As any high school kid forced to plod through "Streetcar Named Desire" can attest, reading a play is nothing like going to one. Scripts are akin to coloring books waiting to be filled in. The reader must imagine his own sets, lights, sound, costumes, blocking, and to top it off, he then has to cast the play in his head, like a fantasy baseball team.
(Playwrights occasionally include stage directions, which usually appear italicized and in parentheses, like this, and when they aren't plain distracting to read, they are irritatingly bland, i.e., "There is a knock at the door", or "The lights go down on the scene.")
I'd rather watch Marlon Brando howl "Stella!" than have to conceptualize it myself. That's why I am a playgoer. I defer to the artists to do all the imagining and interpolating for me.
Last fall, the actor Charles Dutton, pug-faced star of the old television drama "Roc," visited Rhodes College and performed a handful of scenes from August Wilson's plays.
Dutton brings to the works of Wilson what Brando brings to Tennessee Williams': emotion, meaning, physical presence. Because Dutton originated roles in several of Wilson's Broadway productions, the actor’s voice is as close as we’re going to get to hearing what the playwright imagined.
What Wilson intended is now exclusively the study of theater historians and critics; the writer died of cancer in 2005, aged 60, leaving behind ten marvelous plays, one set in each decade of the 20th Century.
Since Wilson's first Broadway hit, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," in 1984, some of America’s best actors have given voice to Wilson’s characters: Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Leslie Uggams, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Angela Bassett, and Delroy Lindo, among others.
"August’s characters are defined by speech," writes actress Phylicia Rashad in an introduction to Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean." "The rhythms of speech serve as emotional building blocks that support the progressive movement of the play. If a word is changed or a phrase interpolated, the rhythms are altered but never to the good."
Dutton dittoed her comment when he said that acting in Wilson's plays was like doing Shakespeare. If you forgot a line, it was nearly impossible to ad lib out of it. The lines are both powerfully realistic and frustratingly idiosyncratic.
Tennessee Williams gave us "Stella!"
Wilson gave us this speech in the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fences" (go ahead and imagine James Earl Jones playing the part). Troy is the angry, black, working class male responding to his son asking if his father likes him. He thunders:
"Like you? I go out of here every morning... bust my butt... putting up with them crackers every day ... 'cause I like you? You about the biggest fool I ever saw. It's my job. It's my responsibility! You understand that? A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house... sleep you behind on my bedclothes... full you belly up with my food... 'Cause you my son. You my flesh and blood. Not 'cause I like you! 'Cause it's my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you!"
Monologues like that make you want to read them aloud and savor the emotion of the language. For the first time, it's finally possible to do so in the comfort of your own living room.
"The August Wilson Century Cycle," a tastefully packaged box set newly issued by Theatre Communications Group ($200) organizes the ten plays in order of the decade they take place. In the introductions to each play, various actors, writers and critics generally agree upon why Wilson is one of America's top playwrights and, without a doubt, the top African-American in his field. The language is deceptively complex.
Each play captures a slice of the African-American experience within the context of its time — from former slaves getting newly acquainted with freedom in "Gem of the Ocean" (set in 1904) to "Radio Golf" (set in 1997) which shows the assimilation of black culture into the mainstream and the accompanying spiritual alienation from the past.
In between are works such as "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" (1911) about the formation of a stronger black identity in the early part of the century; "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom" (1927), about a recording session with the famously difficult blues diva; "The Piano Lesson" (1936), about a piano passed down through generations that carries the markings of the past; "Jitney" and "King Hedley II," about economic disenfranchisement and crumbling black communities in the 1970s and 1980s.
As actual stagings of his plays are few and far between, a theatergoer sometimes has to accept reading scripts as the next best thing. Fortunately, Wilson is a good read. In an afterword to "King Hedley II" Wilson talks of a short story he wrote called "The Greatest Blues Singer in the World," that consisted of two sentences:
"The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning. The end."
Wilson thought he'd adequately captured the struggle of the artist in those few words. In his plays, and only through the conversations of his characters, he's managed to capture ten multi-layered snapshots of black life in the 20th Century. With Wilson, it's not difficult to use your imagination where the stage directions leave off.
Christopher Blank is the performing arts writer and critic for The Commercial Appeal.
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