Theater: Exorcising The Demons of Memory

• Share

August Wilson was only 15 when he stormed out of school forever. After quitting a Roman Catholic academy, where white pupils harassed him because he was black, and then a vocational program he considered academically worthless, he made one last try at a public high school. But when he proudly submitted a 20-page report on Napoleon, the teacher accused him of having it ghostwritten by an older sister. That confrontation ended with Wilson defiantly shredding the essay. "The next day," he recalls, "I went and played basketball outside the principal's window, obviously in the unconscious hope someone would ask why I wasn't in class. No one did, and that was that."

Fortunately for the American theater, the end of Wilson's schooling was not the end of his education. He haunted the local libraries, reading everything from anthropology to verse, and eventually began to try his own hand at writing, first poetry, then folktale adaptations for performance at a science museum, then plays. By the time Wilson, 42, brought his poignant Joe Turner's Come and Gone to Broadway last week, he had established himself as the foremost dramatist of the American black experience. His Broadway debut, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, ran nearly ten months and earned the 1985 New York Drama Critics Circle prize. Fences won the theater's triple crown -- the 1987 Tony, Pulitzer Prize and Critics Circle award -- and is still playing, having set a record for nonmusicals by grossing $11 million its first year.

Wilson is not a "black" playwright in the sense the term was applied in the confrontational 1960s and '70s. He movingly evokes the evolving psychic burden of slavery but without laying on guilt or political harangues. The son of a largely absent white father and a devoted, enterprising black mother whom he revered, Wilson keeps his white characters at the periphery, yet emphasizes the humanity that binds Americans together. Although his vision is steeped in sadness, it is equally rich in humor and wonder at the everyday joys of living, from the umpteenth retelling of a beloved family anecdote to a mock- scandalized peek through the window at the neighbors, from the swing of a baseball bat to the cradling of a newborn child. Like the blues music he threads through them, his plays transcend ethnicity. Playgoers of any race who come as emotional tourists depart realizing they have seen themselves reflected onstage.