August Wilson

August Wilson’s monumental project, the Century Cycle of plays is soon to be released as a single publication—a beautifully (it seems to me) packaged production of all ten of the plays in the cycle. This is exciting news. I have been thinking a lot about August Wilson lately having spent most of this week at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I have been attending this festival every two years since the early nineties, and I have participated in the symposium attached to the festival since that time. The festival is usually a celebrity fest, a crowding of black film, television and stage celebrities in this tobacco enriched town, a week in which fans will gather around the marquee hotel of the festival (it is now The Marriott, but used to be Adams Mark) where the sport of star gazing/spotting takes place. And stars like to be gazed at, like to be spotted—they walk around as if they are looking for somebody, and they never make eye contact when talking to anyone while in the lobby. They all seem to have mastered that rude habit of looking around for someone more important while they are talking to you. They are always in a hurry, and when you do find out what they are hurrying to, you realize that they are not really in a hurry to do anything—they just do the hurry thing because it looks cooler to be rushing through a crowd to your waiting limo than it does to saunter along and casually step in. Some are not big enough stars to be panicked about people coming around. Most are stars who probably go to bed at night feeling like crap because not enough people seemed to realize who they were during the day.

But Larry Leon Hamlin, the late maverickimpresario who managed to make this happen each year has to be admired for the profoundly important premise of the festival—a time for African American theater practitioners to dialogue, to see each others work and to enjoy being stars for a few days. The symposium surprises people each year for its international scope and the liveliness of the discussions that happen. It is also a surprise because where the festival of plays and star-studded daily press conferences are engined by Hollywood-like media savvy, the symposium has not mastered the art of promotion.
This year, Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, gave the keynote speech to a surreally small hall of people. It was a tough and typically insightful speech and I kept lamenting that more people were not there to hear it.
But despite my suspicion of star-power, when you spy a cluster of genuine giants of the theater in the hotel’s bar drinking—August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, Woodie King, Ed Bullins, Yvonne Brewster and Ntosake Shange—and shouting, and pontificating, you have a sense that something significant is happening at this festival. This happened several years ago when August Wilson. It was the same year that Wilson gave a brilliantly controversial keynote speech for the symposium about the position of African Americans in American theater. That day I had a chance to talk to him. He seemed to open a way for talk because I was a poet, and he was a poet. He gave me a sheet of paper with a typed out poem—a tidy piece of formal verse in four short stanzas. It was his poem and he wanted me to look at it.
I liked the idea that Wilson was a poet—that he saw himself as a poet. I liked that he regarded himself as a man who would rather have a few volumes of poems. I liked that because it was an absurdity for him to even think that way. Here was August Wilson, the author of what has to be understood now as one of the greatest epic poems of American letters, The Century Cycle, saying that he wants to be a poet, to write poetry. I liked that about him, as I liked his toughness, his fierceness, and his love of black people. He was a very light-skinned black man who would not let anyone mistake him for anything other than an African American. It was a political act for him-like so many of his great politic acts.
One of the sad truths about playwrights is that so few people really understand their work and understand their literary contribution and achievement because they do not trade as much in books as they do in live theater. It has been said that eighty to ninety percent of the audiences for August Wilson’s plays have been white people. This may not be as remarkable a comment of theater in America as it might seem, but it is something of a loss, a loss that comes from the fact that there is really no genuine culture of buying books of plays and reading books of plays in this society. If you have read a play, it is more than likely that you encountered in a course taken at school or it was read as an part of some focused research. I don’t know many non-theater people who simply buy plays to read for pleasure. If we have not seen a Wilson play, chances are that we may well not have heard of Wilson or have any idea what he is about. There have been a few television productions of a couple of Wilson’s plays, and this may be the hope of any access to his art, but there is still a loss. The loss is acute because of how important and how exceptional a poet Wilson is, and how remarkable is the project he spent his life doing.
I would challenge all poets reading this blog to find a copy of any one of Wilson’s ten plays and read it. It will be a necessary way for us to begin to understand why I am convinced that when we have discussions about poetry, about poetic aesthetics and about the great works of American letters, we must do so with Wilson at the center of the discussion. If Borgess, Marquez, Joyce and Proust all help us to understand something about poetics and our art, then Wlson becomes as necessary a voice for us to engage.