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Also known as: Frederick August Kittell, Frederick August Kittel
(1945-)
Playwright, poet
Prolific playwright August Wilson is a modern-day griot, who has eloquently and consistently chronicled black American life. His critically acclaimed dramas, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars, have been performed at regional theaters across the United States as well as on Broadway. They also have been published, transporting audiences and readers on odysseys of black American life through Wilson's focus on identity, culture, and history. Wilson is the first black American to have two plays running simultaneously on Broadway and is one of seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer Prizes.
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Earlier, his maternal grandmother exhibited great strength and determination when she walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson's mother, Daisy, inherited her mother's strength and determination, qualities she needed to raise six children in a Bedford Avenue tworoom apartment behind a grocery store in Pittsburgh's Hill Districta poor neighborhood inhabited by black Americans, Italians, and Jews. Daisy supported her family as a cleaning lady. Her husband, Frederick Kittel, a German immigrant and baker, seldom spent time with his family. Decades later, in the 1970s, August, Daisy and Frederick's fourth child and eldest son adopted his mother's maiden name, Wilson, and dropped his paternal surname.
During Wilson's teen years, his mother married David Bedford, and the Bedford family moved from the Hill to a predominantly white suburban neighborhood, Hazelwood, in the late 1950s. There, they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home, and when Wilson transferred to Gladstone High School, he was subjected to additional racial incidents. His white schoolmates frequently left notes on his desk advising, "Nigger go home." Yet an even greater insult to Wilson was the inability of a teacher to fathom that a black student could create a wellwritten term paper. After reading Wilson's paper centered on Napoleon, the instructor accused him of plagiarism. The racial animosity exhibited at Gladstone led Wilson, at age 15, to drop out of school.
Although Wilson's formal education ended abruptly, he continued to learn through disciplined selfstudy at the Carnegie Library. Wilson, who learned to read at age four and began reading black writers at age 12, spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself by reading black works in the public library. Reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes,Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, as noted by Contemporary Black Biography, Wilson was caught up in the power of words.
Wilson's fascination with the power of words generated tension at home. During his teens, Wilson was determined to become a writer and worked at a series of odd jobs. His mother, who wanted Wilson to pursue a career as an attorney, disapproved and forced him to leave the family residence. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1963 only to be discharged in 1964. Begins Writing Career
On April 1, 1965, a few weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, Wilson invested in his writing career by purchasing his first typewriter. During the fall of 1965, Wilson moved to a rooming house in his native city. Reflecting on that period in his youth, Wilson described himself in the preface to Three Plays as "a twentyyearold poet wrestling with the world and his place in it, having discovered the joy and terror of remaking the world in his own image through the act of writing." He supported himself by working at a series of lowpaying jobsas dishwasher, shortorder cook, porter, stock boy, gardener, and mail room clerkfor approximately the next 12 or 13 years. During his leisure time, Wilson frequently sat in a restaurant and created poems on paper bags. His initial writing efforts were poetic, and although he did not gain fame as a poet, his poems were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s in several periodicals such as Negro Digestwhich later became Black World as well as Black Lines and in at least one anthology published in the early 1970s, The Poetry of Black Americans: Anthology of the Twentieth Century, edited by Arnold Adoff. Among the poems published during this period were "For Malcolm X and Others," "Morning Song," "Muhammad Ali," "Theme One: The Variations," and "Bessie."
In the fall of 1965, Wilson played Bessie Smith's record "Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine." Wilson acknowledged in his preface to Three Plays that hearing Smith's voice led to an awakening; he realized he was a representative and carrier of black American culture. After listening to Smith's voice, Wilson assumed the responsibility passed on from his black American ancestors; hearing the blues motivated, challenged, and empowered the young poet to document black American culture and history in his writings.
During the remainder of the 1960s, Wilson continued to write and was instrumental in founding two organizations that promoted black American writing: the Center Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop, formed in 1965, and Black Horizons, formed in 1968. Wilson cofounded Black Horizons with his friend, Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, in an effort to politicize black Americans and to increase their race consciousness. Wilson's earliest plays were written for Black Horizons, including: Recycle, written in 1973 and produced at a Pittsburgh community theater; The Homecoming, about blues singer and guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, written in 1976 but not produced until 1989; and The Coldest Day of the Year, a drama focusing on relationships between black American men and women that was written in 1977 but unproduced until 1989.
In 1969 Wilson married Brenda Burton, a member of the Nation of Islam. One year later, their daughter, Sakina, was born. The Wilsons divorced in 1972.
In 1978 Wilson traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to visit his friend Claude Purdy who had worked in theater while in Pittsburgh before becoming the director of St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre. Wilson decided to move to St. Paul and was employed as a scriptwriter for the Science Museum of Minnesota. On the museum's behalf, Wilson wrote several brief scripts, including An Evening with Margaret Mead, How Coyote Got His Special Power and Used it to Help the People, and Eskimo Song Duel. His employment at the museum was an early milestone in his literary career; for the first time, Wilson was being paid to write.
In his spare time, Wilson continued to create plays. According to Contemporary Black Biography, in 1979 "in ten days of writing while sitting in a fishandchips restaurant," he wrote Jitney!, a drama about Pittsburgh's black jitney drivers set in 1971. Jitney! was accepted by the Minneapolis Playwrights Center in 1980; the theater group named Wilson an associate playwright, and awarded him a $200 monthly fellowship. In 1982 Jitney! was produced at Pittsburgh's Allegheny Repertory Theatre. Jitney! was followed by Wilson's Fullerton Street, written in 1980 and set in the 1940s. His next play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, is a musical satire written in 1977, produced in 1981, and is based on a series of poems about a legendary outlaw of the Wild West. Wilson quit his job as the museum's scriptwriter in order to devote more time to creating his own plays. He was encouraged in this endeavor by his second wife, Judy Oliver, a white social worker he married in 1981.
Debuts on Broadway
In 1980 Rob Penny encouraged Wilson to apply to the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut where each summer 15 playwrights are selected to participate from the approximately 1,500 who apply. The O'Neill rejected five Wilson scripts before accepting Ma Rainey's Black Bottom for a workshop in 1982the same year Wilson wrote the play. The National Playwrights Conference director, Lloyd Richards, who is also director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and dean of the Yale School of Drama, staged a production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at the Yale Repertory Theatre in April, 1984. The play marked the beginning of Wilson's association with Richards. Wilson stated in the preface to Three Plays that Richards is "my guide, my mentor, and my provocateur" and added that "From the O'Neill to Yale to Broadway, each step, in each guise, his hand has been firmly on the tiller as we charted the waters from draft to draft and brought the plays safely to shore without compromise." Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the first of six Wilson plays that Richards, at Yale and on Broadway, has directed.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opened, after a brief stint at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center, on October 11, 1984, at Broadway's Cort Theater. Set in Chicago in 1927, the play focuses on white record companies' exploitation of black musicians. According to Masterpieces of African-American Literature, this relationship mirrors the position of black people in the society at largea society dominated by white racism." Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which brought Wilson national attention, was a popular and critical success. It closed in June 1985, after 275 performances, received several Tony nominations, and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
Wilson plans to create a play for each decade of the twentieth century, each focusing on a major black American issue. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the first play of this ten-drama cycle. Although Wilson's earlier plays are set in various decades, the cycle begins with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, his 1920s play while his next drama, Fences, is Wilson's 1950s drama. Wins First Pulitzer
Fences, written in 1983, was staged at the O'Neill in 1983, produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in April 1985, and opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre on March 26, 1987. The play depicts 1950s' black family's personal and economic problems. Fences was a commercial and critical success. It grossed $11 million in one year, breaking the record for nonmusical plays. Fences solidified Wilson's reputation as a major playwright. The Chicago Tribune named Wilson as Artist of the Year. Fences won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, four Tony Awards (Best Play: Wilson; Best Director: Richards; Best Actor: James Earl Jones; and Best Featured Actress: Mary Alice), and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
While Fences was still on Broadway, Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre earning Wilson the honor of being the first black American with two concurrent plays on Broadway. Written in 1984 and prior to its Broadway debut, Joe Turner's Come and Gone was staged at the O'Neill, produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1986, and at Washington's Arena Stage in 1988. Wilson, who cited artist Romare Bearden as a major influence on his work because he views Bearden's paintings as as expressive and varied as the blues, was inspired by Bearden's "Millhand Lunch Bucket" as he created Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The play, set in Pittsburgh in 1911, focuses on slavery's lingering effects, blacks fleeing from the agrarian South to the urban North in the earlier years of the century, and black Americans' search for identity. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Wilson's drama of the second decade, received Tony nominations, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Drama Desk Award.
Romare Bearden's painting The Piano Lesson inspired Wilson to create a play with the same title. The Piano Lesson, written in 1986, was staged at the O'Neill in 1987, produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1988, and opened April 16, 1990, at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre. Set in 1937 Pittsburgh, The Piano Lesson examines family conflict over an heirloom built by a slave ancestor. According to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, "This play perhaps best expresses Wilson's view of black history as something to be neither sold nor denied, but employed to create an ongoing, nurturing, cultural identity." The Piano Lesson, Wilson's drama of the 1930s, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Tony for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award, the American Theatre Critics Outstanding Play Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Thus, Wilson is one of seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzers.
Wilson's next play, Two Trains Running, was written in 1989, produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1990, and it opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1992. Two Trains Running, Wilson's drama of the 1960s, is centered on a group of friends in Pittsburgh who are caught up in the chaos generated by the Vietnam War and racial unrest. Nominated for a Tony, TTR received the New York Drama Critics Award and American Theatre Critics Association Award.
Wilson's drama of the 1940s, Seven Guitars, set in Pittsburgh, opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway on March 28, 1996. Seven Guitars focuses on Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton's friends who gather after his death and the sense of hope for black American empowerment and selfreliance. It received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play.
Additional honors have been bestowed upon Wilson. He is the recipient of Bush, McKnight, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships in playwrighting. An alumnus of New Dramatists, Wilson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Wilson lives in Seattle, Washington, with his third wife, Constanza Romero. Romero is a costume designer, and her credits include Seven Guitars.
August Wilson, former poet turned preeminent playwright, eloquently and diligently provides a panoramic vision of his people to regional theaters, Broadway, and the world as he remains steadfast in his quest to dramatically document twentieth century black American life decade by decade. PERSONAL INFORMATION
Addresses: 600 First Avenue, Suite 301, Seattle, Washington 98104. FURTHER READINGS
Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987.
Salzman, Jack, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, eds. Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA/Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996.
Shannon, Sandra G. "August Wilson Explains His Dramatic Vision: An Interview." In The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington: Howard University Press, 1995.
Wilson, August. Three Plays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. Collections
The Yale School of Drama Library contains information and clippings about Wilson's plays performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre and elsewhere.
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