August Wilson

the long version

The African-American dramatist August Wilson, who was born in a Pittsburgh slum in 1945, saw the first professional productions of his plays in 1981 and 1982, in little theaters in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh. He had also begun sending his plays to the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, which sponsors workshops to develop the talents of young American playwrights. The Connecticut-based conference eventually accepted a work-in-progress, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (staged in 1984), and from that moment Wilson's career took off like, to use the title of his 1992 play, Two Trains Running. With Ma Rainey, Wilson began a ten-play cycle dramatizing different decades in the history of African Americans in the twentieth century. The other works in the still unfinished cycle include: Fences (staged in 1985), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (staged in 1986), The Piano Lesson (staged in 1990), Two Trains Running (staged in 1992), and Seven Guitars (staged in 1996). In this comprehensive analysis of Wilson's theater, Peter Wolfe sees the dramatist as exploding stereotypes of the ghetto poor, with his juxtapositions of the ordinary and the African-American surreal evoking anger, affection, and sometimes a little hope. Rather than debating social issues, Wilson, Wolfe argues, concerns himself with the salvation of black Americans.