Silenced Guitars

Today I am sad. August Wilson died yesterday. He was only 60 years old. Along with Arthur Miller, who also died earlier this year, I consider Wilson to be one of the two greatest American playwrights of the 20th century. The New York Times obituary in the link will give you a great sense of who he was and what he meant to American theatre and, possibly more important, to black culture. I can't do him more justice than they have. I can only share what he meant to me.

As a young theatre student at a college in Middleofnowhere Illinois, I first came across his magical work. I was in my first directing class and was considering if that's what I wanted to do with my life. I had gone to school as an actor but got the idea to give directing a shot. I wasn't sure if it would be something that I could do or not. The first assignment I received was to read and analyze Wilson's Fences. From the moment I read it I knew that I was going to be a director. A play with amazing depth and characters that stand toe to toe with those in Miller's Death Of A Salesman. And it spoke so well to the experiences of real people, and seemed to be written with the idea that it was just about those people, but for them. I sought out the rest of his plays soon after. For those of you that don't know, as I didn't when I first read Fences, he wrote a cycle of ten plays that each represented a decade of the black experience in America. At the time I first read his work he was only through five of them. His first would open in 1981 and his last just earlier this year. Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes, which in my mind means he was robbed eight times.

I saw him speak in person twice. Once at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival and the other time at Chicago's Printers Row Book Fair. At the first he just read scenes from his plays for an hour, which would bore me to tears if anyone else did that. But I was as riveted as if I were at a full production.

But don't take my word for it. If you don't know his work, go to the library and check out his plays. You won't be sorry.

Although I have yet to direct one of his plays, it is the kind of theatre he brought to the American stage that inspired me to stick with this unforgiving career choice. I hope one day I can repay him by putting on a spectacular production of one of his works that would make him proud.

Thank you August. And Goodbye.

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The plays of August Wilson's ten play cycle, in order of the decade in which they take place:
(Descriptions courtesy of Associated Press)

1900s — Gem of the Ocean A haunting, ghostlike play, conjuring tales of slave ships and the black man arriving in chains in the New World.

1910s — Joe Turner's Come and Gone Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house, the children and grandchildren of slavery grapple with a world that won't let them forget the past.

1920s — Ma Rainey's Black Bottom A volatile trumpet player rebels against racism in a Chicago recording studio.

1930s — The Piano Lesson A brother and sister battle over a family heirloom, a link to the slavery in their past.

1940s — Seven Guitars The final days of a Pittsburgh blues guitarist, telling the story of how and why he died.

1950s — Fences A father-son drama of dreams denied and how that denial affects the relationship between the two men.

1960s — Two Trains Running The displaced and the dreamers congregate in a dilapidated Pittsburgh restaurant scheduled for demolition.

1970s — Jitney Another father-son tale, set in a gypsy cab station, as the owner of the cab company squares off against his offspring, newly released from prison.

1980s — King Hedley II An ex-con attempts to get his life back on track despite the desperation, despair and violence that surrounds him.

1990s — Radio Golf A successful middle-class entrepreneur tries to reconcile the present with the past.