August Wilson, who expanded the reach of African-American dramatic literature more so than any other playwright in history, died Oct. 2 in Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center of liver cancer, diagnosed in June, according to his personal assistant Dena Levitin. He was 60.
When he went public with his diagnosis in August, the Pittsburgh native said simply: “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”
His early work as a poet shone through everything he wrote, making him the most lyrical American dramatist since the heyday of Tennessee Williams.
This summer Wilson continued revising his final play, “Radio Golf,” prior to and after a production at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Wilson enjoyed steady and mutually beneficial relationships with many of the country’s major nonprofit regional theaters, including Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. In January 2007 the Goodman will host a production of “Radio Golf,” prior to the play’s spring 2007 bow in New York City.
“Radio Golf” is the coda of Wilson’s signature achievement: a 10-play chronicle of black life, “in all its richness and fullness,” as Wilson liked to say, across a 20th century longer on promises made than on promises kept.
The decade-by-decade cycle introduced a memorable array of African-American characters to the world stage. The cycle’s later plays, including “Gem of the Ocean,” were met with mixed critical and audience favor. The sum total, however, marks a unique, soaringly expressive achievement in the American theater. Wilson’s plays have received thousands of productions worldwide, cementing him as an economic as well as cultural force.
Though he often spoke in favor of a healthy circuit of black-run and black-aimed theaters, Wilson’s steady presence on the mainstream, largely white regional theater circuit served to integrate those theaters’ seasons more so than the work of any other writer.
The plays include two Pulitzer Prize winners, “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson.”
“What those plays did for the black theater community was tremendous,” said Lloyd Richards, the man often credited with discovering Wilson. At Richards’ invitation, Wilson, who was living in St. Paul, Minn., and working as a cook for Little Brothers of the Poor, took part in the 1982 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn. His play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” received a staged reading there. Following the conference, Richards, who also ran the Yale University drama school, staged a full production of “Ma Rainey” in New Haven, Conn., and then on Broadway.
Richards and Wilson went on to five more collaborations: “Fences,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Two Trains Running” and “Seven Guitars.”
The plays, Richards said, “gave so much opportunity for black theater artists that had not existed to that degree previously.” When he first met Wilson, Richards recalled, “he was a brilliant young man, eager to learn. And he did learn.”
Wilson also mentored many up-and-comers. He served on the advisory committee of Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre Company and became the theater’s largest single donor, writing annual checks for $10,000. Moreover, Congo Square artistic director Derrick Sanders said, Wilson showed his support in person, arriving for the first of several visits on the occasion of Congo Square’s inaugural effort, a 2000 production of Wilson’s “Piano Lesson.”
All his plays, said Sanders, in between sobs Sunday, “end on a note of the African-American struggle continuing, and the idea that there’s always someone to pick up the flag. Right now, that’s the best way we can honor this man: To continue to do the best work we can.”
Wilson lived and worked on a punishing, largely self-imposed nomadic schedule, following his plays from regional theater to regional theater as they made their way to Broadway. In the years prior to his death, Wilson lived in Seattle with his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and their daughter, 8-year-old Azula Carmen Wilson. Wilson is also survived by Sakina Ansari, his daughter from his first marriage. Ansari came to Chicago last year when Wilson accepted the 2004 Chicago Tribune Prize for Literary Achievement.
Regarding the completion of his 10-play project, Wilson told the Tribune last year: “I can do it, because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. … I will have completed the cycle.”
A largely self-educated poet, Frederick August Kittel (his birth name) grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, and later immortalized the neighborhood in his plays. He was born April 27, 1945, the fourth of six children of a black cleaning woman, Daisy Wilson, who came from North Carolina, and a white, largely absent German-American baker, Frederick Kittel.
In 1960, Wilson dropped out of Gladstone High School after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. The poet-to-be subsequently spent hours at Carnegie Library in lieu of a formal education. He changed his name to Wilson in 1965 after his father died.
Wilson enlisted in the U.S. Army for a three-year hitch, and was discharged after one. Back in the Hill District he worked various jobs _ short-order cook, dishwasher, gardener _ and began writing in earnest.
With a group of other black Pittsburgh poets and writers, he contributed to the Center Avenue Poets Workshop and, in 1968, started Black Horizons Theater Company.
Often as director, Wilson presented to the Hill community work by revolution-minded playwrights such as Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins.
“A lot of things Baraka and others were saying at the time,” Goodman Theatre associate artist Chuck Smith said, “Wilson was able to shift those ideas into his dialogue and make it all crystal clear.” Smith, who directed a well-received “Ma Rainey” for the Goodman, said Wilson told him the production was a standout. “He said: `I haven’t seen a better one.’ And I’ve got it in writing,” Smith said.
In 1969, Wilson married Brenda Burton, a nurse. Their daughter, Sakina, was born the following year. The marriage ended in divorce in 1972.
In 1978, after visiting a friend in St. Paul, Wilson liked it well enough to move there. From 1981 to 1990 Wilson was married to social worker Judy Oliver. In 1994 Wilson married costume designer Romero, whom he met while working on “The Piano Lesson.”
Athol Fugard, whose play “‘Master Harold’ . . . and the boys” was produced at Yale Repertory Theater in the early 1980s around the time of “Ma Rainey,” considered Wilson a friend and soulmate. His death, he said Sunday, is “terrible news. One knew it was coming. But the sense of loss is overwhelming.
“The only thing that can be said–and I said it in a little note to him not long ago–is that he completed this extraordinary project he set for himself. And by writing those plays, he’s made sure his name will never be forgotten.”