Kindle Notes & Highlights
“There will come a day when you will suffer the most profound grief imaginable,” is what he eventually wrote. “And you look up and you find out that all them years you been living on your mother’s prayers and now you’ve got to live on your own.”
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One of his most memorable characters is Aunt Ester (or ancestor), who figures in four of his plays. In each play, she is as old as slavery, her birth dating back to 1619, the year the first slave ships sailed into North America. Wilson has called her his most important character, the matriarchal force that holds his series of ten plays together. She is “the embodiment of African wisdom and tradition,” he said, a spiritual healer who can make people whole. In Gem of the Ocean, she leads a man struggling with his conscience to the mythical City of Bones, where he meets his ancestors, discovers
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Charles S. “Roc” Dutton was playing Levee, and he was an outspoken, intimidating presence. Dutton had been convicted of manslaughter as a teenager in Baltimore and spent seven years in jail. When sentenced to six days in solitary confinement, he said he read an anthology of work by Black playwrights, which included Day of Absence, Douglas Turner Ward’s 1965 “satirical fantasy” about what happens in a Southern town when all the African Americans disappear overnight. He was inspired and found his calling. A few years after his release, he enrolled in the Yale School of Drama and became one of
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“I didn’t like him,” he said directly. “The doors were shut. You couldn’t get in. I only knew the Black August Wilson. I would like to have known the white August Wilson. He fought desperately to keep it at bay. He is genetically a white man as well as a Black man, and he did the best job of any artist I know of keeping them separate.”
James Earl Jones was very weird and out of line for saying this. This book made me dislike him very much.
Wilson was perceptive, and he later resented Jones’s attitude and what he considered the veteran actor’s tendency to defer to the white theater establishment rather than use his clout to change the system.
It turned out that Murphy, who cut his teeth in New York stand-up before earning acclaim as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, had seen Fences on Broadway, and he wanted to star in a film version.
The impasse was over Wilson’s demand for a Black director. Wilson later wrote, “I wanted to hire somebody talented, who understood the play and saw the possibilities of the film, who would approach my work with the same amount of passion and measure of respect with which I approach it, and who shared the cultural responsibilities of the characters.”
Apart from the two music industry professionals and the policeman in Ma Rainey, Selig is the only white character to appear onstage in Wilson’s cycle. He explicitly wanted to shine the spotlight on Black men and women, but white characters are an unseen, ominous presence in all of his plays. They control the recording industry in Ma Rainey, and in Fences they put up roadblocks in Major League Baseball, making it impossible for Troy to break the color barrier. In Joe Turner, an unseen labor boss demands a portion of Black workers’ wages in order for them to keep their jobs. Wilson told the
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Wilson was still struggling with the ending during the summer of 1989, but he took time off to attend the first National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The six-day event was the brainchild of Larry Leon Hamlin, artistic director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company. Hamlin enlisted poet Maya Angelou as chairwoman, and the two ultimately raised $600,000 for a festival that attracted ten thousand people with thirty performances by seventeen Black theater companies. Wilson and television mogul Oprah Winfrey were the guests of honor at the opening-night gala,
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This sounds amazing. I was born in the wrong era.
And he stayed seated when Moyers asked a final tone-deaf question that in other circumstances would have made him explode. “Don’t you grow weary of thinking Black, writing Black, being asked questions about Blacks?” Moyers asked. Wilson barely flinched as he got in the last word. “How could one grow weary of that?” he replied. “Whites don’t get tired of thinking white or being who they are. I’m just who I am. You never transcend who you are. Black is not limiting. There’s no idea in the world that is not contained by Black life. I could write forever about the Black experience in America.”
He wrote a scathing essay headlined “I Want a Black Director” for the October 1990 issue of Spin magazine. The special issue was guest-edited by filmmaker Spike Lee, who had made a name for himself with She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing. He was at work on his next film, Jungle Fever. The director was as vocal as Wilson was reserved, but they wholeheartedly agreed on the issue of Black directors directing films about Black culture and history. It made sense that Lee and the magazine gave Wilson a platform to take a public stand. In his essay, Wilson laid out his case that Black
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Later, after Davis had won another Tony for a revival of Fences and an Academy Award for its movie adaptation, she credited Wilson for convincing her that she was beautiful. “He would always say, ‘Viola, you are just so beautiful,’ ” she said during a 60 Minutes interview in 2020. “I never felt feminine. I never felt like I could fit into that sort of confines of what it meant, or the stereotypical ways of what being a woman was about until I did Seven Guitars.”
“People look at Black American history, and they say, ‘Oh, you poor people, what you were subjected to, that’s such a horrendous thing. I’m sure you want to forget that.’ And I say, no, no, I don’t want to forget that, because it’s a triumph. Black America is a tremendous triumph.”
He had long been convinced that the Great Migration had been a mistake, despite the fact his mother and grandmother had moved out of poverty in Spear, North Carolina, to a more stable and comfortable life in Pittsburgh. He advocated for Blacks to move back to the South, where they would be able to elect African American senators and representatives, thus gaining greater power in Congress. But he, himself, was not budging from Seattle. “People say, ‘Why ain’t you down there?’ ” he readily admitted. “I’m a follower. I’m not gonna be the first person moving there.”
LOL
“A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor,” Wilson said. “Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?
LOVED Wilson's response to Bill Cosby's anti-Black poundcake speech
A few days later, on September 2, Jujamcyn Theaters officially announced the renaming of the Virginia Theatre as the August Wilson Theatre. The new marquee, with the writer’s signature in bright neon, was set to be unveiled at a ceremony on October 17. Wilson would be the first African American with a Broadway theater bearing his name. It wasn’t clear if Wilson would last long enough to see it happen, but the significance was not lost on some copy editors, who picked up the story under the headline “The Great White Way No More.”
Romero had invited four actors to read excerpts from the plays: Charles S. Dutton performed a monologue from Fences; Phylicia Rashad quoted the venerable Aunt Ester from Gem; Anthony Chisholm read from Joe Turner; and Ruben Santiago-Hudson performed from Two Trains. Dutton, who had feuded with Wilson, but ultimately reconciled with him, told the attendees that his plays “encompassed the entire African-American experience.” His legacy, he noted, “is as important as Martin Luther King’s legacy, as important as Malcolm X’s legacy, and as important as Nat Turner.”
