100 Years in One Life

(2 of 3)

Radio Golf brings the cycle into the 1990s. It is set in an inner-city redevelopment office, where two black businessmen (one of them running for mayor) are seeking to clear space for a new commercial development. There are purposeful echoes of earlier plays: descendants of two characters from Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) are on hand, as is a character from Wilson's 1960s play Two Trains Running; and Aunt Ester's home is the last one marked for demolition. The social message is more overt than most in Wilson's canon: the play is about the "failure of the black middle class," he says, "who failed to return their expertise, participation and resources back to the community." Yet the last chapter of this 10-part journey full of tears and tragedy ends with an affirmation, a hopeful sign for the future. "We got to be united and come together," says Wilson, "before we can proceed on, into the 21st century."

Wilson, who turns 60 this week, is sitting in an outdoor café on the Yale campus. A polite, doughy-faced man, he likes the outdoors because it allows him to puff on his Marlboro Lights, but on this unusually hot spring afternoon, he looks a bit formal and out of place in coat, tie and newsboy cap. He grew up in Pittsburgh's predominantly black Hill District, dropped out of school in the ninth grade and set out to educate himself by devouring books in the library. One of the first was anthropologist Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. "In my plays I sort of work as an anthropologist," he says, "finding those parts of culture, habits and whatnot that embody these people." He soaked up the life of his neighborhood, even dropping in on funerals of people he didn't know just to get a sense of the generations that came before--until one day a woman came up and asked, "Did you know my father?"

He started writing poetry, then poetic plays, and then (after moving to St. Paul, Minn., where his work was first staged at the Penumbra Theater Company) developed a realistic style laced with melodious dialogue inspired by the early blues songs he loved. He was influenced by the work of playwright Ed Bullins--who showed him that "you could put black folks on stage as black folks"--but was pretty much a theatrical naif. He hadn't read Shakespeare (except for The Merchant of Venice in school) or Tennessee Williams or virtually any of the other modern American classics. There was some calculation there. When he started writing poetry, Wilson immersed himself in poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas--and "as a result, it took me from 1965 to 1973 to find my own voice." In his plays, by contrast, "I was free to find my own way." Says Marion McClinton, who has directed several of Wilson's plays, including Jitney and King Hedley II: "He pulled his whole artistic style and breath and soul from who [black people] were. He wasn't writing to get validation from the dominant cultural forces in this country. He didn't care about that."