While many are focusing on the fact that our POTUS took our FLOTUS on a date to NY to see a revival of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone", by August Wilson, I was pleased, and touched by the significance of the play they selected to see, and wish that the playwright had lived to see it.
August Wilson, Pulitzer prize winning American playwright died October 2, 2005 of cancer.
In his honor, 14 days after his death, the Virgina Theatre on Broadway was renamed, The August Wilson Theatre.
Some background on Wilson.
Early years
Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children to German immigrant baker, Frederick August Kittel, Sr. and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. Earlier, Wilson's maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. His mother raised the children alone by the time he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue. The economically depressed neighborhood in which he was raised was inhabited predominantly by black Americans, and Jewish and Italian immigrants. Wilson's mother was remarried to David Bedford in the 1950s when he was a teen, and the family moved from the Hill to the then predominantly white working class neighborhood, Hazelwood. where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home.
His early education:
Wilson was the only African-American student at the Central Catholic High School in 1959 where he was soon driven away by threats and abuse. He then attended Connelley Vocational High School, but found the curriculum unchallenging. He dropped out of Gladstone High School in the 9th grade in 1960 after his teacher accused him of plagiarizing a 20-page paper he wrote on Napoleon I of France. He waited for his teacher and the principal of the school to apologize, but they never did. Wilson hid his decision from his mother because he did not want to disappoint her. At the age of 16, he began working menial jobs and that allowed him to meet a wide variety of people, some of whom he later based his characters on, such as Sam in The Janitor (1985).
Wilson made such extensive use of the Carnegie Library to educate himself that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have bestowed. Wilson, who had learned to read at age four, began reading black writers there at age 12 and spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself by reading Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and others.
His life and work was covered extensively in the many obits after his death.
The NY Times wrote, August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60
In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.
In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power of the blues, he also argued eloquently for the importance of black Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was imperative for black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing fight against the legacies of white racism.
As the daughter of an actor, and drama professor I was taken to plays quite often by my parents, and had the opportunity, and honor to meet August Wilson many years ago.
For those of you unfamiliar with his body of work is plays include:
Fences (1985) (which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award), The Piano Lesson (1990) (a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone.
He will live on through his work, and I salute our First Couple for selecting his legacy as a place to spend an evening.