August Wilson’s Twentieth-Century Cycle Plays: A Reader’s Companion

August Wilson’s Twentieth-Century Cycle Plays

A Reader’s Companion

Sanford Sternlicht

Texas Tech University Press

Copyright © 2015 by Sanford V. Sternlicht

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

This book is typeset in Minion Pro. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Cover design by Barbara Werden

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sternlicht, Sanford, 1931-

      August Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle plays : a reader’s companion / Sanford Sternlicht.

             pages cm

      Summary: A literary guide examining the life of August Wilson and the themes, settings, and characters of his ten twentieth-century Cycle Plays—Provided by publisher.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-89672-900-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-89672-901-8 (e-book) 1. Wilson, August—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

      PS3573.I45677Z895 2015

      812'.54—dc23

2014036328

15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  /  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037 | Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

800.832.4042 | ttup@ttu.edu | www.ttupress.org

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

ONE

A Playwright’s Life

TWO

Introduction to the Twentieth-Century Cycle

THREE

Gem of the Ocean

African American History, 1900–1909

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

FOUR

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

African American History, 1910–1919

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

FIVE

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

African American History, 1920–1929

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

SIX

The Piano Lesson

African American History, 1930–1939

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

SEVEN

Seven Guitars

African American History, 1940–1949

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

EIGHT

Fences

African American History, 1950–1959

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

NINE

Two Trains Running

African American History, 1960–1969

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

TEN

Jitney

African American History, 1970–1979

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

ELEVEN

King Hedley II

African American History, 1980–1989

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

TWELVE

Radio Golf

African American History, 1990–1999

Introduction

The Play

The Characters

Summation

THIRTEEN

Non-Cycle Plays

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

My first August Wilson experience occurred when I attended the 1984 Broadway production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I was stunned by the brilliance of the play, its power, its message, its confidence, and its conviction. When the play ended, I immediately realized that America had a great new playwright. Of course, I did not know how long the author’s apprenticeship had been or how hard he and his colleagues at the Yale School of Drama, like his great theater mentor Lloyd Richards, had struggled to achieve a victory that profoundly changed American drama. I subsequently saw every New York production of a Wilson play. For me, the most memorable was the revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Belasco Theatre on May 30, 2009, in the presence of President and Mrs. Obama. The ticket has a place of honor on my desk.

I must confess, however, that I was initially drawn to buying a ticket to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by its title. You see, when I was about eight or nine years old, I had a beautiful sixteen-year-old cousin named Esther who would babysit me, and she always brought with her a record player and some seventy-eight dance records. She loved to dance, and she danced to entertain me. She knew several dances: swing, of course, and the Charleston, and even the Black Bottom. The latter has a movement in which the dancer slapped his or her behind alternately. I would laugh in delight at that. I was in love with my sitter. I asked her to marry me when I grew up and would she wait for me. She said yes to both, but, alas, two years later she eloped with a sailor. Such are the sorrows of youth.

August Wilson came to Syracuse University for the spring 2003 University Lectures series. In addition to addressing a standing-room-only audience in the Hendricks Chapel auditorium, Wilson graciously agreed to join my friend and colleague Arthur Flowers—a novelist, blues-based poet, and former executive director of the Harlem Writers Guild—and me in a symposium on African America and the American theater. I had been teaching Wilson’s plays for some years in my English Department large-lecture course on drama theory and in a regular section on modern American drama. I had also written about him and his plays in my book A Reader’s Guide to Modern American Drama, which I used as a textbook. Thus, my students were very eager to meet and hear from America’s most important African American playwright. Wilson won the admiration and respect of his young audience with his soft-spoken but passionate argument for an energetic, nationwide African American theater movement that would provide more opportunities for contemporary black playwrights (whose works he well knew), actors, and directors. That day has not been forgotten.

August Wilson’s early death in 2005 shocked us all. A great American dramatist was taken from us, and American theater was diminished.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge my great debt to those who have facilitated this project: Gerald Greenberg, Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, and his administrative specialist, Cassidy Perreault; Gregory Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and founding director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center; and Angela Williams, librarian of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at Syracuse University. Most of all, I thank my brilliant personal editor (and spouse), Mary Beth Hinton.

ONE: A PLAYWRIGHT’S LIFE

August Wilson was born on April 27, 1945, as Frederick August Kittel in a two-room, cold-water flat in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the fourth of six children and the first son of Daisy Wilson Kittel, an African American cleaning woman whose mother had walked from Spear, North Carolina, to Pennsylvania in the Great Migration from the South to the North in search of a better life. His father was Frederick August Kittel, a heavy-drinking, often-violent baker who spoke German and who had emigrated from Austria-Hungary. Kittel only sporadically visited the Bedford Avenue flat where his black family lived. (He also had a white family.) Daisy raised her children in a depressed neighborhood, paying an exorbitant rent that she could barely manage.

Freddy, a precocious child, learned to read at age four. Kittel paid for Freddy to attend Catholic schools after the family moved temporarily to a white neighborhood; the boy wound up as the only African American student in the prestigious Central Catholic High School, where he was bullied by his classmates, ate alone in the cafeteria, and was forced to fight again and again. He changed schools, seemingly to save his life. At Connelly Vocational High School he was intellectually out of place and was soon transferred to Gladstone High School, a more appropriate traditional high school. Unfortunately, a history teacher accused him of plagiarizing a term paper and gave him a failing grade. The boy tore up the paper and left school, never to return.

Meanwhile, his mother married David Bedford, who would be a stepfather for her children. Bedford, a former high school athlete, was a Pittsburgh sewer worker who had killed a man in a robbery attempt and had served a twenty-three-year jail sentence. Frederick hid the fact that he had dropped out of school from his mother and Bedford, and he passed his time reading books by African American writers in the Carnegie Library’s Negro Section.

It is interesting to note that this boy, who dropped out of school at age fifteen, received twenty-three honorary university degrees in his lifetime, including degrees from Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh.

At this moment in his life, Frederick seems to have decided that he could become a writer. This decision did not please his mother. She wanted him to go to law school. Angry and disappointed in her bright son, she forced him out of their home. At age seventeen, he enlisted for three years in the U.S. Army, but he managed to be discharged after a year. Returning to Pittsburgh, he took odd jobs to survive. He hung around the streets of the Hill District, listening to and learning from derelicts and drug peddlers.

Upon the death of his biological father in 1965, Frederick changed his name to August Wilson. Clearly, he wanted to be identified with his mother and her race. That year August also experienced a life-changing epiphany. He had bought a cheap record player to listen to the few records that he owned. One featured Bessie Smith singing Nobody Can Bake A Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine. Wilson was overcome by the emotion that Smith poured into her singing. He had discovered the blues, which gave him a way to release the pent-up emotions that were bubbling inside him. The blues became a lifelong love. Because they are such a rich musical tradition, they provided a path to self-respect and self-determination and an opening to the vibrant culture of a people—his people—whose history and literature had long resided in the oral tradition. Music would be a major structural component in what was soon to be his life’s work. Black musicians would become lifelong friends, and musicians and their instruments would inhabit and embellish his plays.

Another formative influence on the young August Wilson was the art of Romare Bearden, a preeminent African American artist whose brilliant modernist collages and paintings evoked, and still evoke, a spiritual response and are among the finest American works of art produced in that period. Their effect on Wilson was profound. Some of the scenes in Wilson’s plays seem directly influenced by Bearden’s work.

Wilson bought a second-hand typewriter and taught himself to type, although the first drafts of his writings were always handwritten. Poetry was his first interest. In 1968, like so many young African American men at the time, Wilson was stirred and energized by Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and Black Power. In 1969, Wilson’s stepfather, David Bedford, died. He had cared for his stepson more than August’s biological father had, but he had been hard on August, too. Bedford was probably the model for Troy Maxson, the bitter, hard-shelled father in Fences. That same year, Wilson married Brenda Burton, a young Muslim woman. In order to solidify the marriage, Wilson converted to Islam and became a Black Muslim. He joined the Nation of Islam Mosque Number Twenty-Two in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh. The couple had a daughter, Sakina Ansari-Wilson, but the Wilsons divorced in 1972, partly because Wilson could not accept or adhere to the restrictions imposed by his wife’s Muslim beliefs.

Partially under the influence of the Black Arts Movement, founded by Amiri Baraka and others in the early 1960s, Wilson began playwriting for the Black Horizon Theater, which he had co-founded in the Hill District. His first play, Recycle, about a troubled marriage that may have mirrored his own, was written in 1973 and was performed in any community venue available. In 1976 he wrote The Coldest Day of the Year, but it was not produced. Instead, The Homecoming, a very early version of what came to be Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was performed at the University of Pittsburgh, and Sizwe Banzi, his first truly professional drama, opened at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. In 1977, Wilson wrote a satiric musical titled Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. Eskimo Song Duel was written the next year.

Also in 1978, when offered a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota, Wilson moved to St. Paul. There he finished Jitney in 1979, but that play would not be produced until much later. In 1979, he also did more work on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The next year he completed Fullerton Street, and he received a playwriting fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis. As a result, he gave up his museum job in 1981, the year he married social worker Judy Oliver