100 Years in One Life

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Wilson has caught up on his reading a bit since then; he is a fan of Chekhov and has seen a few more (but only a few) Shakespeare plays. He goes to movies rarely and says that for 11 straight years, starting in 1980, he didn't see a single one. (The last film he saw before he quit was Raging Bull, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro; the first one when he came back was Scorsese and De Niro's Cape Fear, so he figured he hadn't missed much.) He avoids the media spotlight, living in Seattle with his third wife, a costume designer, and their seven-year-old daughter. He moved there in 1990, after his second divorce, because he liked the quiet.

He remains a passionate, often politically incorrect, advocate for the black community. In 1996 he caused a ruckus with a speech in which he called for a separate African-American theater, castigated black playwrights and directors for participating in an "art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society" and decried the increasingly fashionable practice of "color-blind casting"--i.e., blacks playing traditionally white roles. The outcry was fierce; the drama critic Robert Brustein, in a blistering rebuttal in the New Republic, disparaged Wilson's plays and denounced his words as the "language of self-segregation."

Wilson's views haven't changed. The plight of black theater, he says, is even worse today, while color-blind casting has exploded--Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar and James Earl Jones in On Golden Pond on Broadway this spring alone. "If I see a production of Gem of the Ocean with a white cast, maybe I'll change my mind. But Death of a Salesman with a black cast--that's not the way blacks respond to this problem. It's a white play. It's intended to be." He realizes that is not a popular view among African Americans in the theater. "I understand the rules of war too. The actors go, 'There ain't no work.' That's your fault. Start some theaters."

Asked about the black political movement today, he responds, "What movement?" Black leaders? "We have Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but it does not mean anything to black America, which is still under assault from the social practices of this society." Bill Cosby's criticisms of black parenting? "A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect? I thought it was unfair of him." His modest, soft-spoken manner belies what is obviously a deep sense of grievance. He describes sitting down at a counter not long ago and watching a white man next to him snatch $2 off the table. "He thinks I'm going to steal his $2. That's reality; that's the world I live in."

Now that he's finishing up his 20th century cycle, Wilson can finally get to some projects he's been putting off for years. He has finished 80 pages of a novel, and he wants to write a comedy, about a strike of coffin makers, featuring cameo appearances by Queen Victoria, Benny Goodman and the Platters. It's a far cry from tortured Wilson characters like Herald Loomis, the itinerant searching for his wife after spending seven years in bondage in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Wilson's favorite among his works. But the closing line of that play might just as well apply to a playwright ready for the next leg of his remarkable career: "You shining like new money!" --With reporting by Kate Novack/New York City