The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson
The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson

Author: Harry Justin Elam

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2009-05-21

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0472021842

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Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press).

August Wilson
August Wilson

Author: Laurence A. Glasco

Publisher:

Published: 2015-12-15

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9780996937207

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August Wilson is one of America's great playwrights. He lived in Pittsburgh from his birth in 1945 to 1978, when he moved to St. Paul, MN, and later to Seattle, WA. He died in 2005 and is buried in Pittsburgh.Wilson composed 10 plays chronicling the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century--and he set nine of those plays in Pittsburgh's Hill District. He turned the history of a place into great theater. His plays, including Fences, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf have become classics of the American stage.August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays guides visitors to key sites in the playwright's life and work in the Hill District and beyond. This guidebook enriches the understanding of those who have seen or read his plays, inspires others to do so, and educates all to the importance of respecting, caring for, and preserving the Pittsburgh places that shaped, challenged, and nurtured August Wilson's rich, creative legacy.

August Wilson
August Wilson

Author: Alan Nadel

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2010-05-16

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1587299356

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Contributors to this collection of 15 essays are academics in English, theater, and African American studies. They focus on the second half of Wilson's century cycle of plays, examining each play within the larger context of the cycle and highlighting themes within and across particular plays. Some topics discussed include business in the street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean, contesting black male responsibilities in Jitney, the holyistic blues of Seven Guitars, violence as history lesson in Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, and ritual death and Wilson's female Christ. The book offers an index of plays, critics, and theorists, but not a subject index. Nadel is chair of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky.

Feed Your Mind
Feed Your Mind

Author: Jen Bryant

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2019-11-12

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 1683356241

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A celebration of August Wilson’s journey from a child in Pittsburgh to one of America’s greatest playwrights August Wilson (1945–2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic, everyday voice of black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from both students and some teachers, August dropped out. However, he continued reading and educating himself independently. He felt that if he could read about it, then he could teach himself anything and accomplish anything. Like many of his plays, Feed Your Mind is told in two acts, revealing how Wilson grew up to be one of the most influential American playwrights. The book includes an author’s note, a timeline of August Wilson’s life, a list of Wilson’s plays, and a bibliography.

Conversations with August Wilson
Conversations with August Wilson

Author: Jackson R. Bryer

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781578068302

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Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.

Seven Guitars
Seven Guitars

Author: August Wilson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1997-08-01

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1101173696

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Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in his continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

August Wilson's Jitney
August Wilson's Jitney

Author: August Wilson

Publisher: Concord Theatricals

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9780573627958

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"Regular cabs will not travel to the Pittsburgh Hill District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to each other. Jitney dramatizes the lives of men hustling to make a living as jitneys--unofficial, unlicensed taxi cab drivers. When the boss Becker's son returns from prison, violence threatens to erupt. What makes this play remarkable is not the plot; Jitney is Wilson at his most real--the words these men use and the stories they tell form a true slice of life."--The Wikipedia entry, accessed 5/22/2014.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Author: August Wilson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0593087607

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences comes Joe Turner's Come and Gone—Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. “The glow accompanying August Wilson’s place in contemporary American theater is fixed.”—Toni Morrison When Harold Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man—in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents he begins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world—and it will take more than the skill of the local “People Finder” to discover it. This jazz-influenced drama is a moving narrative of African-American experience in the 20th century.

Understanding August Wilson
Understanding August Wilson

Author: Mary L. Bogumil

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 9781570032523

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In this critical study Mary L. Bogumil argues that Wilson gives voice to disfranchised and marginalized African Americans who have been promised a place and a stake in the American dream but find access to the rights and freedoms promised to all Americans difficult. The author maintains that Wilson not only portrays African Americans and the predicaments of American life but also sheds light on the atavistic connection African Americans have to their African ancestors.

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson
Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson

Author: Sandra G. Shannon

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1603292608

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The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson's plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America's collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson's work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.