Play Reading Roundup: August Wilson's Mid 20th Century

Viola Davis and Denzel Washington in the 2016 film adaptation of Fences.

August in August! My summer of August Wilson continues with the next 3 plays in the Century Cycle, covering the 1940s through the 1960s.

Seven Guitars by August Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For much of its duration, Seven Guitars feels like a play about a bunch of friends and neighbors hanging out in an apartment building backyard in Spring 1948—eating chicken sandwiches, making paper flowers, listening to the radio, boasting and teasing and flirting. But more troubling and confusing things are going on beneath the surface: the play is packed with numerical symbolism and color symbolism and an overall sense of foreboding. After all, it begins with six of the characters returning from the funeral of the seventh, the up-and-coming blues guitarist Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, and then flashes back to show how things got that way.

None of this is too surprising for August Wilson: he wrote plays that are simultaneously stories of everyday life among working-class Black people in Pittsburgh, and magical-realist stories where humans confront vast spiritual forces. I just think that some of his other plays blend the two elements better, rather than seeming to flip-flop between low-key hangout episodes and high-stakes cosmic struggle. I’m also very puzzled by how the cosmology of Seven Guitars fits in with the rest of the Century Cycle. In other Wilson plays, we’re supposed to take the characters’ spiritual visions seriously: Aunt Esther, in Gem of the Ocean , really can wash people’s souls; the piano in The Piano Lesson really is haunted by a ghost; Gabriel, in Fences , really can intercede with God. The equivalent character here is King Hedley—but in contrast to Wilson’s other visionaries, his visions lead him astray rather than providing him access to a higher truth. (highlight to reveal spoiler) (He kills Floyd because he mistakes him for a figure he has seen in his dreams, who he thinks will give him money.) Maybe that’s why Seven Guitars feels so disjointed: other Wilson plays find healing by integrating the spiritual world with the mundane world, but this play seems to say that spirituality is senseless lunacy.

Fences by August Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fences is a play about fathers and sons and American masculinity, but its emotional high point involves a woman standing up for herself. This moment is even more powerful in the context of the Century Cycle as a whole, where, for nearly six plays (representing nearly 60 years of history), we’ve seen capable, sensible women make sacrifices for charming but unreliable men. They bake the biscuits, they raise the children, they consciously make themselves smaller so their men can feel bigger. Over and over, men tell them the magic words “A woman needs a man,” and they believe it, and they surrender. But Rose, loyal and long-suffering wife to Troy Maxson for nearly two decades, finally realizes she doesn’t need a man. And the catharsis is powerful.

Of course, Troy is more than just some deadbeat husband who Rose needs to cast off in order to become self-actualized. August Wilson finds much to admire in Troy: he is hardworking, confident, charismatic, and unafraid of death. He “goes down swinging,” fighting his demons (his final scene reminded me of the final speech of Cyrano de Bergerac —another flawed and complex hero who fights till the end). I first read this play over one of my college summers, and I judged it quite harshly, the way only a sheltered white girl from a liberal arts college can do. I thought Troy was just some boastful jerk; I didn’t realize at the time just how hard it is to break longstanding cycles of violence and abuse. Because now I think the point is that Troy is trying, as best he can, to break the cycles. He just doesn’t understand how much they have broken him… and how he has broken his loved ones.

Fences is the first Century Cycle play to take place in a year August Wilson could remember living through—he would have been 12 in 1957, about five years younger than Troy and Rose’s son Cory. I think Wilson is also consciously playing with our culture’s stereotypical notions of 1950s Americana, which is so often imagined (and, worse, idealized) as lily-white. Wilson reminds us that Black people, too, dreamed of being baseball heroes or owning a single-family home with a fenced-off yard, but such dreams were always more complicated and fraught for them. And rebellious-but-sympathetic teenage boys like Cory have been a staple of 1950s-set stories ever since James Dean first put on a red windbreaker, but how often do Black actors get to play this type of character?

Two Trains Running by August Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Maybe it’s because depictions of the Civil Rights struggle and its aftermath are much more common in American media than stories of Black people pre-Civil-Rights, but Two Trains Running is the first August Wilson play I’ve read where I’ve thought “Some other Black playwright could’ve written this.” It is set in 1969, in a Pittsburgh diner that is about to be demolished as part of an urban renewal scheme. The owner, Memphis, just wants to get as much money from the city for his property as possible, and frequently makes disparaging remarks about the entitled younger generation and their Black Power movement; but the younger people can’t make peace with the status quo as easily as Memphis does. This setup feels kind of familiar, that’s all.

My August Wilson reading group has come to affectionately joke about Wilson’s tendency to throw over-the-top surreal or violent actions into the final moments of his plays, but in Two Trains Running, Wilson tempers his love for cataclysm and mysticism. Nowhere is this more evident than the character of West, the undertaker. The other characters discuss him in hushed tones before he appears onstage: he is the richest man in the community, he only ever wears black, he always wears gloves. I thought Wilson was setting West up as a spooky metaphorical figure, an emissary of death and doom. Then he finally shows up at the diner and… he’s not that bad of a guy! He has his flaws, but he also has his reasons; and he doesn’t really portend anything awful.

Our reading group also frequently discusses Wilson’s female characters and how writing fully rounded women can be a blind spot for him. This play has only one woman in the cast of seven: Risa, the diner’s waitress and assistant chef. Her biggest character trait is that she “has scarred her legs with a razor in an attempt to define herself in terms other than her genitalia.” This could be a potentially fascinating topic: in the late 1960s, Black people are proclaiming “Black is beautiful” and demanding to be seen and heard, but what does that mean for a young Black woman who doesn’t want to be noticed, who has found that her “beauty” has only earned her unwanted attention from men since she was 12 years old? But I don’t think August Wilson is the right playwright to explore the intersection of 1960s feminism and Black Power struggles. All of the men in the play, with the exception of the mentally disturbed Hambone, get to explain themselves in long, wonderful Wilson monologues, but Risa never gets a chance to speak at length.

(Also, does she pronounce her name Ree-sa or Rih-sa? At first I assumed the former, but eventually we find out that her full name is Clarissa, which suggests the latter. As a woman named Marissa, I spent way too long thinking about this.)

Speaking of monologues, I don’t want to end this review without mentioning the character of Holloway, the diner’s resident philosopher, who gets some amazing speeches about American race relations. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some writers in our own Black Lives Matter era quoting Holloway: “People kill me talking about n------s is lazy. N------s is the most hardworking people in the world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn’t take no lunch hour.”