The August Wilson Century Cycle

As August Wilson's 10-play Century Cycle—his magnum opus—appears today, it confirms his having created a decalogy of genius. It is a chronicle of black life in America in the twentieth century, one play per decade.

Save in one instance, it is life in Pittsburgh's Hill District, the black neighborhood in which Wilson spent his youth. But such is Wilson's gift of comprehension and compression that he embraced everything necessary about black America and spoke it for all America, black and white. He captured a vital aspect of the past century for all future centuries to recall and learn from.

This condignly deluxe edition from Theatre Communications Group presents the essential August Wilson (he did write other things, too) in 10 slim, elegant volumes bound in dark, gold-imprinted cloth, with gripping photographs on the dust jackets. The print is neat, pleasantly legible. There are full credits and production histories of the successive mountings of each play as it evolved through various stages (in both senses of the word) into its final Broadway shape. The 10 volumes are contained in a handsome slipcase box, bearing on its back a splendidly characteristic photograph of the author.

The first volume begins with a discerning and richly informative series introduction by John Lahr, squeezing into 20 pregnant pages much of his longer New Yorker profile, reprinted in the collection Honky Tonk Parade. Beyond that, each play features its own foreword by a different well-known introducer. The plays are, correctly, in the sequence of the decades covered rather than in order of composition.

[IMG:R]Volume one, Gem of the Ocean, is introduced by Phylicia Rashad, who played the leading role of Aunt Ester on Broadway. An exemplary preface, it interprets the play without excessive detail, but quoting some key lines. It describes Wilson's idiosyncratic behavior during rehearsals and his way of improving the text by ever greater compression, and conveys Rashad's impressions as her role developed.

In his brief introduction to Joe Turner's Come and Gone (Wilson's favorite), Romulus Linney, himself a gifted playwright, gets concisely at the nature of the play's greatness: "Wilson sets excitement aside. His characters and his audience live for a while in that calm, unpretentious affection that we, poor humans, at our best, can have for one another. This is not thrilling action. It is life at its most beautiful."

For his foreword to Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Frank Rich draws on both his skills: as drama critic and political columnist. He vividly evokes the work's political background and analyzes its dramatic achievement. He situates it not only in a conspectus of racism, but also in the annals of theater—its debt to Lorraine Hansberry and Eugene O'Neill, and to Connecticut's O'Neill Theater Center. There, under the loving supervision of Lloyd Richards, director and head of the Yale Drama School, it and several later Wilson plays received initial guidance, proceeding thence to other independent theaters on the path to perfection.

In her stylishly written introduction, Toni Morrison brings a novel writer and reader's eye to The Piano Lesson. Aware of the play's onstage power, she finds even greater rewards in reading it. Thus the intricacy of the storytelling and lyricism of the language can be, at leisure, fully apprehended. Reading, moreover, stimulates the reader's imagination into visualizing more than the stage images can convey. Morrison also calls attention to some of Wilson's weaknesses; uncritical adulation (as in some of the other prefaces) does not redound to an author's glory.

[PAGEBREAK] [IMG:R]Tony Kushner's introduction to Seven Guitars, though intelligent and provocative, is also ostentatious, crammed with esoteric biblical and numerological detail, and, characteristically, overlong. Do we need all these Judeo-Christian metaphysics? References to Ingmar Bergman and Wallace Stevens? Do we need diction like "Wilson's particular fabulations of an African/American spiritual/political organicity"? Nevertheless, worthwhile points are made, although adducing them would make me as prolix as Kushner himself.

Valuably introducing Fences, Samuel G. Freedman scores in both his capacities: journalist and college professor. As the former, he offers personal recollections of interviewing Wilson, including the best short account of his heritage, family and early life. As the latter, he gives us crucial insights into the play's characters and their conflicts. Judiciously, he defends Fences against superficial and patronizing comparisons with Death of a Salesman.

For Two Trains Running, Lawrence Fishburne, who played one of the leads on Broadway, provides a terse and illuminating introduction, concentrating on the Civil Rights-era politics of this highly politicized play. It "documents a turning point in the ideology" of American blacks, "when the promise of a new way of thinking (and living) arises… There are always 'two trains running,' always two choices. Wilson poignantly illustrates the costs of some choices, as well as the price of not making them."

Ishmael Reed's introduction to Jitney (my own favorite) is mostly his bully platform for all kinds of anti-white propaganda. He spends disproportionate space on the 1997 Brustein-Wilson Town Hall debate on race and the theater, mostly to deride Brustein while also promoting a number of other black playwrights far beneath Wilson. He savages white critics (also some black ones), accuses white (and some black) conservatives of everything under the sun, berating white society for supremacism, and "white" theater for segregationism. White critics allegedly welcome plays by black women in which the black man is "a reckless, thieving rascal, misogynist, and rapist," no specifics cited.

[IMG:L]Marion McClinton, who directed the Broadway production of King Hedley II, writes his introduction in rapper language. We get things like "August . . . was the baddest motherfucker on the block," "They cool there," "I know that God agrees with me when I say God is a bad motherfucker too." But does God also agree that August is "America's most important playwright," safely above O'Neill, Williams and Miller? That, as for new Wilsons, "There ain't going to be any neither"? Aunt Ester's death from a broken heart is apparently "enough right there to claim this play's place on Mount Olympus."

Gush of a somewhat different sort comes from Suzan-Lori Parks' introduction to Radio Golf, along with Gem of the Ocean one of Wilson's weakest. She writes: "We at AW's number 10! Number 10 in his mad crazy all that/ big X/ and who the hell he think he is, oh you know . . . he doing that apotheosis thing." After two pages of this drivel, she does get down to a few useful specifics.

So much for the introductions. But the oeuvre, taken as a whole, is indeed a work of genius. There is nothing quite like it in America or anywhere else. Buy this Century Cycle if you can afford it, and immerse yourself in hours of joy and wonder.