[...] Part of my process is that I assemble all these things and later try to make sense out of them and sort of plug them in to what is my larger artistic agenda. That agenda is answering James Baldwin when he called for "a profound articulation of the black tradition," which he defined as "that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that will sustain a man once he's left his father's house."
So I say, O.K., that field of manners and ritual of intercourse is what I'm trying to put on stage. And I best learn about that through the blues. I discovered everything there. So I have an agenda. Someone asked the painter Romare Bearden about his work and he said, "I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures."
So I say, O.K., culture and the commonalities of culture.
Using those two things and having the larger agenda, I take all this material, no matter what it is, and later, I sit down and assemble it. And I discovered -- and I admire Romare Bearden a lot; he's a collagist, he pieces things together -- I discovered that that's part of my process, what I do. I piece it all together, and, hopefully, have it make sense, the way a collage would. [...]
[...] In my own work, what I hope to do is to "place" the tradition of black American culture, to demonstrate its ability to sustain us. We have a ground that is specific, that is peculiarly ours, that we can stand on, which gives us a world view, to look at the world and to comment on it. I'm just trying to place the world of that culture on stage and to demonstrate its existence and maybe also indicate some directions toward which we as a people might possibly move. [...]
| August Wilson's "How to Write a Play Like August Wilson" makes me glad he wrote plays and makes me wonder what a weblog he'd kept would have looked like.
Previously on Negrophile: "A workable Wilsonian democracy and "A workable Wilsonian democracy, pt. 2"
[...] In an article about his cycle for The Times in 2000, Mr. Wilson wrote, "I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves." [...]
[...] In a 1999 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Wilson cited his major influences as being the "four B's": the blues was the "primary" influence, followed by Jorge Luis Borges, the playwright Amiri Baraka and the painter Romare Bearden. He analyzed the elements each contributed to his art: "From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality." [...]
[...] When a Hollywood studio optioned "Fences," Mr. Wilson caused a ruckus by insisting on a black director. In a 1990 article published in Spin magazine and later excerpted in The Times, he said, "I am not carrying a banner for black directors. I think they should carry their own. I am not trying to get work for black directors. I am trying to get the film of my play made in the best possible way. I declined a white director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans." (The film was not made.) [...]
[...] "I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans," he told The Paris Review. "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." [...]
[...] "I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. I'm not sure what it means, other than life is hard." [...]
That's from Charles Isherwood's New York Times article "August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Dies"
[...] In a prefatory note to his masterpiece, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (on Broadway in 1988), set in 1911, Mr. Wilson writes of the African-Americans who have made the exodus from the South to the North: "Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their bags a long line of separation and dispersement" as they "search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy." [...]
| Those are from Benjamin Brantley's New York Times appreciation, "August Wilson's Operatic Sweep Added Nobility to Already-Noble Lives"
[...] "Blues is the bedrock of everything I do," he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1991. "All these ideas and attitudes of the characters come out of it. Blues is the best literature that we as blacks have." [...]
[...] "The offers I've had from Hollywood are for the most part to write biographies, as though that's the only kind of black material they are willing to look at," he told the Washington Post. "I want to write an original play or film script, with ideas." [...]
[...] Wilson told the Guardian that, after finishing "Gem of the Ocean," the penultimate play in the cycle, "I immediately got depressed. It's like you temporarily lost your reason for living, and the only thing to do is start another. So I will write down a title or a line of dialogue or an idea for a character or something. So, if someone asks me what I am doing, I can say, 'I'm working on my new play.' " [...]
[...] "For me, there's nothing in life that can compare to those moments of sitting there with that blank page, then to have something emerge out of it," he told the Chicago Tribune in 2000. "You keep pressing, wrestling with it, then — bingo! — it starts to emerge. Then you're really excited. You think, 'This might be something after all.' " [...]
| Those are quotes from Mike Boehm's Los Angeles Times article "Playwright Distilled Black America: 'Magisterial' cycle of 10 works about ordinary lives in poor neighborhood earned him two Pulitzer Prizes"
[...] "I am trying to write plays that contain the sum total of black culture in America, and its difference from white culture. Once you put in the daily rituals of black life, the plays start to get richer and bigger. You're creating a whole world in the process of telling your story, of writing this character. Once you place him down in his environment, you have to write about his whole philosophical approach to life. And then you can uncover, from a black perspective, the universalities of life." [...]
| That's from "Writer is stilled, but not his song: In his landmark plays, August Wilson captured the sorrows and joys of African Americans," Charles McNulty's Wilson-appreciation special to the Los Angeles Times
[...] He didn't finish high school, and helped educate himself at the public library. He started writing in 1965, according to the AP, when he acquired a used typewriter. He won the money to buy it by writing a term paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandberg for his sister, a Fordham student. "I took the $20, and I went down to Kern Typewriter Store and spent it all in one place," he told Playbill's Harry Haun. "I bought this typewriter for $20. It was $20 plus tax, and I didn't have the tax, and the guy told me, `That's okay.' I didn't even have bus fare home so I had to walk home with this typewriter. It weighed about 30 pounds. When I got home, I plopped it down on the kitchen table and said, `I am a writer.' It was then I realized I didn't know how to type." [...]
[...] "I chose the blues as my aesthetic," Wilson told Playbill in 1996. "I don't do any research other than listen to the blues. That tells me everything I need to know, and I go from there. I create worlds out of the ideas and the attitudes and the material in the blues. I think the blues are the best literature that blacks have. It is an expression of our people and our response to the world. I don't write about the blues; I'm not influenced by the blues. I am the blues." [...]
[...] However, he never forgot the city he came from. In an interview with Playbill, he told of his early years, when he trying to become a poet. "I was a poor man, and I bought a record player at a thrift shop for three dollars," he says. "It only played 78s. The thrift shop also had 78 [rpm] records for a nickel apiece. I would go there every day and buy maybe ten records. I did this for months and had about 2,000 records. They were a virtual history of thirties and forties popular music.
"One day in my stack of records I saw this odd-looking, typewritten yellow label. I put on this song called 'Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine,' by Bessie Smith. And I heard this woman's voice that was so strikingly different than anything I'd ever heard. I was stunned, and I listened to it again. And I listened to it again. I listened to it 22 straight times. And I said, 'This is mine.' I knew that all the other music I'd listened to wasn't mine. But this was the lady downstairs in my boarding house she could sing this song. And I began to look at the people in the house in which I lived in a new way, to connect them to the record, to connect that to some history. I claimed that music, and I've never looked back." [...]
| Those are from Robert Simonson's Playbill article "Playwright August Wilson, Who Chronicled African-American Experience, Is Dead at 60"
''I was cut out of the same cloth [as bluesmen] and I was on the same field of manners and endeavor -- to articulate the cultural response of black Americans to the world in which they found themselves." [...]
[...] ''We reject any attempt to blot us out, to reinvent history, and ignore our presence," he said in a 1996 speech at a Theatre Communications Group conference. ''We want you to see us. We are black and beautiful. We have an honorable history in the world of men. . . . We do not need color-blind casting; we need some theaters to develop our playwrights." [...]
| That's from Ed Siegel's Boston Globe article "Playwright August Wilson dies at 60: Portrayed history of black America"
posted in articles on October 3, 2005 11:10 PM | t (0)
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