Two Interviews with August Wilson (2004, 1990)
Author: Miles Marshall Lewis (2004) Vera Sheppard (1990)
Lewis, Miles Marshal and August Wilson. "An Interview with August Wilson." Believer Magazine, 12 Nov. 2004, www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-august-wilson/. AND Heard, Elisabeth J., and August Wilson. "August Wilson on Playwriting: An Interview." African American Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1990, pp. 93-102. Gale Literature Resource Center, go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA54208479&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00107484&p=LitRC&sw=w.
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November 1st, 2004 | Issue Nineteen
An Interview with August Wilson
[PLAYWRIGHT]
“YOU CAN’T WRITE PLAYS WITHOUT KNOWING THE CRAFT OF PLAYWRITING. ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR TOOLS, THEN YOU STILL GOTTA CREATE OUT OF THAT THING, THAT IMPULSE.”
Favorite topics:
Love
Honor
Duty
Betrayal
Ex-enslaved people who sell dog shit
by Miles Marshall Lewis
Illustration by Charles Burns
An Interview with August Wilson
On May 10, 1988, I met my Bronx high school’s black alliance club at the 46th Street Theatre, a shrink-wrapped copy of Lovesexy (released that day) tucked under my arm. Amazingly, Prince was the last thing on my mind after more than two hours of Fences, August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play—a riveting treatise on a father-and-son conflict over their visions of black identity. Fences was my first taste of Wilson’s ongoing drama cycle, which encompasses the black experience in each decade of the twentieth century. Enthralled by Wilson’s blues-tinged voice, I followed his subsequent successes: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, and revivals of Jitney and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—in an impoverished neighborhood known as the Hill—the playwright was one of six siblings. Dropping out of high school after a teacher’s racist accusation that he had plagiarized a paper, Wilson soon became a poet under the inspirational aegis of Dylan Thomas and Amiri Baraka. He began writing plays in the 1970s after a brief stint with the Black Horizons Theatre. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom caught the attention of Yale Drama School’s Dean Lloyd Richards in 1982, which led Wilson to the Great White Way. He swiftly kicked its ass: the playwright has been awarded Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards for both Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1988).
Outdoors at an Au Bon Pain in Boston, the fifty-nine-year-old Wilson took a break from rehearsing a pre-Broadway production of his latest play, Gem of the Ocean. Lighting Marlboro Lights proved difficult under the chilly, gusty wind as we bound from the blues to hiphop, Bearden to Basquiat, and beyond.
—Miles Marshall Lewis
I. “I THINK THAT’S THE CORE OF BLACK AESTHETICS: THE ABILITY TO IMPROVISE.”
THE BELIEVER: Despite the similarities between Fences and Death of a Salesman, and the art of playwriting as a predominantly white discipline, you’ve cited your greatest literary influence as poet/playwright Amiri Baraka. How would you say he influenced you?
AUGUST WILSON: I’m not sure what they say about Fences as it relates to Death of a Salesman. At the time I wrote Fences, I had not read Death of a Salesman, had not seen Death of a Salesman, did not know anything about Death of a Salesman.
My greatest influence has been the blues. And that’s a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have. My interest in Baraka comes from the sixties and the Black Power movement. So it’s more for Baraka’s political ideas, which I loved and still am an exponent of. Through all those years I was a follower, if you will, of Baraka. He had an influence on my thinking.
BLVR: Were you exposed first to his poetry or his plays?
AW: The poetry in particular. The book called Black Magic, which is sort of a collection of several books. That’s ’67—I wore that book out, the cover got taped up with Scotch tape, the pages falling out. That was my bible, I carried it wherever I went. So that in particular. I wasn’t writing plays back then, so I wasn’t influenced by his playwriting, although, to me, his best plays are collected in a book called Four Black Revolutionary Plays, with Madheart, Great Goodness of Life, A Black Mass, and Experimental Death Unit 1. They contributed a lot to my thinking just in terms of getting stuff on the page.
BLVR: How specifically was the blues an influence on your work?
AW: Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues. If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that. All the components of culture. Just like they do with the Egyptians, they piece together all that stuff. And all you need is the blues. So to me the blues is the book, it’s the bible, it’s everything.
BLVR: Baraka himself said that if you want to know where black people are at any point in our sojourn in this wilderness of America, listen to the music of that period.
AW: Yeah!
BLVR: Your characters also often riff off of each other like jazz musicians, particularly in Seven Guitars. Your work in general is like improvising on a theme: the life of Southern blacks who migrated to the North in the twentieth century. How has jazz impacted your creative process?
AW: I think that’s the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our survival. I came to jazz late, man. I wasn’t interested in jazz. I remember guys walking around with John Coltrane, Archie Shepp albums under their arm and I go, “Aw, man, it ain’t got no words!” If it didn’t have any words, I wasn’t that interested.
All that changed on an October night in 1966 when I came up on Kirkpatrick and Wiley Avenue in Pittsburgh and saw about two hundred people standing out on the corner, which was unusual. The first thing I thought was that somebody got killed. [Laughter] So I run down there and I say, “Hey, man, what’s happening?” and they go, “Shhh!” And they were listening to John Coltrane out of the Crawford Grill, you see. And the people inside the Crawford Grill—’cause the drinks cost ninety cents, in ’66 that’s a lot of money—the people inside, they don’t even know how to spell John Coltrane’s name. They inside talking about what they gonna do Friday night and so-and-so’s cousin got a new Lincoln Continental, you see. John Coltrane ain’t playing to them, man, he playing to the brothers out on the street, ’cause the music’s coming straight out over their heads and out on the street. And the brothers outside, they prayin. This is their music. This is what has enabled them to survive these outrageous insults that American society has forced on them.
So when I saw two hundred niggas stunned into silence by the power of art in the music of John Coltrane and his exploration of man’s relation to the divinity, that’s when I got interested in jazz. And also, as a young man wanting to be a writer, I said, This is what I want my art to do. I want to accomplish that. I can’t say I went out and found me some John Coltrane, ’cause I didn’t have no record player. [Laughter] But I did perk up and I started paying attention at the jazz club. We had a guy named Kenny Fisher in Pittsburgh, he played saxophone. I just got more interested.
Other than just improvisation and being a master of the power of black aesthetic, I can’t really say I’ve been influenced by jazz, although I’ve come to it late. I’ve been trying to catch up, man. Charlie Mingus?
BLVR: Mingus is a master.
AW: Yeah, baby.
BLVR: I got to see Miles Davis twice as a teenager, at the JVC Jazz Festival at Avery Fisher Hall. Seeing my namesake before he passed away was a very big deal. I know The Piano Lesson was directly influenced by the Romare Bearden painting of the same name, and that also his Miss Bertha and Mr. Seth and Millhand’s Lunch Basket were on your mind in creating Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. How did Bearden come to you?
AW: With Bearden, there was a book called The Prevalence of Ritual. Bearden painted a lot of collages. He was painting a collage of rituals attendant to everyday life: burials, funerals, and things of that sort. Bearden, I know he spent some time in Pittsburgh, his maternal grandmother lived in Pittsburgh then. I look at them collages, I know everybody in there! [Laughter] Ah, there’s my uncle, yeah, that’s Charlie, there’s Dick over there. They even look like em. It was the first time that I’d encountered art that was black America in all its fullness, its richness. And it wasn’t sentimental. It wasn’t that, “Aww, we sufferin.” It was like, “We’re the people, we’re here, we’re vibin and this here.”
I said, I want to make my plays the equal of one of them canvases. Put Bearden here and put Wilson up there. I’m not a painter but I want to be able to hang in the same gallery with him, man. And then someone asked Bearden about his art. He said, “I try to explore in terms of the life I know best those things which are common to all culture.” So I go, the commonalities of all culture within the life I know best—which is black life, that’s who I am—I’m gonna express that. That’s what I want my art to be about. This is the way we do things. We all bury our dead, we all have parties, we all decorate our houses, but we do it different. And it ain’t nothin wrong with it.
I watched, in a bus station in downtown St. Paul, these four Japanese guys have breakfast. They sat there and chatted politely among themselves. One of em got up and took pictures. Now I found out from their conversation that they were taking Greyhound across the country to California to go to college. They can all afford to fly first class but they takin a bus, they havin adventure, to have some fun. So when the bill came, they all reached for their American Express cards to pay the bill. They paid the bill and they left.
So I asked myself, if it had been four black guys in here having breakfast, what would be the difference? The first thing I noticed is that there’s a jukebox there. It never occurred to any of these four Japanese guys to play the jukebox. But four black guys walk in, the first thing they do, somebody going to go over to the jukebox and put a quarter in, right? The other guy gonna come and say, “Hey man, play so-and-so!” “I ain’t playin with you, man. Put your own money in!” So he ain’t gonna play his music, right? The second thing I noticed, nobody said nothing to the waitress. The four black guys, I don’t care what she look like, somebody gonna say something to her. “Hey baby, how you doin?” “Look here, mama, what’s your phone number?” They gonna do that, right? “Nah, nah, don’t talk to him, he can’t read, blah blah.” And then the guy gonna get up to play another song, somebody gonna steal a piece of bacon off his plate, and he’s gonna come back and say, “Hey man, I ain’t playin with y’all, man, quit messin with my food.” Other than that, when the time comes for the bill, it’s that, “Leroy, lend me two dollars, man.” Right? It’s just the way we do it.
Now somebody sitting over here would say, “They don’t like each other. The guy didn’t let him play the record, he stole some food off his plate, they harassed the waitress.” So to them, the way you do things is all wrong. If you bring four white guys in, they’ll do it differently than the Japanese and the black guys. What white America does, it accepts the way the Japanese does it. It accepts the way the Czechs from the Czech Republic might do things different. But blacks are supposed to act like them; they say, “Y’all still ain’t learned how to do things.”
BLVR: As a hypothetical, how do you think the artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat might affect your plays?
AW: I suspect it would be closer to what we moving toward, which is [a] hiphop play. If he had been around in the sixties when I was twenty-three, twenty-four—a young man searching for the world—I’m sure I would’ve embraced that much more than when I was forty-five and coming to know his work. It’s a different person coming to know his work and I’m already trying to absorb these other influences. But I could see somebody being influenced by him and the best way to say what it would be like is: it would look like them paintings. And I’m trying to make my stuff look like Bearden’s paintings, the literary equivalent of that. I hear more and more hiphop plays being written. And they’re written in poetry, they’re written in verse, they’re written in rhyme the same way you do a lyric. Only now, it’s a larger canvas and we gonna tell the story; instead of using the three-minute thing here, we’re gonna use a larger canvas. And I encourage that. There gotta be a future, and it can’t be what it is now ’cause you gotta build on a present and keep moving and going down. It’s supposed to be something that you can’t think of now. That’s part of life, man.
II. “TO ME, HIP HOP IS WHAT I CALL THE SPIRITUAL FIST OF THE CULTURE. THAT’S PROOF THAT THE [BLACK] CULTURE’S STRONG, ROBUST, INVENTIVE.”
BLVR: What do you imagine the influence of hip hop might be on your work?
AW: I don’t think it’s any different than a blues influence or a jazz influence, because it’s just an extension of music. It’s just another way of doing it. You couldn’t have hip hop unless you had Charlie Patton and Skip James and Sun House and all the rest of them. Although it is different; I recognize that, man. I recall when Baraka and the Black Power poets of the sixties tried to wed jazz in poetry. And, see, that didn’t work, because it didn’t have the beat. You have to have the beat. The blues and poetry are closer than the jazz and poetry. To me, hip hop is what I call the spiritual fist of the culture. That’s proof that the [black] culture’s strong, robust, inventive. That’s not saying we ain’t got some problems. I mean, it’s the way we used to do with some of them lyrics and whatnot… [Laughter] But I look past that and I go, yeah, now we’re here, we’re strong, we’re alive, we’re robust, we’re inventive, and we still doin it. That’s proof of that. So, I embrace it.
BLVR: Whose decision was it to put some Public Enemy into your last play, King Hedley II, which took place in the eighties?
AW: That’s the director, Marion McClinton, that was his choice. I think it was not so much they were big in the eighties but what that particular song [“Fight the Power”] said as a relationship to the character, King.
BLVR: I’ve got a quote from you here that says, “If I were going to write a play set in 1980, I would go and listen to the music, particularly music that blacks are making, and find out what their ideas and attitudes are about the situation, and about the time in which they live.” What music did you eventually listen to while writing King Hedley II?
AW: Blues. [Laughter] I said that, but I did not do that. All the ideas and attitudes that hip hop generation people in the eighties had, that’s where they got it from. They got it from they daddies, it was rooted here. So I really didn’t have to do that. I listened to Tupac. Relative to my blues collection, I got a small hip hop collection, or what I call “rap collection.” It’s not my favorite music; blues is favorite. I pay attention, keep my ear to the ground. I do recognize what’s going on. I’m trying to think: I know I listened to Tupac back then, but still, basically, I thought the core impulse of people is still coming out of the blues. So I tried to make the other elements of my play reflect the eighties more.
People say, “Well, you writin a play in 1911 and you weren’t alive in 1911. Did you do any research?” I say, I don’t do research. They say, “Well, how do you know?” Because the plays ultimately are about love, honor, duty, betrayal—what I call the Big Themes. So you could set it in the eighties and make use of various things, but you’re telling a story that is using the Big Themes. It’s a love story, King Hedley II. It’s a lot of things. It’s really jam-packed, with King as a Christ figure, there’s a lot of little ideas that I was working on in there, or echoes and suggestions of.
BLVR: What else is in your rap collection?
AW: Wu-Tang Clan. I got Snoop, his first album [Doggystyle]. People give me some over the years. I got some Biggie.
BLVR: There was a controversy in 1990 over an article you wrote about turning down director Barry Levinson to direct a film of Fences. You wanted a black director, which raised the question: can whites master a black style? That said, what’s your opinion, if any, of Eminem? Do you think he’s capable of mastering the black aesthetic of hip hop?
AW: Yeah. He’s imitatin, he ain’t creatin. There’s a very big distinction. He’s not an innovator. He can’t create in that style so everything he do is just imitatin. Anybody can imitate anybody.
BLVR: I’ve read someone say, “Sure, whites can box like Muhammad Ali, once they see him do it.”
AW: The same thing with jazz. Benny Goodman could play jazz, but they ain’t creatin no music, they not innovators. So the music, it’s gotta be there for you to step into it. I wanna see you create it; it would be something different. Different aesthetics at work. But you can be influenced by, you can imitate anything. Got some Japanese guys that play some great jazz. Man, they really good, too! It’s already been done, man.
BLVR: Many of your plays deal with the disconnect between the vantage point of different generations, in their respective ways of reading society. Do you find a correlation between that and this year’s controversial comments from Bill Cosby that were critical of black youth?
AW: Let me say, first of all, I did not hear the comments, I hear people talking about them. My understanding of it is that he went on a tirade against poor black people. I say, if you want to go on a tirade, there’s a whole lot of things to go on a tirade other than poor black people, starting with the systemic conditions that create these poor black people. I have an uncle who lived in America and died in America, seventy-three years, was born a poor man and died a poor man. How is this possible when they comin over with two cents and become multimillionaires?
There’s a reason why. Of course, the reason is he’s black and the opportunities, truncated possibility, et cetera. Let’s go on a tirade about the United States Department of Agriculture, which admittedly discriminated against black farmers by denying them loans over the course of sixty years. So it’s not one individual secretary of agriculture. It happened to be the same sixty years while this other hand [of government] over here is signing laws against discrimination, this other hand over here is fighting war against poverty, while they over there systematically denying these black farmers loans until the farms come down from $1,200,000 to $3,000. They go, “Oh, we’ve been discriminating against you, here’s what we’ll do: we’ll offer you a settlement,” which the Washington Post called a mere pittance, of $50,000. The average value of the farm is $500,000. And then, you look up two years later, they gotta fight like hell to get their $50,000. They’ve denied over 50 percent of the claims, they spent over $13,000,000,000 fighting the claims. Let’s go on a tirade against that. Let’s see what happens. Because you take the white farmer who was given the loan and track him down: his farm is now worth $5,000,000, he’s now a productive member of society all them years. The black guy has to go drive a truck, drive a cab, do something to stay alive, and all because of discrimination.
Now was the secretary of the Department of Agriculture fired from his job? No. Was there an outrage about this? No. When they said they were gonna change the anchor on NPR, 17,000 people called up and they were mad about it because they’re getting a different anchor on the goddamn radio. It’s America—why didn’t 17,000 Americans step forward and say, “No, we don’t want that in America, we don’t want discrimination”? Let’s go on a tirade about that. And after we finish going on all these tirades, eventually we gon get to wanna tirade about the way niggas act and the way they don’t speak correct English and et cetera. My point is, there are systemic causes for that, so let’s look at the causes. I have a special problem with a billionaire beating up on people because they poor.
III. “I CAN’T APPROACH [MY FEMALE CHARACTERS] ANY DIFFERENT THAN I HAVE, MAN, ’CAUSE ALL MY WOMEN ARE INDEPENDENT.”
BLVR: What is Gem of the Ocean about?
AW: Love, honor, duty, betrayal. [Laughter]
BLVR: Well, how about a “plot synopsis”? [Makes sharp quotation marks in air with fingers.]
AW: There was a man who arrives at Aunt Esther’s house seeking. He’s in spiritual conflict. Then you find out that there’s a man accused of stealing a bucket of nails from the local tin mill; he runs and jumps in the river and stays there till he drown. The people in the mill is upset about it, right? The whole plot point is about this bucket of nails and why the man drowned in the river rather than to come out the river and take his thirty days and admit to something he didn’t do. He’d rather die in truth than live a lie.
Then we come to find out that the guy who arrives at the house of Aunt Esther, Aunt Esther takes him on a journey on a magic boat to a place called the City of Bones in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which is a half-mile by half-mile. It’s a beautiful city, unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The city is built of the bones of the Africans who were lost in the Middle Passage. So he traces his journey back on a boat, essentially on a slave ship, to the City of Bones, where he discovers a way for him to redeem himself. He takes that road to redemption. I don’t want to say anymore ’cause I don’t wanna give the plot away [laughter], but that’s what it’s about.
BLVR: You set Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 1911 to take advantage of the African retentions of the characters. How do those retentions play out in Gem of the Ocean?
AW: When I set Joe Turner in 1911… in school, I was taught to start counting [decades] at one. So I put 1911, I’m working on my 1920s play, and my wife said, “What about the aught years?” And I go, What? And she say, “The aught years, the zero years.” Then I realized I had another decade to do [laughter] and it was even prior to 1911. That would be the one that was closest to Africa, so I had to find a way to do that, and that’s where Aunt Esther—who is 285 years old at that point—and the City of Bones come from. Because anyone who was like forty-seven years old in 1904 was born in slavery.
For instance, one of the cats is a runaway slave and he made it up to Canada. Instead of staying up there, he joins the Underground Railroad. He took sixty-two people there and now he’s walking the streets of Pittsburgh trying to find something to do. He actually collects dog shit and he sells it, it’s called “pure.” The shoemakers use it to patent leather and all that kind of stuff too. He found a way. So this is what’s happening in 1904. You got a lot of people wandering around who were ex-slaves, born in slavery—he was twenty years old when he ran away—so it’s very close.
BLVR: Is that true? Did Africans escaping enslavement sell dog shit?
AW: The pure collectors? Well, in Europe they did that. There were pure collectors in Europe. I don’t know about the United States, but I figured…
BLVR: Do you have an opinion about hip hop actors on Broadway? In the past few years we’ve seen Sean Combs in the revival of A Raisin in the Sun, Mos Def in Topdog/Underdog, and Mary J. Blige off-Broadway in The Exonerated.
AW: They were actors, right? They were actors who were hired to do the role and they did that, right? I don’t have any problem with that. As a matter of fact, they did the Def Jam Poetry on Broadway. So when you look up there’s gonna be like forty, fifty of em. Somebody should put them in the same play.
BLVR: Somebody should. [Laughs]
AW: I am aware that some of the actors have a problem: “They’re in our thing and they just come in and do this…” That’s who they hired to do it, man. Let him stand or fall based on his talent, not on who he is.
BLVR: What’s your opinion of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks?
AW: I like Suzan-Lori Parks, I like her work, man. I saw Topdog/Underdog. I was on a panel once that selected an award for her, wrote her a citation and everything. It was the Laura Pels Award that’s given by PEN.
BLVR: Essayist Sandra Shannon has criticized the women in your plays, saying, “His feminine portrayals tend to slip into comfort zones of what seem to be male-fantisized roles.” Feminist critic bell hooks said of Fences that “patriarchy is not critiqued” and “sexist values are re-inscribed.” I was wondering if you’ve given thought to this in relation to approaching the final play in your cycle, which takes place in the 1990s, a time when women are arguably their most liberated and independent.
AW: I can’t approach them any different than I have, man, ’cause all my women are independent. People can say anything they want, that’s valid, they’re liable to say anything they want. I don’t agree with that. You gotta write women like… they can’t express ideas and attitudes that women of the feminist movement in the sixties made. Even though I’m aware of all that, you gotta be very careful if you’re trying to create a character like that, that they don’t come up with any greater understanding of themselves and their relationship to the world than women had at that time.
As a matter of fact, all my characters are at the edge of that, they pushing them boundaries, they have more understanding. I had to cut back and say, “These are feminist ideas.” My mother was a feminist, though she wouldn’t express it that way. She don’t know nothing about no feminist woman and whatnot but she didn’t accept her place. She raised three daughters, and my sisters are the same way. So that’s where I get my women from. I grew up in a household with four women.
BLVR: My grandfather was a numbers runner in Harlem, Amsterdam Earl they called him. You wrote a numbers runner into Jitney—I wondered if you had any numbers-runner stories from Pittsburgh.
AW: At a bar, a guy put a gun to his head and was gonna shoot him unless he paid him fifteen dollars. And the guy didn’t have no fifteen dollars, so Harvey stepped forward—he’s a number runner—and said, “Man, here’s your fifteen dollars.” “No, Harvey, I don’t want it from you. I want it from him.” And Harvey said, “C’mon, what kind of sense that make? He don’t have anything.” Finally he say, “Okay, Harvey, I’m doin this for you.” So he took the fifteen dollars and he kicked the guy, he didn’t shoot him. The police are standing across the street watching the whole thing.
I wrote a poem about a friend of mine, Ahmir Rashid. Ahmir is like everyman. I’ma try to say my poem. “Ahmir has big days / Standing on the corner of 125th and Lenox / Thin lips curled around a reefer / He is waiting for the number man / So he can go to Hackensack to see the woman in the red dress / The edge of impatience rides his upper lip / The loaded .45 tucked in his pants.” Aw, shit, something about the loaded .45. [Laughter] “Makes a soft bulge under his coat / The number man is late / Ahmir knows he will either be in Hackensack tonight / Or booked for murder in the 4th Precinct / The number man knows this also / Which is why he is, right now, on a train to Atlanta.” I hope it wasn’t Amsterdam Earl. [Laughter] That was “Ahmir Rashid #1.” I just got an idea. I might write about twenty more Ahmir Rashid poems and put me out a book, man.
IV. “YOU CAN WORK SO HARD AND REWRITE SO MUCH THAT YOU GET CONFUSED OR CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT’S IN HERE, AIN’T IN THERE, OR WHY HIS PARTICULAR THING IS IN THERE. THEN YOU’RE LOST.”
BLVR: What ever happened with a film of Fences?
AW: In 1987, when I wanted to make the movie, I told them I wanted a black director. In 1990 they agreed to hire a black director and then for a long time we battled over who that black director should be. Once it was a black man, “It can’t just be anyone. Now let’s find the right one.” So we stood there a while. Eddie Murphy was a producer and then they got another someone to take over from Eddie Murphy. I just finished a rewrite, a draft of the script. We ready to do it whenever we ready to do it but I don’t sit by the telephone, man. [Laughter] I just keep moving, doing my things. If it happens, it happens. It’s gotta happen the way I want it to happen because I gotta look in the mirror, face myself.
At the time, they told me there were no black directors, and about a month after that the New York Times put about thirteen new black directors in a photo. I sent it to them after I told them it was criminal that the guy didn’t know no black directors. At the time, there was Gordon Parks, Bill Duke, Spike Lee. There were a bunch of black directors; he didn’t know any. Marion McClinton, who is the director of this play, Paramount Pictures actually hired him and I’ve been working with Marion on the script. When we get the green light, we’ll go ahead and do it.
BLVR: Baraka told me that Bill Duke directed Hoodlum—about Harlem numbers runner Bumpy Johnson—from a screenplay he’d written, but he went uncredited. Will you eventually write some screenplays for Hollywood?
AW: Yeah, I got ideas for about four of em. When I finish writing my plays, then I can do that. I’m not gonna do that and interfere with what I’m doing. If I did that, I would only have three plays written, man. When that’s done, I’ll write my book of poetry, do my paintings, I might even start singing, I don’t know. [Laughter]
BLVR: At a writers’ retreat, black playwright Woodie King Jr. told me that poets make better potential playwrights than writers because of their mastery of the economy of language. He was criticizing Toni Morrison’s play Dreaming Emmitt, saying that writers’ plays tend to be too verbose. As a poet, do you agree?
AW: I would agree with him, but I wouldn’t say that’s the reason why. I think poets deal with ideas of metaphor, they deal with the idea of story. Every poem is a story but it’s condensed in a small space. What’s lacking mostly in American playwriting is the idea of metaphor, storytelling, et cetera. It’s the way poets think that would lend themselves to dramatic structure. They’re used to condensing ideas into small spaces, that’s true.
I read somewhere that poetry is the enlargement of the sayable. In other words, the impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. [Laughter] I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a dramatist. Very few people have done both. I’m writing a novel when I finish my plays and then we’ll find out. I know I’m a dramatist; we’ll find out if I’m a novelist.
I always say that any painter that stands before a canvas is Picasso until proven otherwise. He stands before a blank canvas and he takes his tools. Paint, form, line, mass, color, relationship—those are the tools, and his mastery of those tools is what will enable him to put that painting on canvas. Everybody does the same thing. His turn out like that because he’s mastered the tools. What happens with writers is that they don’t want to learn the craft. That is your tools. So if you wanna write plays, you can’t write plays without knowing the craft of playwriting. Once you have your tools, then you still gotta create out of that thing, that impulse. Out of necessity, as Bearden says: “Art is born out of necessity.” Most writers ignore the very thing that would get them results, and that’s craft. And how do you learn craft? In the trenches. You’ve got to do it. You got to get in there, you got to write. I say write and then write and write and write some more and go write some more.
Charles Johnson is a friend of mine in Seattle. Charles threw away 2,500 pages! It blows me away to this day. I said, How many? That’s like ten books, just to get to that one. And that’s work, but he wasn’t afraid to do the work. And that’s how you learn it, in the trenches. Do it, do it, and do it.
BLVR: I know you do a lot of rewriting—your plays may change substantially between their first production and the Broadway run. How much rewriting is excessive/obsessive? How do you know when it’s done?
AW: First of all, let me say, I’m blessed to have the opportunity to go back into rehearsals with a play and get it right. Sometimes you sit there opening night and go, “Oh, man.” You don’t see it until you see it. You can’t make yourself see it, but when you see it… Sometimes opening night, I see something I could’ve done that could’ve improved the play. I don’t write with a hammer and chisel. It’s not set in stone.
How much is too much? At a certain point, you can overwork something. I’ve seen painters overwork a painting. I’ve done some drawings and my wife, I’ll go show her the drawings, she’ll go, “It’s overworked.” I’ll go, yeah, I worked real hard on that. And working hard, I missed my original idea that I started with. That can happen in the plays, too. You can work so hard and rewrite so much that you get confused or can’t remember what’s in here, ain’t in there, or why this particular thing is in there. Then you’re lost. That’s too much. But as long as you can have control of your material and you’re working to make the story clearer, working to improve it… As long as you don’t get lost up in the rewrites, you’re okay. Once you get lost and you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, you’re in trouble.
BLVR: The New Yorker once reported that you’d only seen two movies between 1980 and 1991: Raging Bull and Cape Fear. From 1991 to now, have you managed to hit the cinema?
AW: I just don’t enjoy movies. It’s not my thing. Even when I was a kid, I went to movies and stuff but I never became a movie person. That’s true, I didn’t step into a movie theater in them eleven years, but during them eleven years there was this invention of this thing called the VCR. So that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen any movies. I saw a few. To this day, I got DVDs now, I still don’t see that many movies ’cause it’s not my thing.
One year, I went twenty-three times. Me and my wife said we’d go every Wednesday. [A young black man staying in a homeless shelter approaches with quarters for dollar bills. I give him the dollars, August Wilson gives him some more. He walks off and we don’t mention it.] Amores Perros, I liked that. Memento, I saw that too. Master and Commander—a piece of junk, man, I didn’t like nothin about that. I saw Sankofa in a movie house in Baltimore with my daughter. I loved that. I’ve seen Spike’s stuff. I saw Barbershop, that was fun. I just would rather read a book or listen to some records.
BLVR: When I was four years old, my mother took me to The Wiz on Broadway, and at thirteen, my grandmother took me to The Tap Dance Kid. But seeing Fences at seventeen really helped cultivate my love for theater. It seems my peers don’t really bother. So thanks a lot, Mr. Wilson.
AW: You’re welcome. We’re gonna change that with your peers, man. We workin on it. I think Puffy had a lot to do with that. He brought a lot of people in there that otherwise wouldn’t have went to see the play. And if they come to see him as opposed to the play, that’s okay. They come to see him and discover the play. People came to Fences to see James Earl Jones and they discovered the play. “This is a good play, too, but I saw James Earl!” All that helps, man.
CONTRIBUTOR
Miles Marshall Lewis is a recognized pop culture critic, essayist, literary editor, fiction writer, and music journalist, with a B.A. degree in sociology from Morehouse College. He is the author of the essay collection Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises, concerning coming of age in the Bronx under the aegis of hip-hop culture at its genesis. He is also the series editor and founder of Bronx Biannual, an urbane urban literary journal of fiction and essays, and author of There’s a Riot Goin’ On, a book on the making of the seminal 1971 Sly and the Family Stone album of the same name.
August Wilson: an interview.
Author: Vera Sheppard
Date: Summer 1990
From: National Forum (Vol. 70, Issue 3)
Publisher: Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi
Document Type: Interview
Length: 7,286 words
Vera Sheppard: “Congratulations on your second Pulitzer Prize, this time for your latest play on Broadway- The Piano Lesson. When you were young, did you ever dream of becoming famous, or are you surprised that your work has become so respected and admired?”
August Wilson: “Well, I don’t think one starts off with that idea. I have been writing since 1965, and I always assumed that by the time I was forty I would be a better writer than I was when I was twenty. Fame and that sort of thing never entered into my mind. It was a question of enjoying the work for the work’s sake.”
VS: “You have been quoted as saying that you don’t do any research for your plays, yet I get the impression that you know a lot about African-American history. Do your incidents showing the treatment of Blacks simply grow out of a general feeling you have for the past?”
AW: “Well, of course I have read some of the history of Africans in America. I think where I get most of my information from is all of these walking history books, the people themselves who have gone through various experiences. In Pittsburgh, there is a place called Pat’s Place. I was reading Home to Harlem, and Claude McKay had mentioned that their railroad porters would stop in Pat’s Place, a place where he hung out. And I thought, well, I know where that’s at. I went to Pat’s Place and, sure enough, there were these elders of the community standing around, and at that time I was twenty-three years old and it was a time when life had to be continually negotiated. I was really curious as to how they had lived as long as they did. So I stood around in Pat’s Place and listened to them. They talked philosophy, history; they discussed whatever the topic of the day was-the newspapers, the politics of the city, the baseball games, and invariably they would talk about themselves and their lives when they were young men. And so a lot of what I know of the history of Blacks in a very personal sense I picked up standing there in Pat’s Place.”
VS: “That’s probably why you include so much storytelling in your plays. I was going to ask you where this device comes from. You have answered it; it grows partly out of your youth.”
AW: “It is certainly a part of the culture also. As I got older, I discovered that the stories are all designed for a purpose, and that is to reveal ways of conduct which the community has put sanctions on. When you hear a story, you learn what is expected of you as a man, say, in the Black community. I can remember when I arrived at twenty years old on the avenue where all the young men hung out, for instance, there was a story about this lawyer named Al Lichtenstein. These were undoubtedly tall tales about what a fantastic lawyer this guy was. But what they were telling you was that the chances are that, as a young Black male, you were at some time going to need a lawyer. I said well, okay, if I ever get in any trouble, I know what I will do-I will get Al Lichtenstein, and the judge will just throw the case right out because he will see that I have Al Lichtenstein as my lawyer.”
VS: “Each of the plays so far has been set in a different decade. You have indicated that your future works will cover the remaining years, but that this was not your original intention. How and when did the idea of creating a cycle of plays occur to you?”
AW: “I did not start out with that idea in mind. I wrote a play called Jitney that was set in 1971, and then I wrote a play called Fullerton Street that was set in 1941, and then I wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom which was set in 1927. And I said, well, I have written plays set in three different decades; why don’t I continue to do that. It gave me an agenda, a focus, something to hone in on, so that I never had to worry about what the next play would be about. I could always pick a decade and work on that.”
VS: “And Ma Rainey was the first play that was a great hit.”
AW: “That was the first play. I kept sending my plays to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights’ Conference, and they kept sending them back to me. I had submitted a total of five scripts to them, and they rejected
them all, and eventually I wrote Ma Rainey. It was accepted, and we had a production at Yale Repertory Theatre which we moved to Broadway in 1984. Yes, that was my first breakthrough.”
VS: “Maybe you remembered a story that you had overheard where they made the point that you must have persistence.”
AW: “Well, I got that from my mother. I always saw myself as a warrior in life-you suffer wounds and defeats and what not, and you get up and you continue. So I was determined that if it had taken twelve plays, they would have just had to keep sending them back to me because I was not going to stop writing. No matter what.”
VS: “And that is a theme in some of your plays, too-to keep on going.”
AW: “I think so. The whole history of Black America demonstrates the resiliency of the human spirit. I certainly bear witness to that from hundreds of years.”
VS: “I understand that you are not an avid reader of dramatic literature because you feel that it might destroy your own expression, that you do not want to borrow from anyone else.”
AW: “Well, I started writing poetry in 1965, and I read anything and everything that was out there. As a consequence it took me until 1973 before I could find my own voice as a poet, before I could write a poem that was my poem, that was not influenced by John Bearden or Amiri Baraka or anyone else. So when I started writing plays in earnest in 1979, 1 had not read the body of western theatre that is Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw and Shakespeare and O’Neill and Williams. I had read Ed Bullins and Baraka and the Black playwrights of the sixties, but I thought, I do not want to go back and read all of the ones I have not read because I will just do it my way-I will just say this is my idea of a play.”
VS: “Your plays are quite traditional in structure; in fact, they are very well-structured. In other words, you are not avant-garde.”
AW: “Well, I guess not, but that is the manner in which I write. It is an intuitive way of telling a story.”
VS: “Do you think of your plays as tragedies in the classic sense?”
AW: “I would certainly hope so-I aspire to write tragedies. I don’t know if I have or not, but that is what I sit down to write. Tragedy is the greatest form of dramatic literature. Why settle for anything less than that? My sense of what a tragedy is includes the fall of the flawed character; that is certainly a part of what is in my head when I write.”
VS: “So, we can’t expect you to be producing comedies in the near future?”
AW: “No, there is a great deal of humor in human life, and I think I find the humor, but the overall intent of the plays I write is very serious.”
VS: “You have a preference for putting long monologues into your plays. What do you think the effect of these long storytelling passages should be on the audience?”
AW: “I just hope the audience listens. There is a Black person talking and he is talking a lot, and I think that we have not heard Black people talk. Society views Black life in a glancing manner, and no one ever stops to ask them, What is on your mind? These are common, ordinary characters who have long speeches, and I want the audience to listen to them.
“A reviewer said that the subject matter of The Piano Lesson-the legacy of Black America, what you do with your legacy-should only take an hour and a half instead of three hours. So you can do that in an hour and a half because it is Black and therefore unimportant. But you take the Jewish legacy, and you need more than nine hours to tell the story about the holocaust in the film Shoah.
“I think the long speeches are an unconscious rebellion against the notion that Blacks do not have anything important to say.”
VS: “It is interesting that you mentioned the holocaust because I had thought of the holocaust, too, in connection with your work. We always hear that we mustn’t forget, and it seems to me that you are trying to keep the memory of Black people’s suffering alive. Are you doing this consciously? Or are you just reminiscing in order to tell your stories?”
AW: “I think it is important that we understand who we are and what our history has been, and what our relationship to society is, so that we can find ways to alter that relationship and, more importantly, to alter the shared expectations of ourselves as a people. The suffering is only a part of Black history. What I want to do is place the culture of Black America on stage, to demonstrate that it has the ability to offer sustenance, so that when you leave your parents’ house, you are not in the world alone. You have something that is yours, you have a ground to stand on, and you have a viewpoint, and you have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by your ancestors. It was James Baldwin who called for a profound articulation of the Black tradition,’ which he defined as that field of manners and rituals that sustains a man once he has left his father’s house. And I said, Ah-hah! I am going to answer that call. I am going to show that this culture exists and that it is capable of offering sustenance. Now, if in the process of doing that, you have to explore the sufferings of Black America, then that is also part of who we are. And I don’t think you can ignore that because our culture was fired in the kiln of slavery and survival.”
VS: “Then you are not so interested in pointing out, Yes, we have suffered: Let us not forget.’ But you want to go further-to talk about the reaction to the suffering and the spirit that one can still maintain.”
AW: Absolutely. I think my plays are a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. And that no matter what, we are still here, the culture is still alive, it is vital, and it is as vibrant and zestful as ever.”
VS: The character of Troy in Fences has that resiliency of spirit.”
AW: “Yes, I think what impressed me most about Troy was his willingness to engage life, to live it zestfully and fully despite the particulars of his past, despite the way his mother abandoned him, the way he was put out of the house by his father at fourteen, the way he spent fifteen years in the penitentiary-none of that broke his spirit. And he died with his boots on. When he struck out early at the plate, he said: Death is nothing but a fast ball on the outside comer.’ Well, he only swung, and he missed. But he was in the batter’s box when he died.”
VS: “And Toledo in Ma Rainey gets killed, but he certainly has put up a wonderful fight verbally trying to point out an attitude one ought to take as a Black person. Do you think that certain segments of the Black population are resisting the idea of looking for their roots?”
AW: “I think that is certainly a part of Black American culture, particularly over the past forty years, when White America issued a social contract that said you can participate in the society if you are willing to deny the fact that you are African: that you cannot bring your Africanness inside the door. I think that the fundamental question that has confronted Blacks since Emancipation Proclamation is, Are we going to adopt the values of the dominant culture, or are we going to maintain our cultural separateness and continue to develop the culture that has been developing in the southern United States for some two to three hundred years? I think that is the question. Ultimately the people are going to decide one way or the other about how we are going to proceed. For the vast majority of Black people the origins are the plantations of the South. Those are our roots, and that is our culture, so one best pay tribute to that. I always say, I am standing in my grandfather’s shoes. I want to place myself in that long continuum that goes all the way back to the first African who set foot on the continent. The African who arrived chained and malnourished in the hold of a 350-ton Portuguese vessel-he has not vanished from the face of the earth; he is here, in whatever manifestation, alive in the 30-million Black people who are in this country now.”
VS: “And you might as well be proud of your origin, rather than deny it?”
AW: “Well, to deny it is to deny your parents and your grandparents and in that sense to deny your self”
VS: “You have said that Black culture is very different from White culture and that it is important to acknowledge the differences. What is the worldview of the Black person as opposed to the White person? I know that is a huge question.”
AW: “That is a huge question, but I think it is answered very simply. The basic difference in worldview between Blacks and Whites can be expressed as follows: Western culture sees man as being apart from the world, and African culture just sees man as a part of the world.”
VS: “Would you explain that further?”
AW: “Well, for the White man, nature exists to be conquered. Whereas, for Africans, they see themselves as part of everything, the trees, all of life on the planet. Because Africans are not Europeans, they have different ways of looking at life; there are different things they value. We decorate our houses differently than White people do; we have different rituals that are attendant to burying our dead; our courtship rituals are different. We value and prize linguistic ability. That is one of the values of our culture-the ability to rap. We entertain differently, we party differently, we have a communal sense that I suspect is partly based on our shared history, our sense of style is different, our manners differ from those of Europeans.”
VS: “You say, Vive La Difference!”
AW: “Without question. There is nothing wrong with the way anyone does anything. It is only when one culture tries to impose its culture on others and says that your life is deficient unless, for instance, you know Mozart and Beethoven and all the rest of that culture.”
VS: “You mention rapping. It is true that Black language can be very poetic when compared to White speech, and your characters, while they sound very realistic and believable, also sound poetic. Are you recreating and refining what you have overheard?” fining
AW: “Not that I have heard consciously, other than the years that I spent standing at Pat’s Place: The rhythms and the manner in which those men talked.”
VS: “I heard Lloyd Richards say during an interview that your dialogue reminds him of the way people talked in his presence when he was young.”
AW: “Being an artist, I guess, and being attentive to language, you discover certain things. But it took me a long while before I could value the way Blacks spoke. In my earlier attempts to write plays, I felt that in order to make art out of this, I had to change the language, and so I was trying to force words into the characters’ mouths that simply did not fit because I did not value the way they spoke. But once I stopped and began to listen in my head to the speech rhythms, I uncovered inferences in Black dialogue-a lot of things are done by implication. When you give the language, you are giving the thought patterns as well. There is an impeccable logic in the use of metaphor that I noticed as I was standing around at Pat’s Place. So I simply was trying to recreate that sense of style or that sense of interior logic within the characters.”
VS: “Black speech (in your plays) seems less abrupt and more detailed. Somebody will say something, and a person will answer at length and embellish what he is saying.”
AW: “Oh sure. For instance, in The Piano Lesson you have the question, (AW begins to declaim dramatically) What time Bernice get home?’ The answer is not, Bernice get home at 5 o’clock.’ The answer is you up there sleep. Bernice leave out of here early in the morning. She’s working out to support herself cleaning house for one of them big shots down at the mills. They don’t like you to come late. You come late, they won’t give you car What kind of business you got with nice?’ And they say, `My business, I ain’t asked you what kinda business you got’ `Well, Bernice ain’t got no money, if that’s why you tryin’ to get hold to her. Now if she go ahead and marry Avery, he workin’ everyday, and if she go ahead and marry him, she be doin’ alright. But as it stands, Bernice ain’t got no money.”‘
VS: “Maybe you should have become an actor, too!”
AW: “So the answer to, `What time Bernice get home?’-well, the implication in that is that I am going to borrow some money from Bernice. So you get not only the question, but you get the whole history of what she’s doing, why she won’t give you car fare, whom she should marry, why she should marry him, and all the rest of that. But if it was in fact like White speech, it would be, What time does Bernice get home?’ And the answer would be, Bernice gets home at 5 o’clock.”‘
VS: “And in White speech, the listener would get impatient with the long answer; but the Black person is happy to hear it.”
AW: “Well, you are getting so much more than just the answer to the question.”
VS: “How did you make the transition from writing poetry to writing plays?”
AW: “I still write poetry. I still consider it the highest form of written language arts, and I aspire to write great poetry, actually. But it was a friend of mine who talked me into writing a play. I gave a poetry reading, and I had a character in my poems called Black Bart, and my friend said, hey, you could make that into a play, and I thought, no, I don’t know how to do that, but he kept after me about it, so from one Sunday to the next, I sat down and wrote this play for him. And I did not immediately become a playwright. But I was intrigued with the idea that I was able to take these forms and make something larger out of them. And that was in 77, and I have continued to do that.”
VS: “Are you publishing your poetry?”
AW: “At some point. This may go back to the first question you asked. I have written a lot of short stories and a lot of poetry, but I never sought sanction outside the sanction I would place on my own work. I never sent my poems or my stories off to be published. For me, it was the sheer joy of writing them. But I have been asked by six or seven publishers, and yes, I do plan to publish them.”
VS: “What is more important about your plays-their uniqueness in depicting the Black experience or their universality? What audience do you have in mind when you write?”
AW: “I write for an audience of one. For myself.I think I have to satisfy myself as an artist first before I write for any particular other audience. So I look at my work as a piece of art, and I have to be satisfied with it. I don’t write for Black people or White people; I write about the Black experience in America. And contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities. I am surprised when people come up to me and say, well, Fences is universal. Of course it is! They say that as though the universals existed outside of Black life. It was Romare Bearden, the artist, who when asked about his work, said ‘I try to explore in terms of the life that I know best those things which are common to all culture.’ And I thought, Aha! That is also what I aspire to do. When you look at Troy Maxson and his wife Rose and you see that Troy is having an affair with another woman and has fathered a child by her, it does not matter that these are Black people; this is a human experience that has been duplicated many, many times by all cultures, and all people throughout the world can understand and recognize that.”
VS: “You mentioned your mother having been a strong woman and a good influence on you. Do her characteristics have something to do with the fact that you have quite a few female characters that are the strong ones in the family-the reasonable and nurturing ones-while the husbands are less so?”
AW: “I suspect so. I grew up in a house without a father, in a single-parent household with my mother. In answer to that, I am cautious in writing women characters; I am respectful of them as I would be of my mother. That is, I try to write honest women, I try to place myself in their shoes, I try to look on both sides. I write honestly whatever I find, but I am cautious of being respectful.”
VS: “There is a lot of symbolism in your plays, and there arc many allusions to the supernatural. Would you please address that.”
AW: “Symbolism is one of the tools of art, and I think it helps in creating metaphors and taking a very large experience and focussing it down to something more manageable. So in Joe Turner, for instance, the seven years that the character Harold Loomis spends in bondage with Joe Turner can in fact represent the two to three hundred years of slavery in America. The bones rising out of the ocean are symbolic of the Africans who were lost during the middle passage, who in the course of that play are resurrected and washed upon the land. And Loomis has to make the connection that in actuality this is who he is. The idea of ghosts, the conjure man, these are all part of the culture of Black America. They can be directly traced across the ocean to the continent of Africa. And I think that these are things that have survived after 349 years here in America-the supernatural, our sense of self as a part of the world, as a part of the rest of nature. So if you are going to write about Black culture, you have to understand that.”
VS: “Would you explain your characters’ relationship to God. There are references in your plays that seem to indicate that God has forsaken the Black man.”
AW: “Well, it depends on what God you are talking about. When Africans were brought to this country, they were denied their language, their gods, customs, and all the rest. Toledo in Ma Rainey says, We forgot the names of the gods.’ But I have a very simple viewpoint toward that-when you look in the mirror, you should see your god. If you don’t, then you have somebody else’s god. Because there is not a people on the planet who have a god that does not look like them. Everyone throughout the world, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Eskimos, the Indians-everyone has a god that resembles him or herself.”
VS: “Yes, and Jesus doesn’t look like the Black person.”
AW: “Well, that image of Jesus doesn’t-the image that we know. So what happens in Joe Turner is that Loomis rejects not just the idea of God, but the idea of salvation coming from outside himself. He says, I don’t need anyone to bleed for me, I can bleed for myself.’ So it is an acceptance of his responsibility for his own salvation, and by way of that, an acceptance of his responsibility for his own presence in the world.”
VS: “Your plays have songs in them-Ma Rainey, of course, is full of music-and you have said that you get inspiration from listening to the blues. How does this work for you?”
AW: “Well, the blues are without question the wellspring of my art. It is the greatest source of my inspiration. I see the blues as the cultural response of Black America to the world that they found themselves in. And contained within the blues are the ideas and attitudes of the culture. There is a philosophical system at work, and I simply transferred these things over to all the ideas and attitudes of my characters: these come directly from blues songs.”
VS: “From the lyrics of the blues?”
AW: “It is the lyrics, but the music also provides you with an emotional reference for the information that is contained in the songs. So it is both. I don’t think you can separate them. But I do think that the blues are the best literature that we have as Black Americans. It is very profound art.
VS: “It is often quite sad.”
AW: “That is a misconception of what the blues are. The blues are life-affirming music. Unfortunately, what happened is that when the idea of recording came about, White people went down with their recorders, gave these guys a bottle of whiskey and three dollars, and had them sing twelve or fifteen songs, took the songs back to Chicago and sat down and decided which of these twelve or fifteen songs had any worth or value to them. They set themselves up as the custodians of the music, and also as chief interpreters.”
VS: “And it is the White judgment that focussed so much on the negative aspect.”
AW: “That is exactly my point. The blues are life-affirming music that guides you throughout life; the blues teach you the morality of the culture. These are very valuable things that are being passed along. The blues are rooted in life-they deal with Hey Mama, it look like Mattie, but she walking too slow. Go put on your night gown. Let’s lie down. Last chance I get to be ’round here.’
“Whereas, White music is talking about the moon and stars, and hey, there, you with the stars in your eyes. It is an entirely different kind of music.”
VS: “I understand that you also get inspiration from paintings. Is that so?”
AW: “I have gotten inspiration from the artist Romare Bearden. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was written when I was looking at a painting of his called Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket. It was a boarding house painting, and in the center of this painting was this man sitting in this chair with his coat and hat on, in this posture of abject defeat, and there is a man reaching for his lunch bucket. There is a child who is drinking a glass of milk, and there is a woman standing with a purse as if she is about to go shopping. And I looked at that, and I said, ‘Everyone is going to leave. The man is going to work, and the woman is going shopping, and the kid is going to drink the milk and go out, and this man is going to be left there in this posture. And what he needs most is human contact.’ And then I began to wonder who he was and why he was sitting there like that, and I said, ‘I am going to animate this boarding house and make the boarding house come alive and give these characters names and find out who this guy is and what is his story.’ He became Harold Loomis and I got to know his story, but as I was writing the play, I was listening to an album called W. C. Handy Sings and Plays His Immortal Hits, and one of the songs on there was a song called Joe Turner.’ They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone, got my man and gone, and with forty links of chain, got my man and gone.’ And so I said, Oh, I see, this is what happened to this character.’ And then ultimately I changed the name of the play from Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket to Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. “
VS: “It is marvelous what happens to an artist in the creative process. You look at a picture and there is a play.”
AW: “Yes, and The Piano Lesson was also titled after a Bearden painting. There is a painting of a little girl playing the piano with a woman standing over her-her piano teacher but that became her mother), and so the mother and the little girl at the piano were in the play. So Bearden’s art in particular has been influencing me because of the manner in which he treats Black life-in all of its richness and fullness in a formal artistic language, and he connects it to the great traditions in art, whether they are Dutch or whatever. But his subject matter is the Black experience in America.”
VS: “I have a question about the frustration that is experienced by the characters in your plays, which then results in violence. This relates to what is happening in society now, doesn’t it?”
AW: “Well, I have to go back to the violence in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the only play that I say has violence in it. It is obviously a transference of violence to the nearest target. You know, throughout the course of the play Toledo has been set up as a substitute for the White man. There are comments that he reads too many books-just like the White man. That he has forgotten how to laugh and have a good time-just like the White man. So he is being set up as a standard for a stereotype.”
VS: “In Fences , the characters take up the bat.”
AW: “Yes, there is a fight between the father and son. I don’t think it comes out of frustration. Here again is a rite of passage, a ritualistic kind of rite of passage, in which the son struggles with the father and plays the father, in some cultures in order to become a man himself. Loomis slashing his chest in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is far from being self-mutilation. You can look at it that way, but it is his demonstration of his willingness to accept responsibility for himself, to bleed for himself”
VS: “So it is symbolic violence.”
AW: “Yes, it stands as a magnificent gesture because they see the man taking full control of his life. It is a severing of the bonds that have been binding him. And that one symbolic, ritualistic, and blood-letting rite is also a part of many people’s culture. The crucifixion itself could be viewed as a blood-letting rite. All of those things are purposeful. I would not call any of them violent acts.”
VS: “As your plays are performed in various cities, you often revise them. What is it like for a playwright to keep work in constant progress like that?”
AW: “I have been very fortunate in that the plays have gone through a process. I have submitted them to the O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwright’s Conference. Since Ma Rainey, each one I have submitted has been followed with an invitation to participate in the conference. We do four days of rehearsal and a very intensive workshop in which they hire actors and directors and a dramaturg, and you sort of stand the play up on its feet. And from those two stage readings I get ideas about how I could make the play better. I try to come up with a draft suitable enough for going into rehearsal. When we open the show at the Yale Repertory Theatre, we do not open it in the spirit that this is an incomplete or unfinished work. When we perform in other cities, I watch the performance and continue to revise.”
VS: “So it becomes a collaborative effort?”
AW: “Yes, it is a collaboration between all of the theatres who offer Lloyd Richards and me a place to work. You could not sit and watch a play a hundred times and not find out more things about it. The playwright sitting at home alone is never going to get everything right.”
VS: “Lloyd Richards has directed all of the major plays. Do you want to talk a little about your relationship with him?”
AW: “Yes, Lloyd has directed them all. When we worked together on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I did not know him very well, and I got off the train in New Haven with my script, uncertain what was going to happen. We went into rehearsal, and we read the play. The actors had a couple of questions which I was prepared to answer, and Lloyd liked what I wrote, and he was also prepared and gave the answer, and he was 100% correct. Not only was he correct, but he gave me insights into characters I had not had. I visibly relaxed at that point. I said, ‘Okay, Lloyd knows what is going on.’ Now we have gotten to the point where there is not a lot of talk about the plays. It is an intuitive, almost nonverbal kind of communication.
“For instance, I sent Lloyd a copy of The Piano Lesson, and he said I think you have one too many scenes in there. And I said I will take a look at that. End of conversation. Then I read the play. What could he be talking about? And then I found the scene. To this day, he has not pointed out the scene to which he was referring. But it was one I discovered that I could do without. What happened was that Lloyd let me find it, myself, the way he let the actors find it.”
VS: “I find it interesting that in a sense it is your humility that creates these wonderful plays. I can imagine that there are playwrights who would say, Well, this is what I wrote-this is it-and you are going to put it on. “‘
AW: “I am not that kind of writer. A play is just words on paper. If it does not work, you just put some more words on paper. I have never been the kind to think that it is written in stone, so to speak.”
VS: “It is fortunate that you ran into Lloyd Richards, that he happened to be there just when you needed him, and you clicked. “‘
AW: “Without question. Lloyd has been important not only as director of the plays, but important to my whole career, and important to my understanding of theatre. I have learned a lot about theatre over the past six years in working with him. He is a very generous man and a very giving mentor in that regard. The fact that we have done these nine plays together makes them all seamless-having the same two artistic sensibilities at work on the play.”
VS: “The plays, taken together, form a whole.”
AW: They have a unity and seamlessness to them which would not have been there had I had four different directors. We might have had four disparate kinds of plays. So I am very grateful that it worked out as it did.”
VS: “What is the status of Black theatre companies in America today?”
AW: “They are not institutionalized. I find that White theatres are supported by institutions throughout the country, from the universities on down. We don’t have that kind of institutional support for Black theatre.”
VS: “Is it a good thing to have Black theatre companies and White theatre companies, or would you like to see more of a meshing of the two?”
AW: “I think it is a very good idea to have separate theatre companies. Black concerns and White theatre concerns arc very different. If we need some White actors, we will come over and get you guys, and if you need some Black actors, you should come over and get us.”
VS: “As long as none of us get stereotyped! What do you think is the agenda of Black theatre today?”
AW: “I don’t think the Black theatre has an agenda. It should be an exploration of the culture. Not that long ago it was a crime to teach Blacks to read and write in this country. Cultural developments take time-we are in desperate need of writers, simply because we are coming out of an oral tradition. We need to strive for a development of written art that is comparable to the uniqueness of jazz and blues.”
VS: “I hear you have written a screenplay for Fences. Is it coming out soon?”
AW: “I have been battling for two years with Paramount Pictures who purchased the rights to the movie. The battle has centered on the question of hiring a Black director. They have committed themselves to hiring one. If they actually follow through, I would consider that a big victory. “
VS: “You need a Black director to produce it in the best possible way; a White person could not do it as well?”
AW: “We have proof of that from other films that Whites have directed and that ended up unabashedly patronizing. And I certainly would not want that to happen to Fences . So for me it is crucial that the exploration of the culture be by those who share in it, those who come from it, no matter how well-intentioned others may be.”
VS: There are many stories in your plays that tell of injustices committed against Blacks. But what I think is so refreshing is that you don’t come across to me as being very angry or militant. You point it out, but you are not strident about it. And I think that makes it even more effective.”
AW: “I think if you look at Black life, you don’t have to stand up and shout and indict racism. The 10,000 lynchings in Mississippi will do that very eloquently by themselves. Racism is a problem in the society; it exists. You don’t have to kill White people on stage ultimately for effect. In the sixties I founded a Black theatre group, and those were the kinds of plays that we did. I look for a more inward exploration of who we are, and once we understand that and understand the relationship that we have to society, then we can seek ways to alter that relationship.”
VS: “Lloyd Richards said that Black theatre nowadays does not have to be all protest anymore.”
AW: “Yes, I must say the only reason I can do what I do is because the playwrights in the sixties did what they did. So I place myself in that long tradition. I just wrote a play about 1968 that did not deal with any of that because it had been done.”
VS: “Yes, Two Trains Running. What is the theme of that play?”
AW: “It takes place in a restaurant in 1968. The restaurant is across the street from the meat market and a funeral home, and every morning this man comes and stands in front of the meat market and says to the owner when he comes to work, ‘I want my ham.’ And the owner says, Take a chicken.’ Nine years earlier he had painted the guy’s fence for him, and the owner told him ‘If you paint my fence, I will give you a chicken. If you do a good job, I will give you a ham.’ Well, the man thinks he did a good job, and the owner did not. So his response was to come every morning for nine years. What has happened to him in the nine years is that he has lost all sense of who he is. All he can say is, ‘I want my ham.’ He just wanders around in the community telling anyone and everyone, ‘I want my ham.’ There is an off-stage character Aunt Esther who is 322 years old. And Aunt Esther is a repository of the entire Black experience and wisdom.”
VS: “It is good that you did not have to show her at that age, that she was off-stage!”
AW: Absolutely, the make-up person would have had a tremendous job. But your experience is alive, your legacy is alive. All you have to do is tap into it. So at various points the characters in the play have to go see Aunt Esther in order to solve their problems. And she tells them a very simple thing, and that is: If you drop the ball, there is no need to run to the end zone, because there is not going to be a touchdown. You have to go back and pick up the ball. And so in these characters’ lives, they have to go back and pick up the ball where they dropped it in order to proceed on. That is in essence what the play is saying.”
VS: “In a way you write morality plays.”
AW: “Something of that sort, I suspect.”
VS: “What do you envision you will be writing in the future, when the cycle has been completed up to the nineties?”
AW: “I go back and do it again-I’ll do another cycle!”
VS: “You have offered much information-just like your storytelling characters-thank you!”
AUGUST WILSON was catapulted to the forefront of young American playwrights with the success of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, voted best play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. His second play, Fences, opened on Broadway in the spring of 1987 to enormous critical acclaim and won numerous awards for best play of the year including the new York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, The Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent play, The Piano Lesson, co-premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre and Boston’s Huntington Theatre. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone received its first production he Yale Repertory Theatre in the spring of 1986. His play, The Piano Lesson, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. VERA SHEPPARD is guest editor of this issue of National Forum.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1990 Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi
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