Patti Hartigan

Patti Hartigan’s biography, August Wilson: A Life, is a vivid description of the life of one of America’s greatest playwrights. Wilson was the son of Daisy Wilson, a descendent of African American slaves whose family left North Carolina and migrated north to Pennsylvania after the Civil War. When Wilson was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, he was named Frederick August Kittel, Jr., after his father, a white German immigrant. He changed his name to August Wilson as an adult, taking his mother’s surname after his father died. As a teenager, the intellectually gifted Wilson faced racial harassment at the predominantly white private high school he attended in Pittsburgh. He changed schools and eventually dropped out at age 15, spending his days reading in the Carnegie Library to further his education. Wilson dreamed of becoming a poet while working at various odd jobs to support himself. He switched to playwrighting once he realized that poems were not big enough to say what he wanted to say, and co-founded and directed a local Black theater group.

Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978 and began writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota while continuing to submit plays to theatre workshops around the country. In 1982, on his sixth attempt, his play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was accepted at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. His dramatic reading of the script at the workshop caught the attention of Lloyd Richards, the artistic director and dean of the Yale School of Drama, who would become his mentor. When the performance of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the workshop received rave reviews from Frank Rich, the theater critic for the New York Times, Wilson realized that he had finally become a playwright. Wilson would go on to write a solo show and numerous plays including his Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade series of plays depicting the African American experience during the 20th Century. Wilson received two Pulitzer Prizes, two Tony Awards, several New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and numerous other honors for his work including having a Broadway theatre named after him.

Hartigan’s biography includes information gleaned from interviews she conducted with Wilson from the first time she met him at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 1987 and continuing until a few months prior to his death in Seattle, Washington, in 2005. Hartigan’s background knowledge allows her to expand upon the typical summaries of his plays by drawing links between his characters and the people in Wilson’s life who inspired them. Hartigan does an excellent job of describing how Wilson learned to listen to the voices of the people around him to write dialogue that sounded authentic to his audience. Hartigan also offers insights into how Wilson used workshops and regional theatre productions to refine his plays, and the challenges presented by Wilson’s hectic travel schedule. The biography is well-documented and includes extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index as well as eight pages of photographs of Wilson and his family, friends, and colleagues. Hartigan’s book offers readers a thoroughly engaging look at the life of August Wilson and his efforts to provide theater audiences with a greater understanding and appreciation of the African American experience.… (meer)

The cover photo on this heartfelt and heart-rending biography provides a window into the soul of this driven playwright/blues man: the penetrating eyes, the half smile, the mastery of life’s trials. Wilson is known for his Century Cycle plays reflecting Black lives in America, 1900 - 1990s; his Pulitzers and Tony awards; the NYC theater named for him, but this book explores his childhood and coming of age in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, his early twenties activism, and then, his invitation to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center with his play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in 1985. Each of the ten plays is discussed in depth - the drafts, casting, and especially his formative relationship with director Lloyd Richards. The role of women in his plays and off stage is muted, with the exception of his devotion to his mother. There is not one play out of the ten where a woman is the lead, which makes his work seem a bit dated since the debut of the final play, Radio Golf, in 2007. But there’s no mistaking the importance of his achievement in theatre and his influence on American cultural life. The Lloyd Richards process of opening the plays in regional theatres before Broadway strengthened those unsung institutions immeasurably. The most illuminating sections explain the world of expectations Wilson set out for himself, with his commitment to writing ten plays and to revealing Black lives as the decades advance, with many changes but little meaningful progress. The author’s appreciation for this charming genius provides a most worthy and immortal pedestal.

Quotes: “White people have set themselves up as the custodians of our experience.”

”Kreisler had a chilly relationship with his father, who did not seem to know the phone number to his emotions.”… (meer)