovaas says. “If you can have the kids master a few scenes, act it out, it adds more to the study of literature. You can lend your voice to the page.
“The plays are difficult in terms of subject matter, but when we read them aloud, the students really rise to the occasion and grasp what Wilson is doing.”
Students often think of “literature” as something marked by stilted, pompous-sounding language — the kind of dialogue you’d never hear spoken on the street. But with Wilson, what you hear in the world is what you get on the page.
“They enjoy the change,” Lovaas says. “They like the freshness in the language and the characterizations. Students connect with the characters through the music of the language. His plays add to their knowledge of the world they’re experiencing every day.”
And for a teacher, reading the plays over and over again for each succeeding class is not a chore, Lovaas adds. “Each time you do it, you catch a nuance. You find something different about the character, a different lens.”
When Lovaas arrived at his office last Monday, several students were waiting for him. They wanted to know if he’d heard the news, which he hadn’t — the news that the playwright had died.
But in a larger sense, Wilson is still talking, only now the words are coming from the kids who read his plays and find the familiar rhythms, feel the patterns and echoes of the things they already know.
“In a diverse high school,” Lovaas says, “Wilson’s work offers opportunities for students from other backgrounds to talk about their lives.”
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jikeller@tribune.com
