Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: Muddy Waters Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: Bessie Smith Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: Jimmy Rushing Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: 'Ma' Rainey Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: Robert Johnson Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: Billie Holiday Legends of American Music, Jazz and Blues Singers: Mildred Bailey Legends of American Music, Popular Singers: Ethel Waters Legends of American Music, Popular Singers: Nat 'King' Cole Legends of American Music, Broadway Musicals: Porgy & Bess Legends of American Music, Rock & Roll / Rhythm & Blues: Dinah Washington Legends of American Music, Rock & Roll / Rhythm & Blues: Otis Redding Legends of American Music, Rock & Roll / Rhythm & Blues: Clyde McPhatter Martin Luther King, Jr.īlack Heritage: Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable And to be reminded that those deeper waters are out there, beyond the shallows.Black Heritage: Dr. Epatha Merkerson and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who says of Wilson, “He wrote the frustration and the glory of being black.” Some may be most familiar from, meaning no disrespect, “lesser” works (Merkerson from “Law & Order,” Santiago-Hudson from “Castle,” Fishburne from those “Matrix” movies, with Davis currently the star of ABC’s “How to Get Away with Murder”), and it’s good to see them in these deeper waters. Pollard details the fraying of Wilson’s relationship with director-mentor Lloyd Richards, who ran the National Playwrights Conference where “Ma Rainey” had its first sensational reception, and Wilson’s opposition to colorblind casting, and his calling for more black roles for black actors, which put him into a print battle (and ultimately a Town Hall debate) with New Republic critic Robert Brustein, one of the few skeptical voices here.Īctors interviewed and/or seen in performance include Viola Davis, Laurence Fishburne, Charles Dutton, Alfre Woodard, James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, S. Only the third of Wilson’s three wives is seen, or mentioned.Īlthough Wilson’s success came fast, and was lifelong, it was not without controversy or cost.
American masters august wilson professional#
Past the biographical sketch of the artist as a young man (single black mother, absent white father, surrogate father a professional boxer from across the street self-schooling in the Carnegie Tech library - “I actually thought that they had any book that had ever been printed there”), the focus is on the art. The film, too, is a kind of collage it follows Wilson’s career chronologically, but as his “Century Plays” - one for each decade of the 20th century and all but one set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson grew up - were written out of chronological order, it also skips around in time, giving you at once a sense of the plays, the world of the plays, and the people putting on the plays. (“Once I got the characters talking,” he says here, “it was difficult to shut them up.”) He would begin with a line, which would become a person, which would become a question about the person and the line, and wrote exchanges out of order on whatever scrap of paper was at hand, wherever he might find himself, from a Burger King takeout bag to the empty spaces on a magazine subscription card. Even excerpted and without much context, scenes from “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “Two Trains Running” among others, are terrifically exciting and moving and musical.Ī metaphysical realist who started his writing life as a poet, Wilson’s plays came out of the place where the voices he heard around him merged with the voices he heard in his head.
American masters august wilson full#
August Wilson, a great American writer of great American plays, and a great African American writer of great African American plays, gets the “American Masters” treatment in “The Ground on Which I Stand,” an edition of the series “American Masters,” premiering Friday on PBS.ĭirected by Sam Pollard (longtime Spike Lee editor, producer of not literally innumerable but impressively many TV documentaries), it’s the usual mix of talking heads, including colleagues, scholars friends and relations, and archival clips, including interviews with Wilson, who died at 60 in 2005, and performances of his plays on stage, and on film.īut it has an unusual power, for being so full of powerful language, powerful feelings and powerful ideas.
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