100 Years in One Life

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August Wilson's mom, a cleaning woman trying to raise four kids in the Pittsburgh slums, won a radio contest once. She named the product that went with the ad slogan "When it rains, it pours" (Morton salt), and the prize was a new Speed Queen washing machine. When the station found out she was black, Wilson recounts, his mother was offered instead a certificate for a used washing machine from the Salvation Army. Friends told her to take it anyway; it was better than the old washboard she was using to scrub her kids' clothes. But she refused. "Something," she said, "is not always better than nothing."

Like many of the tales in August Wilson's plays, this one reverberates across generations. Years later, Paramount was trying to make a movie out of Wilson's play Fences, and Barry Levinson was interested in directing. Wilson thought of his mother when he nixed the idea, insisting that the play--about a former Negro League baseball player struggling to support a family in 1957--must be directed by an African American: "Man, I'm thinking, 'Something is not always better than nothing.' She influenced me in ways like that."

Fences never did get made into a movie (though Wilson has written a new script, and producer Scott Rudin is trying to bring it to the screen). But that kind of principled pigheadedness seems perfectly in character for a man who has spent two decades of his creative life on a single mission: a cycle of 10 linked plays, each representing one decade in the black experience in 20th century America. The plays have received wide critical acclaim, Broadway runs, two Pulitzer Prizes (for Fences and The Piano Lesson) and upwards of 2,000 productions in regional theaters across the country. And now, finally, they are complete: the 10th play, Radio Golf, will open this week at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn. Wilson, an inveterate rewriter, will keep fine-tuning the play as it moves in August to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and later, presumably, to Broadway. And then we can truly take the measure of one of American theater's monumental achievements--and an artist who, in creating something where there was almost nothing, realized that for a project this big and this close to your soul, you have to invest everything.

Wilson's plays already stand apart from virtually anything else in contemporary theater. The overarching subject of his epic is the legacy of slavery, yet the plays teem with vibrant, idiosyncratic, fully imagined characters who are never reduced to political placards. The plays are realistic, even old-fashioned, in style but sprinkled with mysticism and magic: ghosts, visions, seers and a matriarchal figure named Aunt Ester, who recurs throughout the series and lives to the age of 366. With their poetic, often meandering dialogue, the plays typically start slow (anyone who says his eyes have never drooped in the first act of an August Wilson play probably isn't being honest), but build to thrilling, sometimes violent, often otherworldly, climaxes. And although the last one, Gem of the Ocean, almost didn't make it to Broadway (after an investor pulled out, producer Carol Shorenstein Hays, who had backed Fences, put in $1 million to save it), they have drawn black theatergoers in droves to a street that is still known, without irony, as the Great White Way.