Putting black culture on stage: August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle.(Essay)

Patricia M. Gantt

Putting Black Culture on Stage: August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle

In "Putting Black Culture on Stage: August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle," Patricia M. Gantt offers an overview of Wilson's life and work, including his background, motivation, dramatic aesthetic, and themes. Taking each of the ten plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle in the order of its New York stage production, Gantt discusses the works' characters and recurring concerns. Throughout, she investigates Wilson's stated goal of drawing on black culture--in ail its sacred and secular particularities--to create art. Her critique aims at suggesting possible fields of future inquiry for teachers and scholars, and assesses Wilson's numerous contributions to American dramatic tradition.

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If it can be said that a single voice dominated the American theater from the 1980s through 2005, that voice definitely belonged to playwright August Wilson. Wilson, whom news analyst Gwen Ifill dubbed "the American Shakespeare," was a prolific writer with more than ten major plays, numerous theatrical commentaries, and other creative work to his credit (2001).Yet it is not merely the number of his productions that marks Wilson's dominance in modern drama, but his ability to put into words the ideas and experiences of everyday African Americans, who have long been caricatured, relegated to the periphery, or displaced altogether in drama created by playwrights from mainstream white society. His characters, while for the most part living out their lives in a single locale, grapple with themes and issues that all people must deal with. In constructing a thoroughly American world of recording studios, taxi stands, back yards, and kitchens, Wilson created a body of drama with universal appeal.

One of only seven Americans to have won multiple Pulitzer Prizes for drama, Wilson was, in addition to being one of this country's finest playwrights, one of its most ambitious writers. Early in his dramatic career, he assigned himself the objective of writing ten plays which, taken together, would depict African American experiences in the twentieth century. Each play was to be set in a different decade, and would reflect cultural issues vital for giving a more rounded picture of life in the United States. Wilson devoted almost three decades to the project, which he completed just before his death in 2005. (Radio Golf, the tenth play in the cycle, made its Los Angeles debut after Wilson had been diagnosed with liver cancer, a scant four months before he died.) In the course of pursuing this dramatic historiography of America, Wilson not only completed his mission, but did so in a manner garnering widespread public and critical applause, as well as numerous fellowships and awards. Having "envisioned theatre as a means to raise the collective community's conscience about black life in twentieth-century America," Wilson also proved himself to be a gifted writer whose themes and characters are so complex and so skillfully wrought that they merit the international acclaim they have received (Elkins 2000, xi).

It would be a mistake, however, to classify Wilson as either a historian or merely a didactic writer. He denied that his primary interest was history, although his plays are steeped in actual events. Rather, he was more concerned with exploring black culture. In an interview with Ebony's Charles Whitaker, Wilson said,