August Wilson’s century in blacks and blues

But it was Wilson’s plays that exploded into wider recognition through his blend of naturalism and poetics, the music of his language, the social forces of his heyday, and that utterly ephemeral aspect of good luck — being in the right place at the right time with the right play.

And in leapfrogging around the black American twentieth century, Wilson made his plays timely for modern audiences with stories that ran counter to the glitzy, mega-scale productions that characterized Broadway for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Wilson worked in the small scale, found the drama within a smaller circle of intimates: family, friends and acquaintances.

The fight for self-awareness
In “Fences,” which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama, the story of conflicts between a bitter, overprotective father and a son intent on accepting a football scholarship assumes wider dimension as the wrenching story of a battle between generations, and the power of sports in American culture.

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” examines one woman’s struggle to nurture her music in the first throes of the mass marketing of communication. “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” looks at black Americans battling to achieve a sense of self-worth in the period of the first generations after the upheaval of the Civil War.

“The Piano Lesson,” which won the 1990 Pulitzer for drama, studies the conflicts that arise when a family faces a choice of whether to part with a treasured family heirloom in order to acquire a patch of land in the South.

In “Radio Golf,” a wealthy realtor poised to be Pittsburgh's first black mayor dreams of developing a decaying inner city — a dream that confronts the reality of people unwilling to demolish the past.

In these and other plays, the overriding theme of Wilson’s work comes through: the African American search for identity and connection, for self-awareness in a world and a country at odds with such discoveries.

‘Maybe I’ll start over’
In that 1991 interview, Wilson was asked “Is there life after the cycle?” The answer from this charitable, passionate, driven lion of the theater, the most-celebrated American playwright of the past quarter-century, revealed the breadth of his vision as a writer, and the scope of his aspirations for his people and his nation.

“Maybe I’ll start over,” he said. “I intend to write as least 15 more plays about black folks in America. My biggest problem is to find the time to sit down and do the work. But what is there to do except to write another play?”

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