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A tribute to a great man, August Wilson
By Bill Maxwell, Associate Professor of Journalism at Stillman College
Reprinted from the Gainesville Guardian October 24, 2005
 Wilson 's legacy will endure long after his death because he accomplished something special: He put a sympathetic face on the lives of ordinary African Americans by universalizing our human condition, our concerns, our fears, our aspirations.
This column is not an obituary. It is a tribute to a great man.
I had the honor of meeting black playwright August Wilson four times, once in Pittsburgh for an article I was writing and three times in New York when his plays were on Broadway.
He died last Sunday of liver cancer in a Seattle hospital. He was 60.
Wilson was one of America's greatest playwrights of any race or ethnicity. A New York Times theater critic said that he was "heroic," and others referred to him as the "American Shakespeare."
He left an oeuvre of 10 epic plays that captured African-American life for each decade of the 20th century.
I saw six of Wilson's plays. When I wrote about "Fences" in 1988, I had a hard time avoiding the use of terms such as "lyrical," "richness" and "luminous."
For his efforts, he won every important theatrical award in the United States, including a Tony and two Pulitzers.
Wilson's legacy will endure long after his death because he accomplished something special: He put a sympathetic face on the lives of ordinary African Americans by universalizing our human condition, our concerns, our fears, our aspirations.
Listen to how Wilson, during an interview with the Paris Review several years ago, framed the essence of his work: "I think my plays offer (white America) a different way to look at black Americans.
For instance, in 'Fences,' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day.
"By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things -- love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty.
Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives."
Wilson didn't see himself as a political writer.
But after his first works garnered a reputation for being ferocious depictions of how profoundly white racism affects black life, he learned that all art produced by the institutionally marginalized is inherently political.
Perhaps the biggest irony of Wilson's career is that comparatively few black people saw his plays.
His audiences were overwhelmingly white.
One obvious explanation is that most theatergoers in New York and elsewhere are white. But that is only part of the answer.
Even though the experience often was painful, whites flocked to Wilson's plays because they witnessed re-enactments of authentic black life.
During "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," for example, whites vicariously feel the insanity of the love affair between the ambitious blues singer and the near-genius trumpet player.
Doubtless, Wilson was a "race man," so much so that he didn't believe that a white person could legitimately direct a black play.
He further believed that, as dictated by the playwright's intent and by real life, white actors should play white characters, and black actors black characters. Wilson alienated many fans and critics, but he never backed down.
When the late Ossie Davis spoke of black theater in general in 1975, he described what would become Wilson's contribution to the black zeitgeist: "Theatre is a testament to the life and vitality of a people, one of the things which proves not only that we exist, but that our existence is something unique.
Black people have had as long a tradition in theatre as we have had in music and in dance, and that tradition, like the black church, has been one of the things that held us together as a people -- it kept us from going mad." |
