"... if you live long enough the boat will turn around": The Birth and Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson.(Essay)

Richard Noggle

"... if you live long enough the boat will turn around": The Birth and Death of a Community in Three Plays by August Wilson

The article "'If you live long enough the boat will turn around': The Birth and Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson," examines what are, chronologically, the first and final two plays of Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle of twentieth-century African American life: Gem of the Ocean, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. The article uses Joseph Roach's notion of "surrogation"--"the enactment of cultural memory by substitution" (1966, 80) to explore how communities continually changing societal values. Gem builds to a clear and optimistic moment of "surrogation" while the plays set near the end of the century offer a darker and more ambiguous interrogation of how a community can move forward after losing its spiritual center--represented through Wilson's Aunt Ester.

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  In order to survive, you need a community of people who can support 
  you. And we've always been those people that rise up in the face of 
  adversity. (Wilson 2005, 77) 

In Rooms With a View: The Stages of Community in Modern Drama, Richard Barr-notes how the longing for "community" is often dependent on "nostalgia for something that has passed" (1998, 4). For August Wilson, this nostalgia is most often the broken link between ancestral history and contemporary life: reconnecting with an African sensibility spurs a concomitant reconnection with the present world. At the heart of many of Wilson's plays are ideas of absence and loss. Characters die--and sometimes whole communities are drying--and the holes left by the loss must be filled by someone or, in some cases, replaced by a different kind of community. Aunt Ester, Wilson's powerful symbol of community and ancestral bonds, dies in King Hedley II, the 1980's play of Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle of twentieth century African-American life, and there is no immediate successor to carry on the cultural memory she represents. Although the work ends with a mysterious sense of resurrection, no immediate surrogate is apparent to replace Ester. She is, in many ways, irreplaceable. Also largely absent, as Wilson's cycle enters the 1990's, is the vernacular of the Hill District. The powerful bonding force of a shared language with roots in the distant past has given way to a language of capitalism, the language of a dominant culture, and certainly Wilson--who sees African American and white culture as distinct cultural entities--fears the loss of shared meaning in the African American community. The "voice" of Radio Golf is shifting to an assimilated, middle-class manner of speech that betrays the values of African American community. The struggle to move on, to fill the vacancies left behind, requires a strengthening of both body and spirit.

 
  Janelle Reinelt, exploring the idea of audience as "community," 
  writes: 
 
  In a sense live theater enacts one of the last available forms of 
  direct democracy, gathering an assembly of 'citizens' in the 
  tradition of civic republicanism. ... Spectators are, at the least, 
  an implied community for the time of performance--even if riven with 
  antagonisms and contradictions. ... Moving beyond this minimal 
  baseline to a truly radical form of civic spectatorship involves 
  negotiation and contestation, and a fundamental transformation of the 
  traditional 'spectator' function from consumer to agent. (Reinelt 
  1998, 286)