On Book

You never know what will open a window onto other lives, or another time. For me, it was a 2022 fellowship that granted me a one-month writing residency at Hawthornden Castle, in the lowlands of Scotland, just outside Edinburgh. Upon arriving, I was overcome by my good fortune—it felt like I had been transported to another life. For one thing, the trip marked the first time I had traveled any significant distance since before the pandemic. For another, having a room in a 600-year-old castle struck me as otherworldly. Hawthornden’s library was not quite so old, but it felt equally otherworldly: the shelves sprawled across several rooms in cozy disarray, housing the personal collection of the late actress and literary arts patron Drue Heinz. It featured works by many of my favorite authors, from Tom Stoppard to Ali Smith, some of them inscribed—but none gave me more of a thrill than when I pulled a copy of August Wilson’s Three Plays from the shelf.

I have seen more than half of the plays in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, an epic series set in that city’s Hill District, chronicling the Great Migration and the long shadow of slavery through some of the most complicated characters in American theater. The ambition of the series was probably the first thing that drew my attention, but what held me was the electricity in Wilson’s characters and dialogue. Despite Heinz’s connection to Pittsburgh (she was married to H. J. Heinz, of ketchup fame), I didn’t expect to find Wilson’s work in a Scottish castle, but there they were—along with a personal handwritten note: “To Drue Heinz—the best of everything. August Wilson.” It was dated March 2000. I stared at the artfully jagged angles of his ink strokes.

Recently, I attended a talk by the unofficial poet laureate of Washington, D.C., E. Ethelbert Miller, on another iconic Black author, James Baldwin. Miller unpacked strands of 20th-century theater and film, examining Baldwin’s writing about the latter, and gave a nod to Wilson. Line for line, Miller said, August Wilson’s work ranked with Toni Morrison’s novels; Wilson was less known only because people don’t read plays as much as they do novels.

Morrison herself would have agreed. In fact, she did agree, praising Wilson in her foreword to a 2007 edition of The Piano Lesson. There she declares that “Wilson widened the space for African American theater” over a quarter of a century. She, too, affirms that the fullness of Wilson’s achievement “comes powerfully into view when the play is read,” an activity that she considers at least equal to seeing a stage production. She adds that “for a nontheater person, an average alert reader,” the practice of reading a play “has unique rewards.” She grew up as a “radio child,” listening to narratives and being forced to supply the visual details herself, and ultimately preferred reading plays whether or not she saw them performed. “Unlike watching one, reading a good play could never disappoint,” she wrote.

I didn’t encounter Wilson’s plays that way—at least, not at first. I was initially drawn to each of his plays as a spectacle, entering the theater space anticipating a new, fully embodied experience. Only afterward did I go back and find the plays on the page.

I first experienced The Piano Lesson in a D.C. theater and recall the set—a narrow rowhouse where a conflict brews between two siblings. At the start, Boy Willie shows up at his sister Berniece’s house, intending to sell the family piano and buy land their ancestors worked as sharecroppers, thus escaping the family’s brutal history. Berniece, however, sees the piano in her living room as part of her family’s history to be kept. The ensemble grows around these two through the course of the play: Boy Willie has come to grapple with the past, bring change, and, he hopes, gain a foothold as a landowner; he faces fierce resistance from Berniece. Supporting characters on both sides of the struggle include Willie’s friend Lyman and Berniece’s boyfriend, Avery, a preacher. Their uncle Doaker plays a pivotal role, telling Boy Willie of the piano’s link to slavery and why Berniece will never sell it. But Boy Willie finds his own voice and pushes on, an unstoppable agent for change. As the tension builds, the audience feels the pressure and sees no escape from a showdown.

 I don’t recall exactly when I read the play after seeing it performed, but the experience felt as richly satisfying as Morrison described. What strikes me is the combination of Wilson’s characters’ direct language with the unexpected rhythms of their exchanges—sometimes a teasing back-and-forth, at other points triggering a rolling monologue—and the topics that they push into the spotlight. A secondary character like Wining Boy—Boy Willie and Berniece’s other uncle—can walk on, sit down at a piano, and have an outsize emotional impact. Really, you could say that there are no secondary characters.

This month, The Piano Lesson landed on big screens with fiery imagery (the poster image shows a piano blazing in a field), the third in Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle to reach theaters. (As of last week, you can now stream it as well.) Several actors reprise their roles from the 2022 Broadway revival, including John David Washington as Boy Willie and Samuel L. Jackson as Doaker (Jackson played Boy Willie in the original Broadway production). I found Denzel Washington’s 2016 film adaptation of Wilson’s Fences spellbinding, though most screen adaptations are less successful—and I suspect that Morrison might agree.

Morrison praises Wilson for the skill and scale evident in his 20th-century series, and for the “rigor and coherence of his project.” She appreciates that Wilson’s plays (like her novels) do not aim to explain Black life to a generic white audience, but instead address “African American life introspectively … and, paradoxically, through the strength and suppleness of his artistry, enlighten both cultures.” Both writers constantly faced the same question from white critics (what Morrison calls the “annoying obligation that seems to beset all and only black artists”): whether they are primarily an artist or a Black artist. She commends Wilson for refusing to fuse two racial identities and instead answering, “Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American.”

Wilson’s goal, in his words, was to “present the unique particulars of black American culture . . . to place this culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.” It gets even more personal than that. In his preface to the collection I read in Scotland, Wilson says that for him, writing a play is “like walking down the landscape of the self, unattended, unadorned,” a place of shadows and “occasional dazzling brightness.”

What does that self look like? What are the constants in his aesthetic? As a teenager, Wilson missed school to spend time in the local library, poring over every book he could. It was Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man that set him on a path toward playwriting—he composed his characters’ dialogue like Ellison would, with an ear tuned to real-life speech. He would sit in coffeehouses and bars in the Hill District, listening for the glimmerings and fire in people’s speech, scribbling phrases on napkins and scraps of paper.

Wilson also recalls himself as a 20-year-old poet in a rooming house in Pittsburgh, “wrestling with the world and his place in it.” One night, he placed an old 78 rpm record on his turntable, its yellowed label spinning “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine,” by Bessie Smith. For him, that recording was a “baptism,” marking the moment he first sensed that he was a relay carrier in a culture with depth and beauty. “With my discovery of Bessie Smith and the blues I had been given a world that contained my image,” a world varied and rich, and in contrast with the larger world. He then found a narrative frame for that aesthetic in the art of Romare Bearden. In Bearden’s deep focus on the particulars of life to find the universal, Wilson recognized himself “as a vital part of a much larger world.” (Bearden’s 1983 print The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou) even inspired Wilson to write the play of that name.)

For Morrison, reading The Piano Lesson allows us to imagine the pre-dawn light in the opening scene ourselves, and to regard each character as they enter. Without an actor’s interpretation, we can take in the dialogue directly, its rhythms and its music. She highlights the percussion in Boy Willie’s telling of how he’ll buy the land: “Walk in there. Tip my hat. Lay my money down on the table. Get my deed and walk on out … Gin my cotton. And I’ll see you again next year.” Reading the play lets us explore quieter narrative threads that are as intriguing as the main story but remain essentially undramatized. For Morrison, one of those quiet threads is the truck that has brought Boy Willie and his friend Lymon north. The truck is “a kind of offstage character with its own colorful personality and multiple roles.”

Morrison identifies another “silent thread” in the fear that palpably undergirds the story. How is it even there? The play takes place in a home that is apparently safe, on a quiet street far from the family’s violent southern past. But that legacy provides an unspoken threat. There’s the ghost of Sutter, the white landowner. And then there’s Parchman Farm, a real penitentiary in Mississippi and the prison where several male characters met and served time. The fear drove those characters to commit acts that they found necessary to live and to avoid getting further enclosed by an oppressive system. These haunting presences bring the past alive, and fear hangs in the air of every exchange—and is just as palpable in Wilson’s text as it is on the stage.

In his preface to Three Plays, Wilson observes that “to write is to forever circle the maps, marking it all down, the latitude and longitude of each specific bearing, giving new meaning to something very old and very sacred—life itself.” In the struggle with death, he sees life. Approaching the last act, I felt Wilson foreshadowing that Boy Willie will meet a bad end. Berniece has a gun, after all. (Spoiler follows.) Morrison marvels at how the play brings that deep fear into the scenes, the quiet block in Pittsburgh practically crackling with danger. “It is very like living in a war zone where alertness is all,” Morrison writes. “The struggle between memory and foresight, regret and promise operates within a world of terror.” Eventually Boy Willie physically wrestles with that violence in the form of Sutter’s ghost, a surreal scene that could easily go off the rails. But Wilson’s dedication to characters that sound like real people in that neighborhood keeps the play grounded.

Patti Hartigan concludes her 2023 biography August Wilson: A Life with a scene in which high school students participate in the national August Wilson Monologue Competition, grappling with Wilson’s speeches along with the challenges they face in their own lives. (The scene was filmed for the 2020 documentary Giving Voice.) Hartigan writes that in reading Wilson’s work, the young people’s “voices capture what Wilson learned from Romare Bearden. They turn Black Americans into kings and queens.” She quotes Gerardo Navarro, who won the competition that year, saying that Wilson’s work “speaks for everyone and it speaks for those who are not seen.”

Toni Morrison and E. Ethelbert Miller pointed me to find that August Wilson on the page. There he’ll always have a special power, however his work is translated for the screen.