THE HANDSTAND

THE HANDSTAND

NOVEMBER 2005

In Memory of AUGUST WILSON - Playwright
April 27, 1945 - October 1, 2005

From KwakuPerson-Lynn, Ph.D.

I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 27, 1945. I had a wonderful childhood. I had five siblings; we did things together as a family. We were a very conscious and family-oriented. On Mondays at seven o'clock we said the rosary. Six o' clock Wednesdays we would listen to the

radio. Other days we would play games. Looking back on what lead me up to what I am doing today, I would say everything.

The person that you are and the person that you become is a sum total of all of your life experiences. I can't think of anything that led me to the theater. As a child at five years old I remember becoming aware that all of the people in positions of authority were white, any kind of authority. The lady who owned the grocery store was white. The bus driver was white. The policeman was white. The fireman was white. The salespersons downtown were white. The
teachers were white. So you notice this at five years old.

My first writing experience was when I was about ten years old in the fifth grade writing stories. I had a wonderful teacher, Sister Mary Christopher. She used to let me read my stories in front of the class. That was encouraging. Ever since I can remember, I have been writing something.     I became conscious as a child. I can mark the exact moment in 1965, living in a rooming house across the street from St. Vincent DePaul Second Hand Store. I use to go over there to buy records for a nickel a piece. I was very indiscriminate, getting the first ten records on the top. I didn't know anything about anything. I started listening to them: people like Patty Paige, Ella Fitzgerald, Hogie Carmichael, the popular music of the 30s and 20s and 40s.     One day in my sack there was a record with a yellow label. That made it standout. It was typed written and the artist was Bessie Smith. The title of the recording was No One In Town Could Make A Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine. I put that on my turntable. I had never heard anything like that
before. I recall listening to it 22 straight times. I kept listening to it. It was so strikingly different than all the rest of the stuff. I suddenly realized, This is mine. This is me here.

Other than that, in 1965, I'm standing on a corner with Rob Penny. A guy named Clarence Jones came down the street and he had a Malcolm X record under his arm. I said, Let's go up to the house and listen to this record. I knew nothing about Malcolm X. I had heard of him but I didn't know anything about Malcolm X. I think it was the Ballot Or The Bullet. I listened to that record, and that changed my life. There was a point in there where Malcolm was talking about,"You're afraid to bleed". There's a voice in the background on that record, when you listen to it, it says, "We'll bleed." And Malcolm says, "You're afraid to bleed. You bled for the white man when you went to Korea." said alright. I was that voice in the background. It wasn't me, but I could
identify with that voice in the back. You kind of felt like he could just lead you right on down the street. Cause I was sayin', No, no, we'll bleed. I'm still there. I'm still with the we'll bleed; the
willingness to shed blood. I think the characters in my plays, like Piano Lesson, Boy Willie's willingness to do battle and Loomis willingness to shed blood for his own salvation are examples.     When I go back to that point in 1965, and hearing Malcolm X, coupled in '65 with hearing Bessie Smith, I knew was part of something larger. I began to think of myself in ways that I have never ceased to think of myself as.....

When I think about perfecting the mechanics of playwriting, I'm still working on that. I don't know if you ever perfect the mechanics of playwriting. With Jitney, I felt comfortable with what I was doing in terms of my craft and what not. The important discovery in Jitney was, I didn't always value and respect the way black folks talked. In order to create art out of it, you had to change it,
you know.     Then came Sekou Toure. I was reading a quote where he said,"Language describes the idea of the one who speaks it." So, black folks think different. You talk how you think. There's a different thought process that's going on. There's nothing wrong in the way black folks talk. I
don't have to change it. So Jitney was the first time I just heard the language and made the characters talk as I remember living in Pittsburgh.

In rehearsals I am constantly re-writing because you constantly see things. As you are going through the rehearsal process, the actors, as they embody the character, they will do certain things that will give you clues who the character is and will lead the character a certain way. So I will go on and write for that. I write to help them out. I see them struggling to develop this character playing the thing a different way. I'll give them new lines or I'll see something. It is very important that the actors you have in rehearsal are ones that can inspire you to do right.

So I began to write dialog. At some point I will come up with the setting. You figure out a set. Now you have a set. You got dialog. You have a character. Now you need more characters; you discover characters. Once you get all that, and I have pages of dialog, then I begin to think about what the story is and how to use this dialog. I don't all the time use all of the stuff the characters
say. Everything they say is true. Everything happened, but now I have to figure out how to use it.

     In terms of a future play, whenever I finish a play, when I write the end, I don't get up from my desk until I start the next one. Ten minutes after I finished a play, you ask me what am I
doing, I'm working on the next one.    Find out who your grandparents are. If you know that, it centers you in the world. Then you understand who you are. You understand that you are part of a continuum. As part of that continuum, you have some rights, responsibilities and some duties. Once you understand, then you can live a good, honest, productive, meaningful life. That's what
its all about anyway. You do that whether you get famous or whatever you
do.

You live a quality life, then you are fulfilling your duty.

2005 Kwaku Person-Lyn

August 6, 2001
Gwen Ifill talks with playwright August Wilson.

GWEN IFILL: When Tony-winner Brian Stokes Mitchell demands the opening act spotlight in
August Wilson's latest play, the character he portrays-- King Hedley II-- is angry. He is tortured.

BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL: They make up the rules, and then they break them themselves. It don't do nothing but put me two weeks behind. I ain't nobody. I don't count. I don't need to eat, I don't need to pay my bills.

GWEN IFILL: Hedley has killed a man for scarring his face. He has served his time. He cannot get a job, instead scratching out a living on petty scams. Born to promise, he watches, frustrated, as his life slips and slides away. Such frustration-- especially given voice through the words of an African-American man-- is a recurring theme for Wilson, who, at 55 years old, has established
himself as one of the nation's preeminent playwrights.

BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL: He's our Shakespeare. He takes these gigantic, grand themes about humanity and the human experience, and puts them in a small setting with characters and people that we all know and we all live with and we all can relate to, that are very simple... at first glance.

BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL: I'm living for you. That's what I told you when we first got married.

GWEN IFILL: King Hedley is the eighth of ten plays Wilson is writing chronicling each of ten 20th century decades in black America. This one, set in the 1980s. The awards have come regularly: A Tony award, for "Fences," here with James Earl Jones.

JAMES EARL JONES: I got out of here every morning and bust my butt, putting up with them crackers all day long…

GWEN IFILL: A shelf full of honors from the New York drama critics circle, and two Pulitzer prizes, including one for "The Piano Lesson."

ACTOR: You never find you another piano like that.

GWEN IFILL: Later adapted for television, "Piano Lesson" tells of a brother and sister's fight over whether to sell an elegantly carved piano. The instrument is both heirloom, and a reminder of their family's legacy of slavery. The sister, played by Alfre Woodard, believes the piano's history makes it too valuable to sell. But Willie Boy, played by Charles Dutton, has other plans.

WILLIE BOY: If my daddy had seen where he could've traded in that piano in for some land of his own, it wouldn't be sitting up here now. He spent his whole life farming on somebody else's land. Doaker, I ain't gonna do that!

GWEN IFILL: All but one of Wilson's plays are set in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he grew up. The characters he has created in the years since, explore the American dream, but a dream as seen through the eyes of the Americans most playwrights overlook. His last production, "Jitney," was set in a Pittsburgh gypsy cab station in the 1970s.

ACTOR: 'Cause we're gonna be running jitneys out of here, until the day before the bulldozer
comes!

GWEN IFILL: Marion McClinton directed "Jitney," and is also taking "King Hedley" to Broadway this spring.

MARION McCLINTON: Well, August is always constantly in pursuit of the truth. He writes about the truth of a people, the truth of a decade, with great poetry.

GWEN IFILL: It is an unconventional poetry. One that relies on Wilson's ear for the dialect and language of an often dispossessed people. Director Lloyd Richards first heard it in 1984, when he gave Wilson his big break by staging "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," here in the Chicago production.

LLOYD RICHARD: When I read it, I felt very much that I was hearing those people really articulate. And I said, "who could've written that kind of a play?" Certainly, the person knows and understands the life of black people.

GWEN IFILL: As "King Hedley" has traveled from Pittsburgh to Chicago to Seattle to Washington's Kennedy Center, Wilson has tagged along-- tinkering, rewriting and recasting. I sat down to talk with Wilson about "Hedley," and about his work, in Washington.......................................

GWEN IFILL: At some point you decided you were going to actively embrace the African-American oral tradition as a way of telling your stories. Was that a conscious decision or were you just writing what you knew?

AUGUST WILSON, Playwright: Well, it... Conscious and I was writing what I knew at the same time. You know, I think I can trace that back to when I first heard Bessie Smith as a 20-year-old living in a rooming House in Pittsburgh in 1965. And I put that on the turntable, and it actually changed my life.

BESSIE SMITH: (singing) …Sweet jelly roll so fine...

AUGUST WILSON: I was stunned by this record. I had never heard anything like it. And as a consequence of that, I began to look at the people who were living in the rooming house. I began to look at them differently; I began to connect them to a history. And then I realized that I was part of that. And so I claimed that record there as mine. And from that moment on, you know, I began
to, in my writing, you know, to embrace and explore this African presence in America.

GWEN IFILL: And explore and embrace the musicality of it as well.

AUGUST WILSON: Absolutely, yeah. See, I learned this earlier on, also, in that when I was writing poetry and we had a place in Pittsburgh, the Halfway Art Gallery, and the musicians and the poets would go down there on Saturdays and Sundays. And the musician would tell us, you could play... you could read while we set up. And the people came in and they didn't want to hear
the poetry. They came to hear the music. So we were an addendum. So I thought, well, if you're going to do language, if you have the musicality of language, since you're dealing with words, you have to have that. Otherwise, the people are not going to listen, you know.

ACTORS: Well you begged me all come down there...

GWEN IFILL: I was struck in this play by how much rage there seemed to be -- not only on the part of Hedley, who's searching for his identity, but also all the characters, including the women characters, to a degree that I haven't noticed in your work before.

AUGUST WILSON: Well, okay, this is 1985, after all. There was a lot of stuff going on.

GWEN IFILL: What stuff?

AUGUST WILSON: Well, you know... Ronald Reagan, I think, is...You know, this is the Reagan era, you know. Black folks did not go through this time of prosperity for some in America. Folks that went through the depression were not noticing it, they did not go through the Reagan era, because... It had a huge impact on the community -- just in terms of economics. I think the larger, I mean, if you look at the play, all king wants is a job.

ACTOR: I go for a job. They say, "what can you do?" I say I can do anything. You get me a tanks and the airplanes, I can win any war that's out there.

ACTOR: If you had the tanks, the airplanes and the boats, you could probably work.

ACTOR: I could dance all night if the music's right. Ain't nothing I can't do. I could build a railroad you give me the steel and a gang of men. The greatest fight. I ain't linking this to nothing. I can go down there, do metal shop. I know how to count money, I don't loan money to everybody who asks for it. I know how to do business. I'm talking mayor, governor, I can do it all. I ain't got no
limits. I know right from wrong. I know which way the wind blows too. It don't blow my way!

AUGUST WILSON: His rage or whatever, is due to the fact he can't find a job, you know -- because America's not playing by the rules. The rules say that if you have the lowest bid on the contract, you're supposed to get the contract if you bid the lowest bid. So you're black and you bid the lowest bid, but you don't get the contract. You see, so it's things like that. So King says now I'm playing by the rules, and so his whole thing that he talks about is a job.

GWEN IFILL: And he wants a child.

AUGUST WILSON: Well, he wants a child, too, yeah. I mean, his wife's pregnant and doesn't want to have the baby. You know, he wants this sense of continuum. You know, he wants to contribute to the world, you know. And that's probably the only contribution he can make.

GWEN IFILL: And one of the reasons why she doesn't want to have the baby contributes to one of the kind of seminal speeches in the play.

AUGUST WILSON: Absolutely, yeah.

GWEN IFILL: Which is what happens black children after they're born.

AUGUST WILSON: Well, I think she says, "I don't want to have a baby when you've got to fight to keep them alive."

ACTRESS: I don't want to raise no more babies when you've got to fight to keep them alive. You take little buddy will's mother up on Bryn Mawr Road. What's she got? A heartache that don't never go away. She up there now, sitting down there in her living room. She's got to sit down because she can't stand up. She's sitting down trying to figure it out, trying to figure out what
happened. One minute her house is full of life, the next minute it's full of death. She waiting for him to come home and they bring her a corpse, saying, "come down, make the identification, this your son? Got a tag on his toe, say John Doe." They've got to put a number on it, John Doe number
four.

GWEN IFILL: You demand a lot of your audiences. Three and a half hours, maybe, on this play. Why is that? Why the emotional attention that you demand?

AUGUST WILSON: Well, you know, first of all, you know, I'm trying to write the best play that I can write. And I think audiences should bring something with them. You know, if you want to stay home and watch television... this is not television, and that's what I'm saying. It's theatre, of course, that's why you're here, you know. So if it's three hours long, you get your money's worth.

GWEN IFILL: But it's three intense hours.

AUGUST WILSON: Well, but, see, that's good. When I go to the theatre, that's what I would want. I would want to be challenged, I would want something intense. I would want something going on, you know, going on the stage. So that when I walk out of the theatre, I take it with me.

GWEN IFILL: You've been described as a man on a mission, and we can go in a million different directions with that. But one is that your play "Fences"-- one of your best- known plays-- has been in search of a film outlet for, what, 15 years now?

AUGUST WILSON: Mm-hmm.

GWEN IFILL: Because you want a black director.

AUGUST WILSON: Yes.

GWEN IFILL: Explain why that's important and where it stands now.

AUGUST WILSON: Well, you know, I think, I think it's important that you have a black director because "Schindler's List" had a Jewish director, because "The Godfather" had an Italian director, you know. I think when you have a work of art that deals with a culture that's so seminal through black American culture, that you just simply have black sensibility behind the artistic development of that project.

GWEN IFILL: You are compared often to other black writers, but less occasionally you are compared to Tony Kushner or Arthur Miller or others. Which do you prefer, I guess, to be known as the great African American playwright or the great American playwright?

AUGUST WILSON: I don't view my plays as belonging to black history. They belong to theatrical literature, you see -- because I don't think of Anton Chekhov as writing about the Russians. I mean, I don't view his work that way. You see, I don't view Shakespeare as, you know, an English dramatist, you know?

GWEN IFILL: But surely you're aware that people view you that way.

AUGUST WILSON: Yes, of course, and I mean, I am. I mean, I am. I'm a black American playwright. You know, I couldn't deny it. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture, all cut out of the same cloth, if you will, you know. That's who I am, that's who I write about. You know, in the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. So there's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" -- even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America, you know? "August Wilson, playwright." I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.

GWEN IFILL: Thank you, August Wilson.

AUGUST WILSON: You're welcome.