Thirty-five years ago, August Wilson was a major voice in the American regional theater who’d had some success in New York. That was an impressive point to have reached for a writer known for his uncompromising, poetically written dramas of African-American life.
Nowadays, Wilson’s plays are acknowledged classics, taught in schools and regularly staged all around the country.
A movie version of Wilson’s best-known drama “Fences,” starring Denzel Washington, opens on Christmas Day. Hartford Stage just staged a fine production of Wilson’s “Fences,” which closed Nov. 13. The Yale Repertory Theatre, renowned for staging the premieres of six of the 10 plays in Wilson’s “Century Cycle” — including two that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” — is doing “Seven Guitars.”
Another strong Connecticut connection to Wilson’s work is that many of his plays were first developed and given stage readings at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford. Lloyd Richards (who oversaw the O’Neill Center’s National Playwrights Conference from 1968-1999, and also served as artistic director of the Yale Rep from 1979-1991), helped establish Wilson as a major voice in the regional theater. In league with the passionate socially conscious producer Ben Mordecai, the managing director at Yale Rep, Richards was able to bring Wilson’s plays to New York.
The plays in the Century Cycle are meant to be produced separately, but there are subtle connections among them, including some recurring characters and background legends. Nine of the 10 plays are set in Pittsburgh, and each play takes place in a different decade of the 20th century. “Fences” (which has had three major Connecticut productions — at the Yale Rep in 1985, at Hartford Stage in 2006 and at the Long Wharf Theatre in 2013) is set in the 1950s, “The Piano Lesson” (done at the Rep in 1987 and 2011) takes place in the 1930s and “Seven Guitars” happens in the 1940s.
“The universality of August Wilson’s work comes from the particularity of African-American culture,” explains James Bundy, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and Dean of the Yale School of Drama, in a phone interview last week. “The authenticity of voice in all those characters, the specificity of that poetry, speaks to everybody.”
Bundy brought Wilson back to Yale for the premiere of what turned out to be the playwright’s final work, “Radio Golf.” The play premiered in April 2005. Two months later, Wilson revealed that he had liver cancer. He died that October.
Bundy recalls Wilson being at Yale for “Radio Golf.” The Rep set up an office for him in the theater building. Wilson’s assistant during the production was a playwrighting student named Tarrell Alvin McCraney, now known as the award-winning author of his own African-American dramatic cycle, “The Brother/Sister Plays.”
“When not writing in the theater,” Bundy says, Wilson “loved to be on Chapel Street, talking to people.”
Speaking specifically about “Seven Guitars,” Bundy points out that “its characters are being indiscriminately incarcerated, the way African Americans are today. The play is actually an elegy for someone who has passed.”
While today Wilson’s plays seem better known than ever, they have become no less challenging to direct and perform. Wilson wrote in certain rhythms that can be as difficult to master as Shakespearean pentameter. The plays can mix deep drama with broad humor, realism with the supernatural. Music is a major element in many of the plays, particularly “Seven Guitars” and “Piano Lesson.”
One of Wilson’s collaborators in the first productions of most of his plays was the composer Dwight Andrews. As the resident music director at Yale Repertory Theatre, he worked on the New Haven and New York productions of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson.” He also created music for “Seven Guitars” when it premiered in 1995 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. The Yale Rep sought out Andrews for this new production.
“I’m getting a chance to build on concepts I couldn’t before, because I was in the midst of it,” says Andrews in a phone call from Atlanta, where he teaches at Emory College. “There’s no one way to skin this cat.
“I was fortunate enough to do those plays when they were being developed, so there was this seamless movement from the story to the music. My gratitude to August Wilson is for those performative moments in his plays, using the truth of African-American music as part of the experience. They’re usually pivotal moments. That’s part of August’s genius.”
The noted musical theater actor Andre De Shields plays the character Hedley in “Seven Guitars,” an ensemble piece about how a blues singer’s impending fame and fortune contrasts with the ups and downs he and his friends have experienced in the recent past.
This is only the second August Wilson play De Shields has performed in, and both have been directed by Timothy Douglas. De Shields played Stool Pigeon in Douglas’ production of “King Hedley II” in Washington, D.C., last year. In a lunch interview in New Haven last week, he called Stool Pigeon and Hedley “dramaturgical twins. I’m a griot in both the plays, keeping the history of the community.”
While he saw all Wilson’s plays in their first New York productions and had “brief, respectful conversations” with the playwright on a few different occasions, De Shields feels that he wasn’t offered roles “because my profile in the industry was majorly as a song and dance man.” He points to a 1996 “manifesto” monologue that Wilson performed as a one-man show as proof that the playwright had a bias against musical theater.
“He spoke very clearly about black musical performers and their penchant for crossing over the line into the white mainstream.” It seems an unfair charge to level at De Shields, who as the original Wiz in the groundbreaking African-American musical “The Wiz” could not be said to have compromised his integrity.
De Shields notes that in most productions of Wilson’s plays, “the sets are representational.” He argues that such realism is not essential to the plays, and that Timothy Douglas brings new ideas to his stagings.
“When we did ‘King Hedley II’ at the Arena Stage — and it is an arena — it looked very Greek. Stool Pigeon did his first monologue sitting on four feet of old newspapers.”
“Timothy Douglas cast me both times. He obviously recognizes two things I know I carry in my DNA. One is the sting of the lash. The other is the gene of the Messiah. This is not peculiar to me. It’s in every one of August Wilson’s characters.”
Douglas, in a phone conversation earlier this month, says “the reason these plays endure is that they continue to speak to the times we are in. Revisiting some of these plays under the Obama presidency, it blew open some doors of the psyche — what this all means about race, about progress.”
Douglas has directed nearly every play in the Wilson canon, and has done some of them (including “Gem of the Ocean,” “Fences” and “Jitney”) as many as four times. He remembers that when he started directing the premiere of “Radio Golf” at Yale Rep in 2005, “there was no script. He was writing it.”
Walter Dallas, who directed “Seven Guitars” at the Goodman in 1995, mentioned similar working conditions. In a 1997 interview, Dallas said, “I didn’t get a script for days. I had to cast two roles with just monologues. And this was a different kind of play for August Wilson — a murder mystery, with jazz-riff dialogues.”
Wilson’s work is no longer in the glorious flux state in which it was created, and in which Connecticut theatergoers first experienced it. It exists in boxed sets of hardbound scripts. A new generation of performers is being cast, one that grew up knowing these plays as established classics rather than groundbreaking new works.
But Wilson’s plays continue to resonate, shapeshift, relate, harmonize and inspire as strongly as ever.
SEVEN GUITARS by August Wilson, directed by Timothy Douglas, plays Nov. 25 though Dec. 17 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. $44 to $88. 203-432-1234, yalerep.org.
Editor’s Note: This story as been updated to correct the spelling of the name Ben Mordecai and the decade in which “Seven Guitars” is set.
