Framing African American cultural identity: The Bookends Plays in August Wilson's 10-Play Cycle.(Essay)

Sandra G. Shannon

Framing African American Cultural Identity: The Bookends Plays in August Wilson's 10-Play Cycle

In various interviews, August Wilson admitted that a" special relationship" exists between his so-called bookend plays: Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) and Radio Golf (set in 1997). In writing both, his mission was to" ... build an umbrella under which the rest of the plays can sit ... a bridge. The subject matter of these two plays is going to be very similar and connected thematically," he explained further, "meaning that the other eight will be part and parcel of these two. You should be able to see how they all fit inside these last two plays." This essay entitled "Framing African American Cultural Identity: The Bookends Plays in August "Wilson's 10-Play Cycle" examines the intertextual relationships within and among five of August Wilson's cycle plays while paying close attention to two of Wilson's plays that are strategically positioned at the beginning and end of a ninety-six-year time line.

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On April 28, 2005, one day after August Wilson's sixtieth birthday, the last play in his 10-play cycle--Radio Golf--opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. In late August of that same year, August Wilson divulged to the press that he was suffering from advanced liver cancer. On October 2, 2005, August Wilson died at age 60. The all-too-sudden passing of this two-time Pulitzer Prize winning and internationally acclaimed playwright suggests a troubling and ironic twist of fate that occurred only months after he had completed a 26-year-long magnum opus--a staggering body of dramatic work that virtually frames African American cultural identity in a series of plays set in fictive time frames that span from 1904 to 1997. While Wilson's death continues to be mourned extensively, we may take comfort in the completed cycle that he leaves behind as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.

Some time during the early 1980s, August Wilson began touting his idea of writing ten plays chronicling decisive moments in the history of African Americans in the twentieth century. After succeeding at crafting individual plays set in two separate decades, Wilson decided to extend the reach of his proven talents and set his sights on an entire cycle of plays. He recalled in a 1984 interview,

 
  As it turns out, I've written plays that take place in 1911, 1927, 
  1941, 1957, and 1971. Somewhere along the way it dawned on me that I 
  was writing one play for each decade. Once I became conscious of 
  that, I realized I was trying to focus on what I felt were the most 
  important issues confronting black Americans for that decade, so 
  ultimately they could stand as a record of black experience over the 
  past hundred years presented in the form of dramatic literature. 
  (Powers 2005, 4-5)