Symphony for the unsung

Among their many virtues, August Wilson’s plays have given unparalleled opportunities to African American actors. What is less often remarked upon is how such luminous performers as James Earl Jones, Charles S. Dutton, Viola Davis and Laurence Fishburne, to name a few, have helped the dramas succeed onstage in a way that transcends their sometimes lumpy, sometimes laggard life on the page.

No one can argue with the breathtaking achievement of Wilson’s 10-play oeuvre chronicling, decade by decade, the 20th century African American experience. “The August Wilson Century Cycle,” with introductions by actors, playwrights, directors and critics, justly monumentalizes the author two years after his death.

Wilson’s place in the canon is secure; his plays continue to be revived. (New York’s Signature Theatre’s recent Wilson season was hailed as one of the best in that institution’s illustrious history.) And most critics would agree that the sheer scale of his accomplishment has earned him a seat in that VIP lounge where Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams toss back bourbons and bandy bons mots.

But with the cycle completed and the eulogies poignantly delivered, the time seems ripe to consider Wilson’s work from the narrower yet necessary vantage of dramatic literature. What can be said about his playwriting craft beyond the remarkable contribution it has made to the enlightenment of our collective heritage?

Each play enjoyed a lengthy gestation period, with out-of-town productions allowing Wilson to make revisions along the way to New York and final publication. Casting was subjected to the same strategic tinkering -- a difficult calculus to find the right person for a role. The ensemble is always a vital concern when steering a drama through the treacherous commercial shoals of Broadway, but the lifeblood of Wilson’s work depended on his actors’ visceral command and authenticity.

Rereading the plays, one better understands this. Although it would be simplistic to say that Wilson’s dramaturgy represents the triumph of content over form, there is something inherently problematic about the sprawl of his stories -- a narrative largesse that calls for actors to imbue each moment, dramatic or not, with exacting verisimilitude and pressurized emotion.

Wilson created worlds in which the unsung would have the time to sing for themselves without fear of being rushed or ridiculed. A corrective impulse -- to racial history as well as theater history -- runs through his work. In a note on “Seven Guitars,” Wilson articulates his philosophy: “I happen to think that the content of my mother’s life -- her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter -- are all worthy of art.”

Heartfelt words. But they fail to acknowledge the fundamental value of economy in the theater. Shakespeare may have known that “brevity is the soul of wit,” but his plays have a lushness that pays no mind to the time of our post-show dinner reservations. The difference, however, between the poetic spaciousness of “King Lear” and the relentless slice-of-life detail from Pittsburgh’s Hill District (where all but one of the plays are set) is that Shakespeare’s seeming digressions are integral to his theatrical design, whereas Wilson’s are often justified on socio-cultural rather than dramatic grounds.

There are always two main narrative lines in Wilson’s plays: the proper drama of his characters, with their arduous trajectories, and the anguished contextual background of slavery’s legacy in America. The latter, of course, circumscribes his characters’ possibilities, and therefore can be seen as inseparable from their individual struggles. But Wilson, acting out of an imperative he once characterized as capturing “the sum total of black culture in America, and its difference from white culture,” goes further, overstuffing his dramas with the quotidian rituals of African American experience. It was about time that this was brought to mainstream audiences, but the inclusive sociological embrace of the plays can crowd out a more nuanced handling of the protagonists’ journeys.

Wilson displays a novelist’s attitude toward time. His episodic structures chart the pain and potential of slow, unsteady progress. But drama, at least the more traditional Aristotelian variety that influenced Wilson, derives its momentum from streamlined action, the making of deliberate choices that yield fateful consequences. The central figures of Wilson’s cycle eventually make such choices, but their freedom is compromised by the trauma of a communal past that is taking far longer to heal than any of his characters have time for. These men need generations, but all they have are measly life spans.

In rendering this quagmire, Wilson permitted the epic struggle of a people to trump his plots. This is why the murderous endings of some plays -- the stabbing by Levee in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the machete lashing of Floyd Barton in “Seven Guitars” -- can seem to be final tragic statements rather than organic tragic culminations. Even the death of Troy, the ex-baseball Negro Leagues superstar laboring in his embittered middle years as a garbage man in “Fences,” transforms a powder-keg father-son drama into a novel manque that’s far more ruminative than dramatic.

None of this detracts from the plays’ emotional right hook when they are adroitly performed. Given an inspired team of actors and a strong director, the work, so miraculously alive with bluesy voices, attains a symphonic heft that is ultimately crushing in its power. But it does perhaps account for the groans that will sometimes sound when you invite more adventurous theatergoers to a Wilson play. There is a sense that the works are too long and sermonizing, and that the plodding pacing is a throwback to mid-century realism.

This grossly underestimates the lyrical layering that went into Wilson’s almost musical compositions. Yet modernism and post-modernism seem to have more or less bypassed the writer who claimed to have become acquainted with the greats of world drama only after he became a practicing playwright. Other innovative African American dramatists, such as Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks, were liberated by these artistic movements to find fractured forms that would capture fractured experiences. But Wilson wanted as large an audience as he could muster, and he wanted to present the fullest and most coherent versions of stories that had been largely neglected. As a playwright, he may resemble O’Neill most, as has been commonly noted, but only in the daunting stature of their shared ambition. O’Neill, for better and worse, was far more experimental.

Wilson stayed unswervingly true to his mission as a dramatic poet. That mission may have occasionally creaked onstage, but it had an evolving methodology that he would subtly recalibrate as needed. If “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” seems the most perfectly constructed of the works, balancing realistic story with mythic song, “King Hedley II,” one of the less well-regarded plays, still conveys the stranglehold of 1980s ghetto blight and the despair that robs his would-be kings of their rightful inheritance. And his final plays, “Gem of the Ocean” and “Radio Golf” -- which inaugurate and complete the cycle in such divergent styles (one bordering on magical realism, the other on ethical melodrama) -- have a substantive depth that should be the envy of every working playwright in America today.

In lieu of a real national theater that could perform all 10 plays in rotating repertory, the Kennedy Center is planning to present a series of staged readings of the entire cycle next year. It’s a noble idea, but to really know Wilson, you need to encounter his characters in full theatrical flight -- and that requires actors who are not just great but appropriately grateful.

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