August Wilson: Black American Drama

Introduction

A cursory glance at the Wilson oeuvre reveals his indebtedness and adherence to 1960s dramatic aesthetics: the quasi nationalism of characters such as Toledo (Ma Rainey) and Sterling (Two Trains Running); the African-imbued cultural rituals and myths of Joe Turner's Come and Gone; and the seven disjointed, blues-inspired characters in Seven Guitars whose lives converge with tragic and transformative consequences. His "polyrhythmic"6 dramas are undeniably the by-products of this watershed artistic moment (Wilson et al, pp. 78).

August Wilson's Works

Though Wilson's plays abound with connections to Black Arts drama, there are substantive differences. The poet and critic Larry Neal's 1968 essay "The Black Arts Movement," considered the cultural manifesto for Black Arts drama, lays bare the distinctions between Wilson and his acknowledged dramatic standard-bearers. Neal earnestly proclaims that the Black Arts Movement eschews "protest literature" but paradoxically insists that "The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world" (258-59). It would be erroneous and critically irresponsible to extract these comments from their social and cultural contexts, but it would also be myopic to overlook the race-speak that sometimes diluted the movement's aesthetic aims. A percipient observation by the drama scholar Tejumola Olaniyan addresses the problems of such binary thinking. According to him, there is an inherent "problematic feature of counterdiscourses: their deep and intricate relations with the dominant. They share the same ground with the dominant and thus run the risk of a fixation with the restrictive binary logics of the latter and of recycling its epistemological premises". At the heart of Neal's treatise lies a symbiotic relationship with the dominant, an unshakeable need to invert the cultural and artistic hegemony, to replace one orthodoxy with another (Wolfe, pp. 212).

I interpret Wilsonian aesthetics as less counterdiscursive than recursive and reclamative. Refusing to privilege or valorize Anglo-American culture as dominant, Wilson strives to reposition and recapture blackness not as the mirror opposite of whiteness but for its own historical resonance and complexity. By vowing to compose what he calls a "dramatic history of black Americans" (Shannon, Dramatic 232), he has committed to interrogating and displaying the rituals and intricate relationships that unify and/or estrange blacks from each other—again, what Baldwin labeled a "field of manners." Much less a dramatist of didacticism than a dramatist of ideas, Wilson distills the blackness of blackness, that unique and contradictory web of individual and collective narratives of blues people, irrespective of the cultural forces committed to their evisceration. Throughout his work, he dissects the codes of conduct that govern blacks' relationships to each other, foregrounding especially black men's excruciating attempts to gather together in the name of individual and collective affirmation.

A sense of place as sentient and organic pervades Wilson's drama-world. The playwright's omnipresent fascination with various communal enclaves—stages, really—piqued his interest in community, performance, and voicedness. Moreover, that the gambling dens and street corners were probably male-dominated venues elucidates the author's persistent concern with the ...