Play Reading Roundup: August Wilson's Early 20th Century
Michael Potts, Chadwick Boseman, and Colman Domingo in the recent Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom film adaptation.
My Quarantine Shakespeare book club finished up our task of reading his 37 plays in early March, took a springtime hiatus, and have now reconvened this summer to read and discuss the complete plays of another virtuoso historical dramatist: August Wilson’s Century Cycle. I had tried to read the Cycle on my own two years ago, but burned out after the second play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. This time around, it was reassuring to discover that everyone else in the book club also found Joe Turner a weird and off-putting play, and to have the encouragement to push through to the real masterpieces Ma Rainey and The Piano Lesson. Here are my thoughts on the first four Cycle plays, covering the decades from the 1900s to the 1930s.
Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the first years of the twentieth century, slavery and the Civil War were still within living memory. But enough time had elapsed since Emancipation for Black people to realize the hollowness of the freedom that was granted to them, and for the younger generation to become anxious, angry, and uncertain. Therefore Gem of the Ocean, set in 1904, is very concerned with how the elders of a community pass their wisdom to the next generation. (Interestingly, this play premiered in the early 2000s, at a time of similar anxiety about how the “Greatest Generation” was passing away and World War II was slipping out of living memory.) Perhaps this theme of hard-earned wisdom explains why it is the next-to-last play August Wilson wrote for his Century Cycle, even though chronologically it comes at the beginning. He had to be old enough to do it justice.
The play is allegorical and spiritual, with much emphasis on names and their meaning (which is related to the way that many freed slaves took on new names). For instance, we have Citizen Barlow, a troubled young man in need of healing and direction, and Caesar Wilks, a representative of the tyranny of state power. Aunt Ester’s house is a place of physical sanctuary (the first line of the play is “This a peaceful house”), but there’s also an ongoing theme about finding peace and sanctuary within your own heart—or, to put it less pretentiously, it's about “getting right with yourself”.
Wilson spoke often about how his writing tapped into the spirit of the Blues, and, though this play does not involve characters who are professional musicians like some other Century Cycle plays do, it still feels incredibly musical. It would make a really good opera libretto, what with its aria-like monologues, its fugue-like ebb and flow of themes, its sense of ritual. And what better way to begin an epic 10-play cycle than with a play centered on a symbolic baptism and rebirth?
Joe Turner's Come and Gone by August Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It shouldn’t be surprising that Joe Turner’s Come and Gone finds August Wilson working with many of the same themes and motifs that featured in
Gem of the Ocean
. After all, the two plays take place just seven years apart, one of the smallest time-gaps between Century Cycle plays. Once again, the protagonist is a Black man in spiritual turmoil, who has recently arrived in Pittsburgh from the South. Once again, names are important, music is important, and some of the characters possess mystical and visionary powers. The plays even share a supporting character, the peddler Rutherford Selig (the only white person who has appeared onstage in the Cycle so far).
But despite all these similarities and parallels, Joe Turner is somehow a much stranger play than Gem of the Ocean, and for me, a less satisfying one. Selig gets a disquieting backstory that complicates our understanding of how he relates to the Black community, and it’s even more disquieting because this backstory was never hinted at in Gem of the Ocean (which, after all, was written later though set first). In both plays, the troubled protagonist undergoes a sort of baptism and rebirth, but here the baptism involves blood, not water, and feels shocking instead of genuinely cathartic. I really don’t know what to make of Herald Loomis’ choices in the last moments of the play, which seem morally questionable even as the stage directions insist that Loomis is now “free to soar above the environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.” Isn’t it more complicated than that?
Meanwhile, we also meet the first musician character in the Cycle, a guitar-toting scalawag named Jeremy. He is torn between two young women who have contrasting personalities but names that seem intentionally interchangeable: Mattie Campbell, who is looking for love, and Molly Cunningham, who is looking out for her own self. (Amusingly, in the original production, these characters were both played by actresses named Kimberly/Kimberleigh. It must have gotten very confusing in the rehearsal room!) Societal expectations in 1911, and maybe even in 1988, would therefore label Molly as a “bad girl” and Mattie a “good girl,” but I wonder if that still holds in the 21st century. If the main action of the play is about Herald Loomis learning to be self-sufficient and stand on his own two feet, why is it so bad for Molly to be confident and self-sufficient too?
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
White Americans have always had an easier time accepting Black people as entertainers than as many other professions. That’s one of the central themes of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: the ways in which Black artists have power and the ways in which they lack it. But maybe that’s also a reason why this story about musicians was August Wilson’s first play to be a big success with the largely white American theater audience.
We are in a Chicago studio in 1927, where the great blues singer Ma Rainey is preparing to cut some records. Her four band members’ chatter and good-natured teasing eventually develops into a broader conflict between Levee, the brash young trumpet player, and Toledo, the philosophically inclined piano player. I couldn’t help reading this as a conflict between two aspects of August Wilson’s own personality. Levee is the ambitious artist who wants to break new ground in an artistic field where white people are the gatekeepers; Toledo is more cautious, always thinking about the societal implications of what he does and the message it sends to other Black people. Some of the things Toledo says, particularly about how Black people have forgotten their African roots, echo things Wilson said in interviews.
My August Wilson reading group commented that his plays tend to have a middle-aged or elderly female character who serves as a figure of wisdom and community. At first, Ma Rainey wouldn’t seem to have much in common with venerable matriarch Aunt Esther (in
Gem of the Ocean
) or respectable housewife Bertha (in
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
): Ma is an imperious diva who sings raunchy blues songs and openly travels with her female lover. But her imperiousness also means that she is more courageous and defiant than any of her band members—and she manages to care for other people more than they do, too. Levee only cares about himself and his music; Toledo cares about the Black community, but in an abstract philosophical way. But Ma’s music tangibly strengthens the community; as she puts it, the blues makes you feel less alone in the world. And she genuinely cares for the members of her entourage, especially her shy and stammering nephew, Sylvester.
Still, despite Ma Rainey’s force and charisma, the play isn’t really about her. It all comes down to that Levee–Toledo opposition, which can only end in tragedy. And right before that happens, there’s one of the all-time great stage directions: “They purposefully avoid looking at Levee in hopes he’ll calm down if he doesn’t have an audience.” Because, of course, the irony is that even if the other band members look away from Levee, we are still looking at him—the theatergoing audience is his audience. And, for a spiritually inclined writer like Wilson, there could be another layer here too: Levee claims not to believe in God, but maybe God is watching him, regardless.
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve always been slightly obsessed with the 1930s, so maybe it’s no surprise that The Piano Lesson, the 1936-set entry in August Wilson’s Century Cycle, is my favorite of the series so far. Not that Wilson has loaded it down with signifiers of the decade; indeed, though this is the era of the Great Depression, the characters have enough money to live on—and they even have the dubious privilege of deciding what to do with an inheritance. Berniece and her younger brother Boy Willie share ownership of an antique piano that was carved with stylized family portraits by their great-grandfather, an enslaved man who missed his wife and children. Should Boy Willie sell it to a Pittsburgh antiques dealer and use the money to purchase the land down South where his ancestors worked as slaves? Or should it sit in Berniece’s parlor, played occasionally by her 11-year-old daughter, as a different kind of memorial to their ancestors’ sacrifices and a reminder of how far the family has come?
Maybe another reason this play appeals to me so much because it’s the first play in the Cycle where a woman could be considered a co-protagonist. Wilson was not always the best at writing female characters (see my complaints above about the virgin–whore dichotomy in
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
), but Berniece feels plausible and sympathetic. The drama wouldn’t work as well as it does if Berniece and Boy Willie weren’t both right about some things and wrong about others.
I also appreciate how the exorcism at the end of the play functions in the context of the Century Cycle as a whole. In The Piano Lesson and the plays that take place before it, most of the characters are Great Migration transplants, who are palpably haunted by their Southern roots and the horrors of slavery. In the 1940s and 1950s plays, the characters are obviously still facing racism and injustice, but they feel less connected to the South and less directly haunted by slavery per se. So the last scene of The Piano Lesson does not just put to rest the ghosts of the past for Berniece, Boy Willie, and their family, it almost feels like it caps off the first phase of the Cycle. From here on out, Wilson's characters seem to be better at dispelling their ghosts.
BONUS: I read both Joe Turner and Ma Rainey in a library copy of August Wilson’s Three Plays collection (the third play is Fences — to be featured in an upcoming blog post). Because I didn’t read it straight through, it took me a few days to notice what was on its title page. And at first, I could barely believe my eyes:
This is the same signature found on the marquee of the August Wilson Theatre in New York, and it wasn’t merely stamped or printed on as a way to jazz up the title page. It was handwritten in pen — I could see and feel the indentations on the reverse side of the page.
And then I flipped to the flyleaf, and saw:
“Love and laughter” is the wisdom that Bertha shares with Mattie in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. I love seeing what lines from their work famous playwrights choose to quote when inscribing things! Like how Edmond Rostand quoted 6 lines from Cyrano about kissing.
When I went to return this book to the SFPL this weekend, I tried showing the signed title page to two librarians, but they were incredibly unimpressed. I thought that they would want to note for their records that the book was autographed, maybe even preserve it in special collections rather than having it circulate! Couldn’t they have even worked up some enthusiasm to match my own surprise and delight?
So I’m just saying: if you want to hold a book that August Wilson himself held and signed, and you are a California resident*, get yourself a San Francisco library card and then check out their copy of Three Plays. It deserves to be circulated among people who will cherish having a signed August Wilson book in their house for a few weeks.
*All California residents are eligible for an SF library card. It also gives you access to 100 free JSTOR articles per month. It’s pretty awesome.