Dreams No Longer Deferred

Playwright August Wilson is a chronicler of history as re-imagined through the poetics of African American culture. One of the most produced dramatists of his generation, Wilson has evolved into a role model for many, and his works are a virtual staple of regional theater.

Wilson’s eight plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, take as their theme black alienation in the wake of the great migration north. Sensual, spirited and spiritual, these works are to the stage what the blues are to music: the affirmation and voice of a people. Like a musician with a 12-bar blues, Wilson takes good old-fashioned American stage realism and riffs on it. He has remade the kitchen-sink drama in his own image, suffusing it with African American cadences and mysticism.

Wilson, 54, first broke into the mainstream of American theater in 1984 when his second play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn. That success was the first of many to come for Wilson and director Lloyd Richards. Almost every year for the next decade, they had a play premiering in New Haven or opening on Broadway, while others toured regional theaters with clockwork regularity. Along the way, the Pittsburgh-born writer has garnered two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony and many other accolades.

He has also been outspoken on cultural issues. In 1996, the playwright sparked a national debate as a result of statements he made at a national Theatre Communications Group conference in which he decried the widespread practice of “nontraditional” or “colorblind” casting and called for increased support for black theaters. Distinguished critic and American Repertory Theatre artistic director Robert Brustein, writing in the New Republic, responded by denouncing Wilson’s plea for separatism. Others criticized Wilson because his own plays have not generally been developed at black theaters, but rather in mainstream houses. Wilson and Brustein subsequently engaged in a highly publicized face-off, sponsored by Theatre Communications Group, at New York’s Town Hall in 1997.

Wilson’s work was last presented by the Center Theatre Group in 1996, when “Seven Guitars” was staged at the Ahmanson. He returns Thursday with “Jitney,” at the Mark Taper Forum, directed by Marion McClinton. First written in 1979, completed in 1982 and revised in 1996, “Jitney” is set in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and centers on the owner of an unlicensed cab company, who is facing the city’s plan to shut him down--as well as the return of his estranged son, who has spent the past 20 years behind bars.

The Seattle resident spoke by phone from New York, where he was in town to mark the occasion of the presentation of a $50,000 award from Jujamcyn Theaters to the black-oriented Penumbra Theatre of St. Paul, Minn.

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Question: “Jitney” was actually the first play of your widely produced cycle of historical dramas, but it’s only now receiving major productions. Where has it been hiding all these years, and what prompted you to bring it forward at this point?

Answer: We did a production in Pittsburgh at a small 99-seat theater in 1982 and people still talked about that production in ’96. Eddie Gilbert at the Pittsburgh Public Theater had heard about this play and he asked me to send him a copy, and I did. He called me up and said he’d like to produce it, and then I went back and did some work on it in 1996 at the Pittsburgh Public, and I’ve continued working on it ever since.

Q: What have you changed?

A: When we [first] read the play at the Pittsburgh Public, the second act was [only] 25 minutes. My first scene in “Fences” is 25 minutes! I had to shift the material around, reshape the play. But the real work I did was on the father-son relationship, which is a central part of the play. When I wrote that in 1979, I simply didn’t know as much about life--or as much about the craft of playwriting--as I did in ’96.

In the original draft, the father and son had this scene in which the father disowned him, and I thought that there should be a second scene between them. But I didn’t know how to write the second scene, so I conveniently killed the father so I didn’t have to write the second scene. And in ‘96, I thought, “OK, let me try and take a stab at the second scene.” And I wrote a [new] second scene, and it somehow didn’t work.

I’d previously had a scene where the father and son come together, and the father, having disowned him, walks out the door. I found it to be very dramatically affecting because you realize that the father really meant what he said when he disowned him. [But] I took that out and tried the [new] second scene. Then I went back to the father just walking out the door. That was the really major work.

Q: How does it feel to go back to a piece you wrote more than 20 years ago?

A: It’s difficult to get back to a place where you have the emotional heat of the moment, so to speak, and I struggled with that. It didn’t flow. But Marion McClinton, the director, was very helpful. I told him, “I feel like I’m in a box.” He said, “Well, it’s your box. You can break out of it, ‘cause it’s yours.” It was difficult to go back, to figure out what it was I was thinking about in 1979. But I feel good. It was liberating. I think it helped me with my next play.

Q: Let’s talk about your work apart from playwriting. How do you feel about the controversial statements you made in 1996? Do you still feel as strongly as ever?

A: I feel pretty much the same as I did then. I don’t think I could get any more strong. We should be about the business of promoting and preserving the black cultural arts, and theater in particular. It’s about institutions. I would encourage the Mark Taper and any of the regional theaters to do more plays by black playwrights. It’s fine, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. I have continued to work [in such theaters as] the Pittsburgh Public and the Goodman. I think that’s necessary and important. But at the same time, we want to build black institutions.

Q: How have you been working to make that happen?

A: We held a five-day closed-door conference to which we invited 45 participants--not just from theater, but from all of the areas of society in which we have gained some expertise and experience. The result of the conference was that we formed the African Grove Institute for the Arts, [which was] the first black theater in America. That is ongoing. It’s based at Dartmouth [in Hanover, N.H.], and I’m the chairman.

One of the things that we discovered at the conference was that one of the reasons that black theater has failed was because of poor management. And so we entered a partnership with the business school at Dartmouth to bring in and train black theater managers, utilizing one of the programs that they had in place there.

What we want to do is organize 40,000 black performing artists in a single organization and have, in 2002, what we’re calling the gathering of the tribes, which will be a convention as opposed to a conference, to come up with long-term goals for black theater. We’ve been working on that and some archiving programs and various other things that need to be done. We’re not in it for immediate gratification, immediate goals. We’re in it for the long term.

Q: Do you continue to oppose the practice known as “colorblind” or “nontraditional” casting?

A: I would prefer, for instance, that a black theater do “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” with a white cast, the same as the Goodman would do “Jitney” with a black cast. I just think there’s a proper way to do it. Using black actors to do “Death of a Salesman” has got to be odd, because black people do not respond to the world in that situation in that way. A black traveling salesman in 1947 would be lynched. The problems of the household were certainly different in black America. It’s a great piece of work, but I don’t think we should be about celebrating that. There are many, many black playwrights whose work you can do.

Q: Between revising “Jitney,” working on the play’s various productions around the country and your efforts with the African Grove Institute, have you had time for any other creative ventures in the past few years?

A: I have a 2-year-old daughter, born in ’97.

Then I’ve written a new play, which is currently at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. It’s called “King Hedley II.” I think this is the first time any of the same characters will be in a second play. In “Seven Guitars,” the baby that she’s carrying is King Hedley II. I found it exciting to take a look at these characters 36 years later, in 1985.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: Well, I have two plays left in my series of plays, my cycle: the first decade of the 20th century and the last decade. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. In fact, I forgot all about the 1900s, the zero years, because I started counting at one. And I guess someone said, “What about the aught years?” and I realized there’s a whole decade from 1900 to 1910.

I think it’s fortunate, because now I have an opportunity to tie the two together to create bookends which the other eight [plays] could fit into. I had this idea of relating those two plays, and I’m not at this point exactly sure how.

Q: If there was one thing you could wish for, one way in which the American theater could embrace change in the new century, what would it be?

A: I wish that all the what I call “museum productions” that get main-stage productions would wind up on the second stage, and the main theaters would be turned over to the playwrights. There are exceptions, of course, but a lot of the new work is done on second stages and given productions with somewhat lesser production values, while the 84th production of “Uncle Vanya” or Ibsen or whatever is on the main stage. I certainly recognize the importance of preserving that, of presenting that work to new audiences, but I think you can do it on the second stages, you know, and give the playwrights the main stage.

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* “Jitney,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Opens Thursday. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends March 19. $29-$42. (213) 628-2772.