On Jan. 7, August Wilson gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — a fitting tribute for a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright who is one of the most celebrated and important American storytellers of the last 50 years.
But there’s a touch of irony to that Hollywood setting because in his daily life, the late Wilson wasn’t much of movie guy.
“We did love to sit back on our couch and watch thrillers sometimes and, of course, he especially liked Meryl Streep,” remembers Constanza Romero, Wilson’s widow and the executor of his estate. “He really liked a lot of the earlier movies by Black filmmakers, and films with music and Black talent. But it’s true that he was never really in the world of film.”
Between 1980 and 1991, Wilson saw just two movies, according to a 2001 article in the New Yorker.
Yet the influence of Wilson’s epic masterwork, “The American Century Cycle,” extends across genres. The groundbreaking series of 10 plays, each taking place in a different decade of the 20th century and most of them set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, depicts Black lives with complexity, dignity and a tinge of magical realism. Beginning with his 1984 Broadway breakout, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and continuing through richly detailed works including “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Seven Guitars,” Wilson’s oeuvre blazed trails and spotlit stage talent who would go on to become some of Hollywood’s biggest film and TV stars.
Now, an effort to adapt all 10 plays of the “American Century Cycle” — a long-term project that includes Netflix’s just-released adaptation of “The Piano Lesson” — stands poised to further cement Wilson’s screen legacy.
“For me, August Wilson represents home,” says Viola Davis, an EGOT who won a Tony Award for her performance in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Fences” and then an Oscar when she reprised her role in the 2016 movie adaptation. “He carefully and brilliantly weaves together not just characters but human beings and commands us to pay attention. And how can we not? They’re honest, unflinching, tragic, humorous. They are all alive. He is our griot, our keeper of history. He left love in its truest form.”
Davis, whose first Broadway credit was in Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” in 1996 and who won her first Tony for her turn in the playwright’s “King Hedley II” in 2001, is one of a cohort of big-name screen talents whose performances in Wilson’s plays helped lift their careers to new heights. Samuel L. Jackson understudied the roles of Boy Willie and Lyman in the 1990 Broadway premiere of “The Piano Lesson”; more than 30 years later, after becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces, he played Doaker in the 2022 Broadway revival and in the current film. Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne and Charles S. Dutton also found early success in Wilson plays.
August Wilson wrote “Seven Guitars,” above, starring Viola Davis and Jerome Preston Bates.
Denzel Washington’s Tony-winning Broadway appearance opposite Davis in “Fences” led to the subsequent movie version that he directed and headlined — and prompted his vow to see all 10 of Wilson’s plays made into movies.
Washington’s commitment is a family affair: The recent Broadway revival of “The Piano Lesson” starred his son John David Washington as Boy Willie, who reprises the role in the new movie version directed by John David’s brother, Malcolm, with a cast that also includes Jackson, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher and Corey Hawkins.
“What I love about Wilson’s work is that it’s art of the finest caliber that communicates and reflects a community and a people,” Malcolm Washington says. “His characters are so well-drawn, so dynamic and so well-rounded, and almost all of them carry contradictions in them. I think that works so well in film adaptations because you can explore that kind of interiority that exists inside each of these characters and bring it out with the tools of cinema.”
A 1930s tale centered on a brother and sister’s clash over what to do with a piano that has been a haunted family heirloom since the days of slavery, “The Piano Lesson” is in many ways emblematic of Wilson’s work overall. In that 1990 play, he conjures a portrait of everyday Black life with vibrantly distinctive voices, reflecting both the tides of historical injustice and the universals of human existence. Through it all he weaves threads of spirituality and the supernatural that carry both metaphoric and emotional weight.
The recent trio of film adaptations of Wilson’s plays, which began with “Fences” and continued with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in 2020, isn’t the first brush with Hollywood for Wilson’s work. When a studio optioned “Fences” back in the late 1980s, Wilson insisted on a Black director. The movie never got made.
Malcolm Washington directed his brother John David, left, in the film version of “The Piano Lesson.”
That’s just one incident in a life of championing Black voices and Black stories.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1945, Wilson dropped out of high school when a teacher accused him of plagiarism, but he continued his own, self-guided education in the local library. He also spent time in the hangouts of the Hill District, the working-class Black neighborhood that would become the milieu of most of the “American Century” plays.
There he deepened his affinity for the music of everyday voices and the richness of their inner lives. In later years, Davis was moved by the love Wilson showed her parents. “To the world, they were two Black people of limited education, but to August, they were gold!” she recalls.
After struggling to establish himself as a poet in the 1960s and early 1970s, Wilson began to write plays in earnest after a move to St. Paul. The first play in what would become the “American Century Cycle,” “Jitney” — about the denizens of an unlicensed cab company — was produced professionally in Pittsburgh in 1982.
The playwright’s prominence exploded after his script for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” about a 1920s blues singer and her band, was accepted to the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. There he met the influential Black director Lloyd Richards, who staged “Ma Rainey” on Broadway and went on to direct four more of his plays.
Subsequent plays in the “American Century Cycle” followed, usually developed in a series of pre-Broadway productions around the country prior to a Broadway premiere. The final play of the cycle, the 1990s-set “Radio Golf,” debuted on Broadway in 2007. Along the way he became known as a fierce advocate for a Black theater movement, famously debating Robert Brustein about it in print and at a 1997 debate in Manhattan.
Over the course of his career, Wilson accumulated a string of awards including two Pulitzers (one for “Fences” in 1987 and one for “The Piano Lesson” in 1990), a Tony Award (for “Fences”) and seven trophies from the New York Drama Critics Circle. Not long after his death from liver cancer in 2005, Broadway’s Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre. It was the first Broadway house named for a Black theatrical figure.
Now, with more “American Century Cycle” movie adaptations to come after “The Piano Lesson,” Wilson’s fans expect the big screen to further deepen his legacy.
“With these films and how beautiful they each have turned out so far, I’m hoping that this is a sign of August’s work being appreciated on a larger scale and on a level that stands the test of time,” Romero says.
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