Is the long career of the Pulitzer Prize Winner enough for his public to congratulate themselves on their cultural awareness or is his continuous relevance indicative of pervading, troubling questions about society’s isolation with itself?


August Kittel, born in the Hill District, is no poster child for public education. Going by his African American mother’s maiden name of Wilson, he became a dropout by age sixteen, tired of confronting the pervasive racism in the educational system. He can, however, be a good promoter of public libraries, for he completed his education in one, and after a couple of years of diligent work, won the Pulitzer Prize, becoming one of the most important figures in the U.S. theatre at a time when, in a daunting exercise of comparative literature, among his contemporaries were David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Miguel Piñero.

Not that the public library or his old neighborhood will ever benefit from the recognition garnered by his native son. In the case of any other story, by and large sports tales, the loose lips would give lip service to admiration but reserve words for the usual masked resentment and a sense of ingratitude. It would be ironic in the case of this towering figure of the stage, not because he is a dramatist, but because the whole of his fame resides from letting the world know about these forgotten streets of Pittsburgh, the first area of the city where immigrants and African Americans happily converged and that, by World War II, flaunted not only diversity but two Negro League baseball teams and homegrown musical talent the likes of Lena Horne and Erroll Garner, to name just two of them.

After more than two decades, the author of “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” has predictably tinkered with his muse. In “Gem Of The Ocean,” his new play at the Mark Taper Forum, Wilson introduces a dominant, albeit ethereal, female character. Otherwise, he continues to use a predominantly black cast, the same Hill setting, but by now he has covered every decade of the last century except for its last. The chorus of those who wish for more flexibility should not keep their hopes too high, and to do so can signal a profound misunderstanding of his work.

First of all, his theatre is cemented in the concept of family, or rather, of a society of close relations where almost everyone is on a familiar footing; a place full of self inflicted cruelty, where triumphs and tragedies are suspect in its origin, perspective can be suspended without notice and, on the other hand, awareness even of the deeper sources of tragedy, as in the historical injustice never healed by the collective memory, is a more formidable curse than blissful ignorance.

But what is real plight for some is a discomforting thought for others. Much admired but often been belatedly criticized for the intensity of his plays, it is as if a part of his audience is willing to endure an evening of theatre in the most absolute incomprehension if distanced by the death of the artist or a disconnection to what is being represented.
Consequently, they must have felt nothing but shock when Wilson countered their presumed magnanimity by calling for an end of subscription based theatres, considering that it holds the artist hostage to mediocrity.

Just as shocking must have been his contention that inclusion of a couple of African American plays in these repertoires simply disaffect and patronizes black audiences, and at the same time, denouncing what is called color blind casting as a bad solution to include African Americans within the theatre establishment. Rather, he suggests, African Americans need to cultivate their own theatre tradition and their own theatergoers. This should not be too hard to imagine from a culture that in that exact manner gave birth to a rich musical heritage, as varied as jazz, blues and rock and roll.

This is, of course, the worst nightmare for some: to be immersed for real in that intense world of recriminations they safely watched as spectators. In their puzzlement, the playwright has even been accused of flirting with segregationist ideas. It could be that critics have ignored, for as long as the playwright’s inordinately lasting success, at least some of the roots behind the success of August Wilson.
Nobody seems to wonder how can anyone sustains the interest of his audience with the same setting, situations, and male characters for more than three decades, with much better fortune than Mamet or Shepard. There may be an understandable fear to answer these questions.

In “Gem Of The Ocean” Wilson finds the idea that in 1904 one could still find people who had been slaves simply astonishing. This may be a clue to his audience. If that awful intensity, that anguished, harrowing spectacle of damaged souls inflicting even more harm at the center of gravity in August Wilson’s universe is merely the inescapable African presence in the U.S., if that is indeed a reality beyond the theatre hall, that can easily be avoided by the elevated freeway on the way home, and therefore remain shockingly afresh, then it might be that- as in 1904 -we have been missing something else as well.