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Meeting August Wilson
By Lee Blessing
August Wilson and I both worked at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis in the early 1980s, but we didn't get to know each other until the 1983 O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, CT. He'd been there the summer before, with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a copy of which I found lying around. Sitting alone that evening reading his play was when I first truly "met" August Wilson.
I'm sure all of us remember our first experience with August's work. For me it was as though a door I'd only dimly been aware of suddenly flew open. I stumbled into a world I'd never known. How could I? I'd grown up in my own ghetto--affluent, white and light-years from Pittsburgh's Hill District.
August's work does something miraculous. It carries me effortlessly into the pain of his world by providing me the conveyance of its joy. The bitterest aspects of his characters' experience stand side by side with their simultaneous pleasures. We examine the darkest themes via the author's transcendent poetry.
I'm lucky to have known August as a friend (meeting him at the O'Neill became a habit over the years) and perhaps luckier still to have developed as a playwright during the creation of his extraordinary cycle. Our last summer together at the O'Neill was 2002, when he came as a guest to read from his latest, Gem of the Ocean. Each afternoon August sat at a picnic table, talking with whoever wanted to sit across from him. He shared himself with us the same way he shared his plays. At times it felt as though he could enliven life itself.
And why not? He was clearly a magician. August took the most discouraging material--a people struggling out of the spiritual slaughter of slavery through an endless twilight of poverty and prejudice--and fashioned a world as full and powerful as any ever created for the stage.
Our days in the Twin Cities seem far away now, but among the many wonderful things August did was introduce his adopted home to the world he'd brought with him. The productions of August's work at St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre were a landmark in the theatre history of Minnesota. Signature Theatre's production of Two Trains Running, directed by Penumbra's Lou Bellamy (August's old friend and mine), allows me to celebrate that as well.
Lee Blessing is the 1992-1993 Signature Theatre Company Playwright-in-Residence.
