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August Wilson: The People's Playwright - Interview
American Visions, August, 2000 by Sharon Fitzgerald
The setting is the Edison Cafe, New York City. Located in the Broadway theater district, this 1920s grand-ballroom-turned-coffee-shop is one of playwright August Wilson's favorite haunts in Gotham. The clatter of meals being served and conversations taking place seems to suit him: Wilson has been known to write here, and it is also a spot where he enjoys receiving interviewers.
The unexcitable cafe staff is welcoming. In this homey, chandeliered, pink-and-white ode to lox, blintzes and gefilte fish, actors, producers and directors can be seen lunching, but Wilson's picture is on the wall: "On a Napkin in a Coffee Shop, Life Is Written (A Play, Too)" is the headline of a New York Times article about Wilson displayed prominently above an archway. A food critic's review in the restaurant's front window alerts theater fans that Wilson has his own table.
But though he can do no wrong at the Edison, New York City's indoor-smoking prohibition routinely forces Wilson, who prefers Marlboro Lights, onto the restaurant's sidewalk. Here, he indulges in a series of slow drags, observes passersby, and reflects on dramatic events. Across the street from the Edison is the Barrymore Theatre, a pivotal location in black culture. The first play written by an African American to appear on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, debuted there in 1959. The third of Wilson's award-winning dramas, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, was presented on the Barrymore's stage 29 years later.
In the turf wars of American art, Wilson holds his own. It has been only 16 years since he arrived on Broadway with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and commenced his transfiguration of the Great White Way. Today, Wilson's voice--much like the voices of the characters he created in such plays as Fences and The Piano Lesson--seems to have been ever present. Surely, the numerous Tony, Pulitzer and Drama Desk awards have marked his success as momentous. His assertions about the importance of black theater and the dangers of colorblind casting have initiated some of the artistic community's most volatile debates. However, Wilson's impact on the theater is composed of more enduring stuff: He listens to black people, grasps the language of our dreams and fears, and weaves all that he absorbs--both characters and conflicts--into art.
"For me, the primary focus should be the celebration and illumination of the culture," he says. "The culture has not always been valued; it certainly has not been valued by white America. In terms of the value and worth of the humanity of black folks, it has been sometimes very urgently and profoundly denied."
As poet-philosopher, Wilson is thoughtful, soft-spoken. His intuitive self blends easily with the Wilson who stands assured amid complexities, like a leader of troops: reserved, yet candid and approachable. The robust physique suggests more than just a 55-year-old intellectual's preference of ideas over workouts. Inside a form built to sustain powerful and passionate insights, a muse paces, leopard-like.
Despite fame and his move to Seattle in the early 1990s, Wilson remains a brother from Pittsburgh. His nohumbug goatee is part W.E.B. Du Bols, part Amiri Baraka. He smiles to express happiness or amusement, not to assure others that he is friendly. His eyes, an astute pair of navigators, search everywhere for truth. His well-chosen words sweep through a conversation like a rebel tornado.
He is a five-star storyteller: He remembers people, places and attitudes, where he stood, how he felt, and what he learned about human nature. Some of his life's stories are told as one-man narratives; others are fully cast, but he enacts all of the parts. The rhythms and nuances of language are adhesives for his memories, and he uses them, as he always has, with delight and abandon. He was in second grade when the word "breakfast" first caught his attention.
"I said, That's two words: `break' and `fast'," Wilson recalls, "and then you put it together. I didn't know the word `fasting' in terms of food, but I knew that it was two words. So I started trying to put words together and to make my own words. They looked like they were a foot high, and I would just climb up inside the words. On the way to school, there was a sign that said `hospital,' and I just liked the way that looked, so I would spell it out.
"And then when you discovered that you could concretize your thoughts--that you could think something and that there was a system by which you could let people know what you were thinking--oh, what else was there? That's the greatest thing in the world. So I was concretizing my thoughts and then going: `Here. That's what I was thinking.' It was just the words. That's how it started."
Around seventh grade, his affair with words took flight as the result of another love interest. "I discovered that words had a certain power, because I would write Nancy Ireland poems, but I wouldn't sign my name to them," says Wilson. "I'd watch her: She'd read them and look over at Anthony Curvin. And I'd go: `It works. That's okay, all I've got to do is sign my name the next time. Bye, Nancy; bye, Anthony. Catherine, how are you?' So I started writing poems for Catherine Moran, and I put my name to them. That was my beginning writing thing."
