Download Joe Turner`s Come and Gone

A Young Vic production
Joe Turner’s Come
and Gone
By August Wilson
Contents
1.
August Wilson
2
2.
The Works of August Wilson
8
3.
Synopsis
9
4.
Cast and Creative Team
17
5.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
18
6.
The Pittsburgh Cycle
22
7.
Historical Context
28
8.
The African-American Experience
32
9.
Influences of August Wilson
36
10.
Interview with David Lan, Director and Artistic Director of the Young Vic
41
11.
Interview with Kobna Holdbrook Smith, Actor (Herald Loomis)
44
12.
Bibliography
47
If you have any questions or comments about this Resource Pack please contact us:
The Young Vic, 66 The Cut, London, SE1 8LZ
T: 020 7922 2800 F: 020 7922 2801 e: [email protected]
Compiled by: Adam Penford
Young Vic 2010
First performed at the Young Vic on Thursday 27th May 2010
Production photography by Simon Annand
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A Young Vic production
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1. AUGUST WILSON
Frederick August Kittel was born on 27th April, 1945, the fourth of six children. His father, Frederick
Kittel, a white German immigrant, was a baker, and his mother, Daisy Wilson, an African-American,
worked as a cleaning lady. He was raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a rundown area
which was mostly inhabited by black and European immigrants. His childhood home, 1727 Bedford
Avenue, has now been declared a historic landmark. Despite his mixed ethnicity, Wilson always described
himself as black as his drunken and abusive father left the family for good when he was a boy of five
years old,. Thereafter, he was predominantly raised by his mother. In 1965, following his father’s death,
he dropped his first name and adopted his mother’s maiden name, becoming August Wilson.
August Wilson
Wilson’s mother remarried when he was a teenager and the family moved to the nearby neighbourhood of
Hazelwood. This was largely an intolerant white area and bricks were thrown through their house
windows. Wilson also suffered racial abuse as the only African-American student at the local high school.
Within a year, they moved to another house and Wilson attended a new school. An intelligent child, (he
could read at the age of 4), he found the new school unchallenging and moved again to Gladstone High
School. Whilst there, a teacher wrongly accused Wilson of plagiarizing an essay he had written on
Napoleon - when the school failed to apologise, Wilson dropped out of the education system for good. The
15 year old began to work in menial jobs, keeping his absenteeism from school from his mother.
Simultaneously, he continued his own education by extensively reading at Carnegie Library (the
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institution would later award him an honorary degree). He studied black writers; predominantly the poet
and activist Amiri Baraka (see Chapter 9) whose political stance would have a major impact on his work
and the way he viewed the world. The inspired teenager told his mother that he wished to be a writer but
she demanded he train in law. When he refused, she told him to leave the family home. Wilson enrolled in
the United States Army in 1962, dropping out a year later, and returned to menial jobs such as a
dishwasher and kitchen porter.
In 1964, Wilson started to focus on writing:
“What I discovered is that writing was the only thing society would allow me to do. I couldn’t have
a job or be a lawyer because I didn’t do all the things necessary… If they saw me over in the corner
scribbling on a piece of paper, they would say, ‘That is just a nigger over in the corner scribbling on a
piece of paper.’ Nobody said, ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ So I felt free.”
The community must have been aware of his interest in writing as one day a man appeared at his door
with a typewriter for sale (Wilson could only presume it was stolen). He bought it for $10 knowing he
would have to take it immediately to the pawnshop as he needed the $10 for that week’s bills. But he
saved up and retrieved it from the shop a few weeks later, paying the inflated sum of $11.25. From
1969, black publications at the University of Pittsburgh began to publish some of his work, but Wilson
said it took him many more years before he truly discovered his poetic voice. A significant step towards
this goal came in 1965 when he discovered Bessie Smith, a blues singer. Blues were to influence
significantly his writing, both poetry and plays, for the rest of his career (see Chapter 9).
In 1968, Wilson started Black Horizon Theater Company with his friend Rob Penny (1941-2003), a
poet, playwright and social activist. Penny either wrote the plays or they chose work by other black
writers, and Wilson directed. The productions toured around schools and community centres playing to
black audiences. Wilson and Penny’s aim was to “raise consciousness through theater... as cultural
nationalists.” Wilson made his first attempt as a playwright in 1977 with a play called Black Bart and
the Sacred Hills, based on a series of poems he would written about a cattle rustler. Although he was not
satisfied with the play, other local directors began to take notice of Wilson’s poetical style and Vernell
Lillie [1931-], founder of the Kuntu Repertory Theater based at the University of Pittsburgh, staged
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Wilson’s one-act play, Homecoming, soon after. During the mid-1970s, Wilson and Penny united with
poet, Maisha Baton [1938-2009], to establish the Kuntu Writers’ Workshop with the aim of supporting
and promoting black playwrights - it still runs today.
In 1978, Wilson managed to get a job writing scripts for the educational department at the Science
Museum of Minnesota in the city of Minneapolis. Wilson moved to the state capital of Minnesota, Saint
Paul, and in 1980 received a fellowship at the nearby The Playwrights’ Center. He also established a
relationship with the Penumbra Theatre Company of Saint Paul, who were to premiere most of the early
works in his Pittsburgh cycle of plays. The whole area of Minneapolis had 55,000 citizens, roughly the
same number as in the Hill District and Wilson has since acknowledged that in gaining physical distance,
he could suddenly see the theatrical potential of his old neighbourhood: “In that silence, I could hear the
language for the first time.”
The Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes called the Century Cycle) was to become Wilson’s lifework. In 1982, he
revised a play called Jitney which he had previously written for Black Horizon in the 1970s. The play was
based on a group of illegal taxi drivers in the Hill District who he later described as a “microcosm of the
community at large”. Jitney’s local success prompted him to start writing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,
which examined the jazz culture in Chicago during the 1920s. At a playwriting conference, Wilson met
black theatre director, Lloyd Richards (1919-2006), who recognised the potential in Ma Rainey and
worked with Wilson to refine it. They presented the play at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984, where
Richards was Dean of the drama school, and it transferred to Broadway later that year. Richards was
subsequently to direct the premieres of most of Wilson’s plays - they developed a process of touring the
new play around smaller theatres for up to two years whilst they refined it, before officially opening in a
major theatre or in New York.
The writer had now found his subject matter, but struggled to write dialogue. Richards described him as
“a wonderful poet turning into a playwright.” He asked his friend Rob Penny how he made his characters
talk, Penny replied: “You don’t, you listen to them”; this advice resonated with Wilson and influenced his
approach to future work. Wilson also struggled with structuring the plays. He preferred to create a series
of scenes and sections of dialogue inspired by whatever theme or situation he was exploring, then lay
them out on his floor and decide which order they should go in: “Just like working in collages, you shift it
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around and organize it: This doesn’t go here; that speech doesn’t really belong to that person, it belongs
to this person.” This is a very unorthodox approach to writing for theatre where dramatic structure and
storytelling is paramount; Richards encouraged Wilson to retain his unique approach as it allowed Wilson
to be creatively instinctive but taught him a way of ordering the work to maximize its effectiveness.
Wilson has described Richards as “my guide, my mentor and my provocateur.”
By the time he had written his third major play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) set in the 1910s, he
determined to complete the cycle and write a different play for each decade of the 20th century exploring
the black experience. Wilson’s aim was to educate young African Americans about their heritage: “My
generation of blacks knew very little about the past of our parents, they shielded us from the indignities
they suffered”. Wilson has often been quoted in interviews recalling his daughter telling him that she’d
joined a Black Action Society at university and they were studying Timbuktu. Wilson responded by
advising her to study her own grandmother’s life first, and then working her way back to Africa: “In order
to understand who you are you have to understand your immediate ancestors. You’ve got to make this
connection with your recent past in order to understand the present and then to plot the future”. Fences,
which was to win a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in 1987, was again located in Pittsburgh but this time
set in the 1950s concerning a former athlete who forbids his son from accepting an athletic scholarship.
In 1990, Wilson wrote The Piano Lesson located during the Great Depression of the 1930s about a
brother and sister fighting over whether to sell a family heirloom; the play won Wilson his second
Pulitzer Prize. Two Trains Running, which concerned the threatened closure of a run-down diner in the
1960s, followed, opening on Broadway in 1992.
In 1994, Wilson moved to Seattle and developed a relationship with the Seattle Repertory Theater, (the
only venue that has produced the entire cycle). A year later, he completed Seven Guitars, exploring the
funeral of a blues guitarist and flashing back to the last week of his life. Whilst writing his eighth play in
the cycle, King Hedley II (1999), Wilson acknowledged the impact it had had on his life: “As I approach
the cycle’s end, I find myself a different person than when I started. The experience of writing the plays
has altered me in ways I cannot yet fully articulate”. He described the work as his first truly ‘male’ play
and revisited many of the characters from Seven Guitars, describing their lives forty years on. Wilson
now only had the two bookends to complete in the cycle, the 1900s and 1990s. He tackled the earlier
period in Gem of the Ocean, in 2003, which featured Aunt Esther, a character who appears, and is
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referred to, several times throughout the plays. The play chronicles African-Americans coming to terms
with emancipation. In June 2005, Wilson told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he had been diagnosed
with liver cancer and only given a few months to live: “I have lived a blessed life, I’m ready”. He
continued to make the final changes to his tenth and final play, Radio Golf, examining black middle class
society (who do not feature in the rest of the cycle) and how distanced they were from the rest of the
black community. Wilson was able to see several productions of his new play at repertory theatres before
he died on 2nd October 2005. Radio Golf opened on Broadway in 2007.
Wilson is partly remembered for how outspoken he was about the need for change in the American
theatre scene. In 1997, he went head-to-head with Robert Brustein (1927-), Artistic Director of The
American Repertory Theater, Massachusetts, in a debate in the Town Hall in New York. Wilson argued
that the plays of a truly black theatre should be: “one, about us; two, by us; three, for us; and four, near
us”. This position was controversial and, Brustein argued, separatist, and the debate provoked wide
discussion in the industry. However, some black activists criticized Wilson for producing his plays in
venues that mostly attracted white audiences. Wilson’s long-held response was that it was not his role to
consider audiences, he just wrote. He was fond of giving the example of whether Picasso considered if
the viewers of his work would be French or Spanish or American or Asian whilst he was painting. As well
as Black Horizons Theater Company, he later started the African Grove Theatre in Dartmouth, New
Hampshire. Before establishing the company, Wilson and his colleagues examined other, mostly
dysfunctional or defunct, black theatres and discovered poor management skills and lack of professional
connections lay at the heart of the problems. Wilson and African Grove’s management spent several years
studying the business skills required and ensured that their board of trustees contained professionals such
as lawyers and those who had access to sources of funding. The company has now established a training
program and hopes to pass this information on to other black artists.
Two weeks after Wilson’s death, the Virginia Theatre on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson
Theatre in honour of the playwright, the first theatre in New York to be named after an AfricanAmerican. The venue’s owner, Rocco Landsman, who first met Wilson in the early 1980s said: “He’s one
of the most important American playwrights ever; I think his work is going to speak to generation after
generation of theatergoers.” Wilson was very fond of recalling an interviewer who asked him: “Well, Mr
Wilson, now that you’ve written these four plays and exhausted the black experience, what are you going
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to write about next?” Wilson responded: “Wait a minute, the black experience is inexhaustible.” It was
this belief which drove the writer and led to the creation of one of the greatest play cycles in the history
of theatre.
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2. THE WORKS OF AUGUST WILSON
1976 Homecoming
1977 Black Bart and the Sacred Hills
1978 Jitney (revised 1982)
1982 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
1984 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
1987 Fences
1990 The Piano Lesson
1991 Two Trains Running
1995 Seven Guitars
1999 Prince Hedley II
2002 How I Learned What I Learned
2003 Gem of the Ocean
2005 Radio Golf
Selected Awards
1987 Pulitzer Prize Fences
Tony Award
Fences
1990 Pulitzer Prize The Piano Lesson
2002 Olivier Award Jitney
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3. SYNOPSIS
ACT ONE
It is Saturday morning in Seth and Bertha’s boarding house. Seth has just returned from working a night
shift at the steel mill, while Bertha is preparing breakfast for the guests. Seth, frustrated that he has not
been able to raise the investment he needs to open up his own shop, turns on long-term resident Bynum,
an elderly root-worker and conjure man whose ‘heebie jeebie’ activities make Seth uncomfortable. Seth
reveals that his real concern lies with the fact that so many white people keep arriving from Europe and
end up making more money than him. As a man born of Northern freed parents, Seth has mixed feelings
towards the many hundreds of African Americans coming up from the South, who began migrating North
after the abolition of slavery.
Danny Sapani as Seth and Adjoa Andoh as Bertha
Rutherford Selig arrives to do business with Seth. He is a salesman for whom Seth makes domestic
household items. Bynum accosts Selig, who has a reputation as a ‘people finder’ and asks him why he has
not found his ‘shiny man’. Bynum goes on to tell Selig and Bertha the story of how he met a shiny man, a
man full of light, who led him in a vision to a great ocean where he met his daddy. Bynum’s daddy gave
him the ‘binding song’, a way of healing people by binding them together. This, he says, is his life’s work,
and when he sees the shiny man again, he will know that his work is complete. Selig says goodbye and
heads off downriver.
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Delroy Lindo as Bynum
Jeremy, another resident in the house, arrives home. He is a buoyant young man from North Carolina,
with a passion for guitar and women. On the previous night the police fined him and threw him in jail just
for being out on the streets. Bynum advises him to go down to Seefus’s bar and play guitar in a contest,
but Seth and Bertha warn him to keep his head down and not to go looking for any more trouble.
Nathaniel Martello-White as Jeremy
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Herald Loomis and his eleven year old daughter, Zonia, arrive at the boarding house looking for a room.
Seth takes an instant dislike to the man, but Bertha, seeing the young girl, ushers them both in. Loomis
says he is looking for his wife, Martha. No one in the house admits to knowing her, although Seth
realises that the little girl looks just like Martha Pentecost who used to stay with them.
Jessica Richardson as Zonia and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Herald Loomis
Mattie, a distressed young woman, arrives to consult Bynum. She asks him to help bring her man back to
her. Bynum cannot do this; instead he gives her a herb that will help her forget all about him. Jeremy
overhears their conversation and offers to keep Mattie company for a while. They make plans to go to
Seefus’s bar that evening.
Out in the yard Zonia makes friends with a lonely boy called Reuben, who persuades her to go and see his
pigeon coop with him, in spite of her father’s instructions to stay around the house.
The following Saturday Rutherford Selig returns to the house. Loomis asks Selig to find his wife for him
in one week. Selig takes down the details of his wife and asks for a dollar in payment. Seth tells Bertha
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that he knows where Loomis’s wife is but refuses to tell him, because he doesn’t trust him. After Loomis
has paid Selig, Bertha tells him he has wasted his dollar and that Selig only finds people he has already
taken away on his horse and cart.
Daniel Cerqueira as Selig
The next morning, Jeremy, flush with his success playing guitar at Seefus’s, asks Seth if Mattie can move
in with him. Seth agrees and Bynum counsels Jeremy about his attitudes towards women, at which point
Molly Cunningham arrives looking for a room. Molly is beautiful, independent and unabashed in her
confession that she likes male company. Jeremy is bewitched by her.
All the residents except Loomis gather for Sunday dinner, before beginning a Juba, a celebratory dance
that recalls their African heritage. It quickly becomes an invocation of the Holy Ghost, at which point
Loomis interrupts their singing and drags his daughter out of the dance. He tells them about a vision he
has had in which bones rose up out of the water. Bynum helps Loomis to reveal this vision, which he too
has shared, of bones walking onto the land, collapsing and becoming flesh. These are the African slaves
who drowned mid-passage, brought to dry land and resurrected in the vision, so that they can at last walk
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upon the land and be free. In the wake of the vision Loomis attempts to stand up, but finds his legs will
not support him. He collapses.
Adjoa Andoh as Bertha, Leah Ocran as Zonia, Danny Sapani as Seth, Demi Oyediran as Mattie, Nathaniel
Martello-White as Jeremy and Petra Letang as Molly
ACT TWO
In the morning, the residents of the house try to come to terms with the previous night’s events. Seth
threatens to throw Loomis and his daughter out, but Bertha and Bynum calm him down. Loomis refuses
to leave until Saturday when he hopes Selig will arrive with news of his wife. Molly comes down for
breakfast and tries to engage Bynum in conversation. It is clear that she wants to know more about his
healing powers but is too scared to ask directly for his help. Bynum leaves and Molly turns her attention
to Mattie, who just wants to leave for work. Molly asks why she has to work if Jeremy is looking after
her, to which Mattie replies that Jeremy is just keeping her company until her man returns, and leaves
Molly alone. Jeremy comes in a little while later, having been fired from his job for not letting a white
man take a cut of his pay. He has an argument with Seth about his future and decides that he can make it
better on the road. He woos Molly and asks her to come travelling with him. Molly lays out her rules: she
will not work and she will not go back South.
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Later that afternoon Bynum and Seth are playing dominoes in the yard when Loomis comes in. Bynum is
singing a song that causes Loomis severe discomfort. Bynum sings the song to provoke him into telling
his story. The song is about a kidnapper called Joe Turner who would capture black men and force them
to work for him. Bynum says he knows this is what happened to Loomis. Loomis breaks down and tells
how he was captured by Joe Turner’s gang in 1901 while he was preaching to some men on the road. He
was taken away from his wife and child and was not released until 1908 when he found that Martha had
gone North with the church and left Zonia with her mother. He tells Bynum that he needs to find Martha
in order to come to terms with what has happened to him.
Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Herald Loomis and Delroy Lindo as Bynum
The next day, Mattie finds that Jeremy has run off with Molly. Bynum and Bertha try to console her.
Loomis tells Mattie that he has seen the way she has been looking at him and suggests they go to bed
together. Mattie is unsure but full of hope that this man might be the one for her. Yet as Loomis tries to
caress her he shrinks away; something is still keeping him chained on the inside and preventing him from
touching another woman.
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The following morning, Reuben tells Zonia how, after hearing Bynum talking to the wind, he was visited
by the ghost of Seth’s mother telling him to let his pigeons go. She said that they belonged to Reuben’s
friend, Eugene, who died, and that Eugene could not rest until the pigeons were freed. Zonia does not
know whether or not to believe Reuben, who gets cross and calls her ‘Spider’. As they squabble they
realise they will miss each other and both are sad that Zonia must leave on Saturday. Reuben asks Zonia
for a kiss, which she hesitantly gives him. This, he says, means that she is his girl and he will come
looking for her in the future.
Saturday comes round and Loomis is waiting for Selig’s arrival. When he does not come, he leaves with
Zonia. Bertha celebrates with laughter, and tries to cheer a distraught Mattie. Seth returns from work,
happy to see that Loomis has left but surprised to see him still standing up on the corner of the street
looking back at the house. Suddenly Selig arrives with Martha, having found her at a church in a town
upriver. Loomis storms back into the house and Martha, overcome, defends her decision to leave Zonia
with her mother and move North with the church. She says she had intended to return for Zonia but by
the time she got there, Loomis had taken her.
Riann Steele as Martha
Loomis gives Zonia to Martha and prepares to leave. But when Martha goes to Bynum to thank him for
his help in bringing Zonia back to her, Loomis is shocked. He accuses Bynum of keeping him bound to
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the road. Bynum insists that he did not bind Loomis, only the girl to Martha. Loomis takes out a knife,
struggling with the revelation that he has only bound himself to the road and that there is no one but
himself that he can blame for his continuing suffering, and set him free.
While Martha preaches the mercy of Jesus to him, Loomis rejects the church and cuts himself with the
knife. He smears himself with his blood, looks down and realises that he is, at last, standing, freed from
the psychic torture of his years of enslavement. He leaves the boarding house a freed man. Mattie rushes
after him. Bynum watches, overcome with emotion, and names Loomis as the shiny man he has been
searching for all this time.
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4. CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
Cast
Bertha
Adjoa Andoh
Reuben(shared)
Brandon Benoit-Joyce
Rutherford Selig
Daniel Cerqueira
Herald Loomis
Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
Molly
Petra Letang
Bynum
Delroy Lindo
Jeremy
Nathaniel Martello-White
Reuben (shared)
Tapiwa Mugweni
Zonia Loomis (shared)
Leah Ocran
Mattie
Demi Oyediran
Zonia Loomis (shared)
Jessica Richardson
Seth
Danny Sapani
Martha
Riann Steele
Creative Team
Direction
David Lan
Set
Patrick Burnier
Costumes
Gabrielle Dalton
Light
Mike Gunning
Sound
Gareth Fry
Composer
Tim Sutton
Movement Choreographer
Thea Nerissa Barnes
Casting
Julia Horan
Dialect
Neil Swain
Assistant Director
Peter Cant
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5. JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the second play in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle. First staged in 1984
at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, it was reworked several times before opening at the
Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1988. The play was directed by Wilson’s regular collaborator,
Lloyd Richards (see Chapter 1) and starred Delroy Lindo as Herald Loomis, who is also in the Young
Vic’s production but now playing Bynum Walker. The play was nominated for a Tony Award and Drama
Desk Award, and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, all in the Best Play category. It was
revived last year on Broadway to great acclaim and was last seen in the UK at the Tricycle Theatre in
North West London in 1990.
The original production gained great accolades in the press, but the audiences did not respond to the play
as well as the critics and the play only ran for 105 performances. Frank Rich, reviewing the original
production for the New York Times, wrote that moments such as Loomis’ spiritual climax at the end of
Act One were “occasions of true mystery and high drama, and they take Mr. Wilson’s characters and
writing to a dizzying place they haven’t been before. That place is both literally and figuratively Africa”.
He goes on to say that “in Joe Turner, the clash between the American and the African shakes white and
black theatergoers as violently as it has shaken the history we’ve all shared.” Many observers have since
identified this as the core reason why the play did not do very well at the box office. Peter Wolfe, author
of the 1999 book August Wilson, claimed: “Playgoers comfortable enough with the African retentions
built into Wilson’s two earlier plays recoiled from the ethnicity of Joe Turner.” Wilson’s subject matter in
Joe Turner, newly freed blacks migrating from the south to the north, is more complex than the racial
issues explored in Jitney or Ma Rainey. The reality of the slave trade is still a raw subject for American
audiences. The play’s portrayal of spirituality is difficult for some parts of American society to watch. The
concept of Bynum’s voodoo activities (particularly spilling the blood of the pigeons), in conjunction with
Loomis’ spiritual wrestle at the end of Act One (and later denunciation of Christianity), are examples of
the strong links to Africa the play contains. Wilson even specifies in the stage directions that the Juba
song [a traditional African-American plantation dance] in Act One should be “as African as possible”.
When reviewing the revival of the play last year on Broadway, critic Ben Brantley noted that it is this
convincing Africana that makes the play superior to Wilson’s other long-running Broadway hits, Fences
and The Piano Lesson, which bookended Joe Turner in New York. He also notes that the play manages to
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“seamlessly blend the ordinary and extraordinary” whereas the others resort to “melodrama and
sentimentality.”
Wilson’s inspiration for the play was taken from a painting by Romare Bearden (see Chapter 9) called
the ‘Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket’ (1978), which was the original working title for the play and a visual
source the Young Vic team have tried to incorporate into their production (see Chapter 10).
Romare Bearden’s Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket
The picture portrays a boarding house with various figures, including a dejected, solitary man; Wilson’s
inspiration for the character of Loomis: “It occurred to me that all the people in the painting were going
out, and they were going to leave this man alone just when what he needed most was human contact. And
I decided to write a boarding-house play.”
The title Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is borrowed from a blues song by W.C. Handy (1873-1958), a
composer and musician who is often referred to as “Father of the Blues”. The Joe Turner of the song
refers to the historical figure of Joe Turney, the brother of Tennessee governor, Peter Turney (18271903). Joe Turney was in charge of taking Negro prisoners from Memphis to the prison at Nashville.
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However, it was alleged that he frequently sold these prisoners to farmers in need of labour en route,
claiming to the authorities they had absconded. Indeed, it is also alleged that many of the prisoners’
crimes were fixed. A well-known device was to start an illegal gambling game on the street, drawing in
players and then arrest them. W.C. Handy explained the song’s title in his autobiography: “That night,
perhaps, there would be a weeping and wailing among the dusky belles [women]. If one of them chanced
to ask a neighbour what had become of the sweet good man, she was likely to receive the pat reply, ‘They
tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone.’”
W.C. Handy
The central theme of Joe Turner is about the search for identity. As mentioned in Chapter 8, the
emancipation of slaves did not, in the majority of cases, lead to equality (as Jeremy’s encounter with
blackmail at his road building job illustrates). Freed slaves had to fight for their new position in society.
Some, like Seth, had been born in the North and are already adjusted to the world of white capitalism.
He runs his business economically, constantly succeeds in striking better deals with Selig, a white
character, for his metal, and bemoaning his colleagues lack of vision. He also knows that in order for the
boarding-house to maximize custom it must maintain a moral reputation. The other characters try to
rediscover or cling to their African roots, as Bynum’s spirituality suggests. The search for identity
manifests itself in the nomadic instinct of many of the characters and the imagery of the endless roads
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being built and walked upon. As slaves were released in the South, for the first time they suddenly had
the opportunity to travel wherever they chose. Wilson reveals that this freedom is not just liberating, it
also leads to a population without a home, struggling to find a place to belong, miles away from their
ancestral lands. This search for identity is also linked to the necessity of finding, as Bynum says, one’s
song, the song in question can be interpreted as one’s purpose in life, or one’s soul. The New York Times
critic summarised: “Loomis’s history has mournful, angry echoes of the theft of human identity that was
institutionalised slavery.” Wilson, in an interview given in 1988, confirmed: “The seven years that Herald
Loomis spent with Joe Turner can be read as a metaphor for the 400 years of slavery, Loomis is seeking
to reassemble himself.”
Wilson often stated that Joe Turner was his favourite play in the Pittsburgh Cycle: “After I wrote it, I
said to myself: ‘If I die tomorrow, I have fulfilled myself as an artist.’”
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6. THE PITTSBURGH CYCLE
The Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes known as the Century Cycle) is the collective title for August Wilson’s
ten plays which chart the African-American experience in the 20th century. Nine of the plays are located
in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where Wilson lived for much of his early life (the exception, Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, is set in 1920s Chicago). Wilson wrote the plays out of sequence, only deciding
to attempt the cycle after completing the third instalment, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Asked later in
life if he had therefore felt pressure from knowing he had to complete the whole cycle, he responded:
“No, it kept me safe, in the sense that I was never finished. I never had to worry about what my next play
was going to be and come up with an idea.”
Hill District, Pittsburgh, in the 1950s
Wilson did no historical research when approaching his plays which, when considering that the cycle is all
about the historical context of each decade, surprised some readers. However, Wilson justified his
position: “If you do research, you’re limited by it… It’s like putting on a straitjacket”. With Joe Turner,
for example, he explained that just assumed people had horses not cars, and as people arrived in
northern cities they would need to room at boarding houses - he just adopted a logical commonsense
approach. Rather than historical research, Wilson’s starting point for most of the plays was inventing a
single line of dialogue which intrigued him. He would then try to work out what kind of person would say
those words and who would they say them to - from that initial place he began to develop characters, plot
and themes. For example, Two Trains Running (1991) started with the line:
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“When I left out of Jackson I said I was gonna buy me a V-8 Ford and drive by Mr Henry Ford’s
house and honk the horn. If anybody come to the window I was gonna wave. Then I was going out and
buy me a 30.06 [gun], come on back to Jackson and drive up to Mr Stovall’s house and honk the horn.
Only this time I wasn’t waving.”
Wilson then considered: “Who is talking? Who is he talking to? Who is Stovall? Why does he want to get
a gun and go see him, etcetera. In answering the questions the play begins to emerge.”
The Hill District plays a prominent role in the plays. As a teenager, Wilson discovered a pool hall called
Pat’s Place in his local neighbourhood where elderly African-American men would relax. Wilson enjoyed
spending time there, listening to their stories and philosophies on life, and asking them questions. He
called them his professors and they called him Youngblood (who was later to become a character in
Jitney). Wilson once wrote a short story consisting of a single sentence called ‘The Best Blues Singer in
the World’: “The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.” This
meditation recalls the hardships of the predominantly immigrant community which inhabited the Hill
District and Wilson said that all his plays were essentially rewriting this same story.
A few characters are reincorporated several times during the cycle and the most memorable of these is
Aunt Ester. She is first mentioned, but not seen, in Two Trains Running (1992) where she is said to be
349 years old. The play is set in 1969 and this therefore marks her birth as the same year that Africans
were first transported to America; in effect, she is Africa. Wilson explained: “She embodies the wisdom
and traditions of all those Africans, starting with the first one.” The characters in King Hedley II (set in
the 1980s) describe her death, although she is not seen on stage, noting that the pathway to her house is
overgrown and you can no longer see her front door from the street. By killing the most emblematic
figure before the end of the cycle, Wilson is emphasising that contemporary African-Americans are no
longer attuned to their heritage, that they have forgotten their ancestral roots. Aunt Ester is the central
figure in Gem of the Ocean (2003), the play set in the first decade of the 20th century. The cycle is mainly
populated by male characters, (in fact Wilson has been accused by some academics of sexism in placing
female characters on the periphery of the action). However, the matriarchal Aunt Ester does emerge as
the predominant figure you remember when reading or watching the cycle. Wilson described her
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invention towards the end of the cycle as completely affecting the way he viewed the remaining plays. He
suggests that all the other characters he had created, before and after her appearance, essentially
became her children.
1900s
Gem of the Ocean (2003)
Set in Aunt Ester’s house in the Hill District. Two men arrive on her doorstep. Solly Two Kings makes a
living by selling dog excrement and is in love with Aunt Ester. Citizen Barlow has committed a crime and
is seeking redemption. Aunt Ester helps heal him by talking to the mystical City of Bones.
“Gem has passages of transporting beauty. But it is the first of Mr Wilson’s dramas which lack people
whose flesh feels as palpable as your own.” [Ben Brantley, NY Times.]
1910s
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986)
Located in Seth and Bertha Holly’s boarding house, Herald Loomis arrives with his young daughter
searching for his wife. Many of the boarding house’s guests are looking for something following
emancipation and local spiritualist, Bynum Walker, suggests that it is his inner-song which Loomis
should be searching for.
“As the occupants of the Pittsburgh boardinghouse are partly assimilated into white America and partly
in thrall to a collective African unconscious, so Mr Wilson’s play is a mixture of the well-made
naturalistic boardinghouse drama and the mystical, non-Western theatre of ritual and metaphor.” [Frank
Rich, NY Times.]
1920s
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984)
Set in a recording studio in Chicago, Ma Rainey’s band await her late arrival to the despair of her white
producers. Young Levee dreams of starting his own band supported by Rainey’s producer and argues with
the veteran players, including Toledo. The diva, Ma Rainey, arrives, making demands and soon the studio
is in disarray. She eventually fires Levee from the band for arguing with her, and the record producer
tells him he is no longer willing to record his work. In a fit of rage, Levee stabs Toledo to death.
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“This play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims – and it floats on the same
authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates.” [Frank Rich, NY Times.]
1930s
The Piano Lesson (1987)
A brother and sister have inherited a family heirloom, a piano, with faces carved into its body by their
great-grandfather of his wife and son who were sold into slavery so the white landowner could afford the
instrument. The brother, Boy Willie, wants to sell the piano to buy the land which his family worked on.
The sister, Bernice, cannot bear to part with it.
“The central fact of black American life – the long shadow of slavery – transposes the voices of Mr
Wilson’s characters, and of the indelible actors who inhabit them, to the key that rattles history and
shakes the audience on both sides of the racial divide.” [Frank Rich, NY Times.]
1940s
Seven Guitars (1995)
Located at the wake of blues guitarist, Floyd Barton, the action flashes back to tell the story of the last
year of his life. It was a turbulent time, since recording a hit song for a white record label he has left his
girlfriend, been arrested, spent his money and pawned his guitar. The label asks him to record another
song and he returns, determined to right his wrongs with disastrous consequences.
“Seven Guitars ambles with deceptive ease as the friends laze around, eat, drink and spin tales in the Hill
district backyard.” [Vincent Canby, NY Times.]
1950s
Fences (1985)
Troy is the head of the Maxson family and a sanitation worker. The play explores his relationship with his
wife, Rose, and his son who dreams of accepting a college sports scholarship. Troy had also once
dreamed of taking such a scholarship and tries to discourage his son in favour of a more secure career the two men’s turbulent relationship explodes.
“The struggle between father and son over conflicting visions of black identity, aspirations and values is
the play’s narrative fulcrum, and a paradigm of violent divisions that would later tear apart a society.”
[Frank Rich, NY Times.]
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1960s
Two Trains Running (1990)
Set in Memphis Green’s rundown diner, the owner is bracing himself for a battle with the local
authorities. They have offered him an unfair price so that they can tear down the building to make way
for the area’s regeneration. His customers and staff all deal with white suppression in different ways - his
waitress, Risa, seeks solace in religion; his friend Sterling, in the civil rights movement. Memphis is
determined he will get a fair price for his business.
“Two Trains Running captures a racially divided country as it came apart.” [Frank Rich, NY Times.]
1970s
Jitney (1982)
Set in an illegal taxi-cab firm (no licensed cars want to drive into the Hill District), the drivers sit around
and philosophise about the world. Trouble starts to brew as the owner’s son arrives after being released
from prison.
“Real life, whether comic or tragic, is the best show in town in the Hill District. Mr Wilson’s characters
get as much of a thrill from sitting in the audience of observers, kibitzing and criticizing and retelling
local dramas, as they do from being the major players.” [Ben Brantley, NY Times, revised for the 2000
production.]
1980s
King Hedley II (1999)
The play catches up with the unfulfilled ambitions of the characters from Seven Guitars 40 years later.
The centre of the action concerns an ex-con trying to sell a batch of stolen refrigerators in order to set up
his own video store business.
“The words are spoken of course, but these are big, operatic arias. You would need to look to a Verdi to
find a more stirringly musical fusion of public crises and private pain... The plot that connects those
magnificent arias is not always easy to understand or, when you do understand it, even credible.” [Ben
Brantley, NY Times.]
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1990s
Radio Golf (2005)
Harmond Wilks is a property developer intending to clean-up the Hill District. He is also about to run as
Pittsburgh’s first black mayor. When he learns that one of the condemned houses used to belong to
legendary spiritualist Aunt Ester, he rethinks his plans and life.
“Mr Wilson intends that at least three of his characters sound as out of place as they do... They may be
transacting business in that section of Pittsburgh where most of Mr Wilson’s plays have been set. But
they have forgotten its language, an organic poetry shaped by decades of hard living... In Mr Wilson’s
world, that’s the same thing as losing their souls.” [Ben Brantley, NY Times.]
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7. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is located in Pittsburgh, now the second largest city in the state of
Pennsylvania, located in the North East of the USA. In 1911, when the play is set, the nation was in the
midst of great socio-political change.
Between 1861 and 1865, Civil War raged on the one hand between the Northern states, who wanted to
end slavery, and on the other the Southern States, who did not and instead wanted to make their own
policies by becoming independent from the Union. The Northerners won the battle, but there were an
estimated 620,000 fatalities, the highest number of Americans killed in any war. Afterwards began the
period known as Reconstruction, the reintegration of the Southern states into the Union and the
enforcement of laws, including most controversially, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which granted all
citizens the same rights as white men (see Chapter 8).
Part of Reconstruction involved increasing the infrastructure of the USA, particularly in the area of
transportation, and this led to the Second Industrial Revolution. This is illustrated in Joe Turner where
the building of roads is a major industry in Pittsburgh. America had the perfect natural resources: a
diverse climate, an abundance of land, rivers, canals and coastal waters to transport goods, and natural
energy. It also had an abundance of labour and capital which was to make it the world’s leading
industrial nation. Pittsburgh began to produce steel in 1875; by 1911 it manufactured half of America’s
output. The infamous fog which covered the city at the time was seen as a sign of success and was not to
be cleaned up until environmentalism became a concern in the mid 1930s.
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Pittsburgh was once known as “hell with the lid off.”
As an increasing number of railways were built, the populations of towns and cities began to swell
(termed Urbanisation) as people were drawn towards new employment opportunities. Developments in
technology led to new means of communication, including the telephone and telegraph, and innovative
organisation of the workforce, such as Henry Ford’s1 moving assembly line for the mass production of
vehicles. Technology began to take the place of skilled labourers in the workplace, so workers with trades
(such as Seth’s metal work in Joe Turner) began to struggle to find employment; companies now needed
unskilled labourers to work alongside machines and competition for jobs grew as the qualifications
needed were little. Alongside Ford, other individuals began to emerge as wealthy industrial barons
including Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) a steel tycoon who made his fortune in Pittsburgh and John
Rockefeller (1839-1937) an oil magnate who famously said: “The growth of a large business is merely a
survival of the fittest.” Despite the overall increase in America’s wealth, the gap between rich and poor
was increasing, hence the title ‘Gilded Age’, coined by author Mark Twain (1835-1910), designed to
differentiate it from the concept of a ‘Golden Age’.
1
Henry Ford, 1863-1947, founder of the Ford Motor Company.
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As America’s economy continued to grow, the country became a leading destination for immigrants from
around the world, fleeing persecution or seeking a better quality of life. An estimated 37 million arrived
from Europe, Russia, Canada and the Far East between 1840 and 1920. The vast majority entered
through the ports located in and around New York and consequently settled in cities along the eastern
coast, including Pittsburgh. New arrivals tended to choose cities where immigrants from their country of
origin had already settled, and Pittsburgh attracted a large number of German immigrants (such as
Wilson’s father). Henry J. Heinz was to become the most famous of these founding the H.J. Heinz
Company in 1872. African-American migration did not really take place in Pittsburgh until the early 20th
century (see Chapter 8). The population of Pittsburgh had swelled from 49,221 in 1860 to 533,905 by
1910. The new inhabitants brought a wealth of multiculturalism to the city which is still in evidence
today. The downside, both in Pittsburgh and the country as a whole, was that there was an unprecedented
number of people looking for work; unemployment began to grow and wages to decrease. Most people
worked at least a 10-hour days (12 hours in the steel industry) and the number of children working
doubled between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Living quarters were overcrowded and the USA
had the highest fatality rate of accidents at work in the world.
A consequence of this was the development of the Labour Movement, designed to protect worker’s rights
by reducing hours, improving conditions and increasing wages. Strikes often turned violent and
Pittsburgh suffered intense conflict as riots led to property being destroyed and numerous deaths. The
unions managed to achieve very little until the era of Progressivism (1890-1917) when leading members
of the well-educated middle-classes also began to argue for reform. State governments began to pass
laws designed to improve living standards, particularly those of children. Although President William
Howard Taft (1857-1930) was in power in 1911 when Joe Turner is set, it was his predecessor,
President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), who had had a major impact on American life. His tough
but fair domestic policies were summed up by his ‘Square Deal’ which aimed to control large
corporations and protect workers and consumers.
Alongside a reputation for manufacture, Pittsburgh has always been known as a city of culture and
education. The Pittsburgh Academy was first established in 1787 and was accredited as the University of
Pittsburgh in 1908. Although none of the characters in Joe Turner would have benefited from the
institute, theatre companies funded by the university first produced Wilson’s early plays in the 1970s. The
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magnates who had made their money in the city occasionally also invested in the cultural life of the city.
Andrew Carnegie, who, as previously mentioned, made his fortune from producing steel in the city,
established the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in 1895. This was where Wilson was later to educate
himself in the works of the black writers who were to have a major influence on his playwriting career.
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8. THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
During an interview about Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 1988, Wilson remarked that: “The seven years
that Herald Loomis spent with Joe Turner can be read as a metaphor for the 400 years of slavery,
Loomis is seeking to reassemble himself.” He went on to comment: “You’ll find very little of this on the
bookshelves, in the literature of theatre that speaks of this. Theater is the place where I work. It is my
life. It is part of my responsibility to address those shelves, the gaps on those shelves, so that the work
continues to expand.” The subject matter which runs through the Pittsburgh Cycle is an exploration of
those people of African descent and their complex relationship with America. The contemporary term
African-American refers to those people who were transported to the USA between 1619 and 1865 as
part of the slave trade. However, people from other countries of origin such as the Caribbean or South
America also chose to be identified as African-American due to their shared sense of history. Between
1940 and 1970, there was another influx of immigrants from Africa who are also referred to as AfricanAmerican.
The slave trade has a long history in Africa as for centuries it was common practise for rival African
states to sell prisoners of war into slavery. In the late 15th century, following the discovery of the New
World, the trade was made transcontinental as European and American slave traders began transporting
Africans to meet the demand for labour in the plantations. Jamestown in Virginia was the first colony
which imported Africans but they were classified as servants because they had agreed to work in return
for a passage to the New World. They were then released from service after a period of time. However,
due to the impracticality of replacing freed Africans and the resources they consumed once liberated, this
system was soon replaced by slavery. It is estimated that between 10 and 12 million Africans were
transported. Only 3% came to the Americas - the vast majority were put to work in the West Indies where
the conditions were much worse and the death rate higher. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first
colony in the Americas to legalise slavery and others soon followed, introducing laws which enforced that
the children of slaves were automatically slaves themselves for life. The slaves had little rights, although
in theory it was illegal to kill a slave and some white plantation owners did receive the death penalty for
committing this crime. Slaves who had previously been freed or had escaped tended to settle in the
Eastern states, forming several free black communities. By 1700 slaves made up 10% of the population
of the Americas (about 25,000).
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During the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the colonies in the Americas fought for
independence from British rule. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the country’s third president, drafted
the Declaration of Independence in 1776 which contained the infamous words: “We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The hypocrisy of
this belief was not lost on the slaves and many joined the war on the Loyalist British side. After the
Americans won their independence, the treaty demanded the return of property which included slaves, but
the British helped an estimated 4,000 former slaves escape to Canada, Jamaica and Britain. The newly
formed U.S.A. began to build its constitution that included restricting the rights of free blacks from
voting or attending public educational institutions. However, many northern states also began to
recognise the duplicity of the Declaration of Independence and passed emancipation acts between 1780
and 1804, freeing slaves. The impact of these laws was gradual, but from the 59,000 free blacks in
1790, the number had risen to 186,446 by 1810.
Simultaneously, the number of slaves in the southern states underwent a 70% increase as the invention of
the cotton gin (a machine which could separate cotton fibres from seeds) led to dramatic increase in
production and therefore a demand for labour. The Fugitive Slave Act (1793) specified that any black
person could be claimed as an escaped slave if no white person was willing to testify that this was
incorrect; this led to an increase in kidnapping. By 1819, there were 11 free and 11 slave states. This led
to a split between the northern Union states (those who wanted the southern and northern states to
remain unified) represented by the government, and southern Confederates states (who wanted their
independence). The government sent troops to the south to suppress the threat of unrest, but violence
erupted leading to the American Civil War (see Chapter 7). The Emancipation Proclamation (1862-3)
was passed during the war by President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) which freed slaves in the
southern states and was followed by amendments which granted African-Americans full citizenship.
During the process of Reconstruction, the black population throughout the country began to make strides
towards equality, establishing businesses, voting (this was still for men only, in line with the rest of the
country), buying land and attaining positions of authority in the local infrastructure.
These advancements only lasted a decade. Soon southern states rejected the policy changes and through
violence and intimidation, directed at both African-Americans and their white sympathisers, forced the
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government to withdraw Unionist troops from the south. Founded in 1867, the Klu Klux Klan was the
most notorious of these organisations, employing lynching and cross burning in a reign of terror across
the south. It has been estimated that as many as 20,000 African-Americans may have been killed by
vigilante groups. The states soon began to introduce new rulings, which became known as the Jim Crow
laws, aimed at segregating society by race. Black and white citizens were not allowed to share public
facilities such as toilets and drinking fountains, and were required to sit in different areas on public
transport and in restaurants. The facilities that were established for the black community were frequently
substandard. This practise soon spread to racial segregation in the military and education.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the black community began to organise resistance. Led by W. E. B.
Du Bois (1868-1963), the first African-American to graduate from Harvard University, the civil rights
movement established a manifesto which demanded full civil liberties. The faction led to the creation of
the National Association of the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in 1909 which still exists
today. The Great Migration began in 1910 as five million African-Americans leaving the southern states
in search of a better quality of life in the north, as depicted in Joe Turner. Pittsburgh’s north-eastern
location meant that it was not until 1916 that African-American migrates began to arrive in great
numbers. They settled predominantly in the Hill District area of the city where the Pittsburgh Cycle takes
place. Wylie Avenue in the district became the centre of black culture and achieved a national reputation
for jazz, attracting greats such as Duke Ellington (1899-1974).
Wylie Avenue, 1932
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The foundation of the NAACP was a significant step on the road to equality, but it took many more
decades before civil rights were truly gained. In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance developed from the
concentration of black intellectuals and culturists settling in New York, and produced great artists such
as Langston Hughes and Romare Bearden (see Chapter 9). The profound contribution of AfricanAmericans during World War II also helped to change attitudes during the 1940s. The Montgomery Bus
Boycott against racial segregation on public transport in 1955; the college graduation of black student,
Fannie E. Motley, in 1956; and the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 (where Martin
Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech) were also all crucial moments in the journey
towards equal rights. The 1964 ’Civil Rights Act which banned discrimination in employment, and the
Voting Rights Act the following year, were both aimed at legislating equality. Empowerment has been
gained politically: Douglas Wilder became the first African-American governor in U.S. history in 1989;
in 2001, the number of black mayors in the country reached 434; and Barack Obama’s election as 44th
President in 2008 signalled a new era in the relationship between those of African heritage and America.
In Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie, the great-grandson of a slave, exclaims: “That’s all I
wanted. To sit down and be at ease with everything. But I wasn’t born to that. When I go by on the road
and something ain’t right, then I got to try and fix it.” The character’s pledge to determine his own future
echoes that of Wilson and all African-Americans who have fought for equality. Wilson’s cultural heritage
is the guiding factor in his work:
“Before one can become an artist one must first be. It is being in all facets, its many definitions
that endow the artist with an immutable sense of himself that is necessary for the accomplishments of his
tasks. Simply put, art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired. Before I am anything, a man
or playwright, I am an African-American. The tributary streams of culture, history and experience have
provided me with the materials out of which I make my art.”
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9. THE INFLUENCES OF AUGUST WILSON
Most playwrights would acknowledge that they were first inspired to write for the stage whilst watching a
play that moved them deeply, but Wilson had never seen a professional production when he started Black
Horizons Theater Company with his friend, Rob Penny. He had read a few, and seen some amateur
attempts by his friends, but it was not until eight years later that he would see his first professional
production, Sizwe Banzi is Dead (by South African playwright, Athol Fugard, 1932-) at the Pittsburgh
Public Theater. Even once he was an established playwright in his own right, he never became a
theatregoer and claimed, with the exception of his own plays, he only ever watched six professional
productions. He believed this liberated him as an artist; he was not restrained by the perceived notions of
what a play should be. Instead, he said his main influences were his “four B’s – the primary one being the
blues; then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.”
The Blues
When Wilson was 20 years old, he lived across the street from a second-hand shop where he would buy
cheap records; he estimated his collection was at least 2000 strong at the time. One day he came across
‘Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues’ and it changed the way he thought about African-American life.
Bessie Smith (1894-1937) is considered one of the greatest singers of the 1930s. Wilson recognized his
own community in her music: “Somehow there was something about them that came through in Bessie
that I had never known. I thought: ‘This is mine.’”
Bessie Smith
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This realisation was to have a great effect on Wilson’s writing as suddenly he found himself writing
dialogue which truly captured the rhythms, intonations and speech patterns of the people of the Hill
District. The blues emerged in the late 19th century in the Deep South from spirituals, work songs and
chants. The name originates from a colloquial term for feeling melancholy. Wilson described the genre
as: “Simplicity and profundity at the same time. It’s a cultural response to the world that contains our
world view and our ideas of life. If we disappeared and someone found these recordings, they could tell
about our pain, our pleasure, our God, our devil.” The ideas and attitudes of all Wilson’s characters are
expressed in the words and emotions of the blues; he called the form his bible. Alongside the musicality
of language, Wilson has used the art form several times in the plotting of his plays. Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom concerns a blues singer, Floyd Richards; the lead character in Seven Guitars is a blues musician;
and the title of Joe Turner is the title of a blues song and its central concept is of locating one’s own
song.
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine poet and short story writer. He created fantasy,
dreamlike worlds from his vast reading of western philosophy and theology. As a young boy, he had seen
an engraving of a circular labyrinth with no end that became a lifelong, recurring nightmare. This led to
his obsession with the concept of time which he believed was not simply linear, but parallel and
convergent.
Jorge Luis Borges
His work, the most famous of which are Ficciones (1945) and The Aleph (1949), reflected his view of
time and contain visions of mazes, labyrinths, mirrors and forked pathways. He is associated with the
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movement of magic realism, which combines magical and realistic qualities to gain a deeper
understanding of reality. Wilson explained Borges’ influence: “I learned that you can be specific as to a
time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honour,
duty and betrayal.”
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka’s (1934-) influence on Wilson was very different from that Borges. Baraka was born in
New Jersey and became the leader of the Black Art Movement in Harlem during the 1960s. Born
Everett LeRoy Jones, he changed his name to Amiri Baraka to reflect his African origins.
Amiri Baraka
He was a poet, essayist and playwright who tackled issues of racism and liberation in a committed and
unrelenting way. He is a controversial figure - some of his work has been interpreted as expressing that
violence is the only way for black people to achieve equality; it also appear to condone the rape of white
women and contain homophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments. Baraka was later to quantify and distance
himself from these earlier works: “The anger was part of the mindset created by, first, the assassination
of John Kennedy… followed by the assassination of Malcolm X, amidst the lynching, and the national
oppression.” Despite Baraka’s status as a playwright, Wilson first discovered his poetry reading Black
Magic in 1967: “I wore that book out… I carried it wherever I went.” Baraka’s ability to combine
beautiful prose with profound sociological ideas inspired Wilson: “I learned that all art is political,
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though I don’t write political plays.” He later familiarised himself with Baraka’s writing for the stage,
acknowledging that it “contributed a lot to my thinking, just in terms of getting stuff on the page.”
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was an African-American artist. Whilst at university, he managed to
combine his two passions of art and baseball. Upon graduation, he was offered the chance to play
baseball professionally, but only if he was willing to pretend to be white (he was very pale skinned). He
refused and instead threw himself into developing as an artist. Later he studied philosophy in Europe
which greatly influenced his art and he began producing abstract pictures, specialising in collages which
were heavily influenced by traditional African art.
Romare Bearden
Wilson encountered Bearden through his book, The Prevalence of Ritual, in 1977 which featured
depictions of routine black life such as funerals, weddings, streets scenes and home life: “What I saw was
black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a
language that was vibrant and which made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and
exalted its presence.” Bearden was educated in, and had family ties to, Pittsburgh and Wilson felt he
recognized the people he saw in Bearden’s work. The playwright was inspired by a quote Bearden had
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given: “I try and explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common in all culture.”
Wilson has also often been credited with presenting universal themes through the eyes of a specific social
group. His plays, and Joe Turner specifically, have been compared to a collage; a fragmented view of an
American culture via Africa. Wilson defined Bearden’s work as: “The art of a large and generous spirit
that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience. I was looking at
myself in ways I hadn’t thought of before and have never ceased to think of since.”
The unifying factor amongst Wilson’s influences (with the exception of Borges) is the predominance of
African heritage in their work and how it is instrumental to the way they view the world. Wilson
summarised:
“We are African people, and we have a culture that’s separate and distinct from the mainstream
white American culture. We have different philosophical ideas, different ways of responding to the world,
different ideas and attitudes, different values, different ideas and style and linguistics, different
aesthetics – even the way we bury our dead is different. The way we participate in life is very much
different than white America.”
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10. INTERVIEW WITH DAVID LAN, DIRECTOR AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE YOUNG
VIC THEATRE
How are rehearsals going?
It’s a difficult play. The story’s told obliquely. You’re trying to work out why things happen. You know
there’s a substructure of information you’re being given and there’s a line of emotional continuity to the
piece, but you’ve got to express the story physically for the audience to hold on to it. You’ve got to look
for the common source of all the stories in the play so that it doesn’t feel sprawling.
What are the other challenges of the play?
It’s very black in the way that white plays are not very white. For example, Death of a Salesman2 is
trying to say something about a particular group of people at a particular moment in history who happen
to be white. I guess in a way that does make it a white play, but that distinction doesn’t seem as extreme
as Wilson’s plays are. Joe Turner has a particular sense of outrage, of social distress, and it’s very
American. Trying to find that outrage when we’re a group of British artists is a challenge.3
As a white director, how do you feel about August Wilson stating that he did not want white
directors to direct his work?
He didn’t even want white theatres to produce them. I’m sympathetic. If his widow had said no, I would
have accepted that. The first white director of this play was for last year’s revival on Broadway. Howard
Davies did a production of a Wilson play about 20 years ago at the National Theatre, but the fact they
got that past the Wilson Estate4 is surprising. Maybe they didn’t care as it was in England. The main
three directors of his work in America are all black. When I was meeting black actors in New York to
play the role of Bynum, I realised there’s a community of people, almost an army, who worked with
Wilson during his lifetime and feel a part of what he was trying to achieve, which was to give voice to a
group of people who felt that their voice wasn’t being heard. There’s a speech he gave called ‘The Ground
on which I Stand’ in which he said there were 66 regional theatres in America and only one had a black
artistic director. He said there was another way of seeing the world, which comes out of a different
2
1949 American play by Arthur Miller about Willy Loman, a travelling salesman, who considers himself a failure in business.
In a magazine interview in 2004, Wilson spoke about the need for black writers to write black plays: “If you take Death of a
Salesman and you try to present that play with an all-black cast, that’s not the way that problem would have been dealt with in
a black household.”
4
The body which represent Wilson’s plays since his death.
3
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condition, the African-American condition (with an emphasis on the African) and unless that value is
recognised it will die, and that would be a major loss.
Wilson didn’t agree with casting black actors in traditionally white roles.
He was very against colour blind casting. He was saying “one of the things that make me interesting is
that I’m black. Don’t tell me that you’re going to watch a play and it doesn’t make a difference if I’m
black or white, it does.” I’ve always said that we will cast actors despite of their race at the Young Vic
and if you look at Eurydice5 most of the cast are black even though the parts weren’t written for black
actors. But if you do a play such as A Raisin in the Sun (by African American playwright, Lorraine
Hansberry; see Chapter 9) where the characters are black, you aren’t going to cast a white actor. It was
interesting that when we acquired the performance rights to Joe Turner one of the conditions was that we
wouldn’t cast white actors. I thought that was ridiculous. Why would you? But apparently directors have
done that in America, arguing that if you can cast a black actor in something like a Shakespeare, then
why can’t you cast a white actor in a black role?
The blues were very important to Wilson. Did you consider this when approaching the work?
There are 3 important ‘B’s’ to Wilson: the blues, Jorge Luis Borges (see Chapter 9) and Romare Bearden
(see Chapter 9]. We’ve derived the set design from a Bearden picture called ‘Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket’
which inspired Joe Turner (see Chapter 5), incorporating similar colours.
Is the musicality and rhythm in the text difficult to direct?
It’s certainly difficult for the actors to learn because it’s so repetitive. It’s like musical notes. I think
when we get it right, it will be like jazz. A lot of the dialogue is like a series of riffs. Similar to jazz, it
needs an audience to be present before it will really work.
Can you talk about the themes of the play?
It’s about associations. It is structured by a series of scenes which are variations of each other. The
central meanings or ideas are submerged. For example, Death of a Salesman ends with the central
character’s widow stating the infamous line: “People have to pay attention”. That instantly clarifies the
message of the play for the audience as “poor people’s lives are as rich and as complex and as capable of
5
A play by Sarah Ruhl staged at the Young Vic in April 2010.
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misery as people with power”. There’s no single moral in Joe Turner, so if it works it will be because the
audience have embraced the characters and their world.
Have you staged the production in-the-round to help integrate the audience into the play’s world?
We’ve taken a play which was conceived and written by the writer to be played on a Proscenium stage6
and done it in a different way a couple of times before at the Young Vic. We play every word as written in
Joe Turner, but we don’t necessarily follow the stage directions. There are some domestic moments you
have to recreate, such as cooking and eating, but I get very bored with people sat around tables in plays.
It’s difficult to say things to audiences about characters when they’re just sat down.
What attracted you to the Century Cycle as a body of work?
It’s interesting to be doing an August Wilson play as he’s incredibly famous in America but hardly known
over here. There have been four or five productions at the Tricycle Theatre (located in North West
London) and a couple at the National Theatre. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the play that’s been mostly
done over here as it’s thought to be the most conventional and accessible production. There are some
good aspects to it, but it’s not an extraordinary play in the way that Joe Turner is extraordinary. There
are about four plays in the cycle that I really like.
Spirituality is a major theme in the play. This is conventionally quite an American subject. Will
British audiences engage with it?
British audiences don’t have any trouble feeding into American plays and ideas because of film and
television. Look at the success of films like Avatar. Besides which, everyone has some interest in trying to
understand why things happen, don’t they? Whether you label it religion or spirituality or something else,
it boils down to the same thing.
6
A traditional framed, raised stage with the audience facing it.
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11. INTERVIEW WITH KOBNA HOLDBROOK-SMITH, ACTOR (HERALD LOOMIS)
I’m interviewing you on a lunch break during rehearsals and you’ve got some of your costume on.
Do you usually rehearse in full costume?
Not full costume, but because we’re rehearsing in the venue (which is unusual) we have resources
available to us that we wouldn’t normally get until the technical rehearsals. It’s nice to get used to how
things work, the practicalities of the costume and how it feels to wear.
What research did you do in approaching the role?
Before I started rehearsals, I began work on the accent, looked at maps of Pittsburgh and images from
1911 and researched some of the details of slavery. I’d already read some Wilson plays and essays by and
about him. I looked up some Youtube clips of previous productions and some interviews by Delroy (Lindo,
playing Bynum) who has directed the play before (at Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2008) and Chad
Coleman who played the role of Loomis on Broadway last year.
Have you performed in plays with a similar style, and exploring similar subject matters, before?
This is my third August Wilson play in four years after Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Manchester Royal
Exchange, 2006) and Gem of the Ocean (Tricycle Theatre, 2006). I also performed in a season of
African plays at the Tricycle which explored similar subject matters (the ‘Not Black and White’ Season,
2009).
What do you think of Wilson’s writing?
Wilson is one of the greatest writers I’ve worked on, literally on a par with Shakespeare in terms of his
language and what you need to know to understand the language. He’s also on a par with Chekhov in
terms of his managing of the domestic and the epic. It’s of that depth and breadth; that scope.
Is it technically difficult to act that language?
Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not technically difficult to maintain, but if it’s unfamiliar, it can seem odd.
He listened to how people spoke - it’s natural speech, natural rhythms; they make their own sense, so you
can connect to them. But if you’re on the outside, it takes a while to build that connection. Sometimes in
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rehearsal, something will sound wrong in a line I’ve just spoken and I will realise I’ve missed out a single
word, and that destroys the whole rhythm of the line.
Herald Loomis is a challenging role. It has some technically difficult moments aside from the
language.
It is a challenge. The key is to stand still and tell the truth. That’s all acting is. In theory at least. It’s
much more complex in practise. Loomis has a difficult character arch, but it’s all there - you are told
what to do, (this is why it’s like Shakespeare), you know how he feels because of what he says or does,
(or doesn’t do in his case). The challenge is to find the energy with which to live it. It’s also quite a
challenge to find the precision of meaning because of the complexity of the language. I find things
difficult as an actor when you’re trying to live it and you keep getting new information and that
information spins the whole character around. You find something out in Act Two scene four and you
realise you have to rethink everything you did when you rehearsed Act One scene one earlier in the week;
rethink everything for that tiny thing to work, for that tiny little thing to make sense. Everything has to
stack up to build up to it. Managing the information is tricky. It’s so expansive.
What’s the relevance of Joe Turner and the Pittsberg Cycle to contemporary Britain?
It has direct links to the black Diaspora7. It’s also an amazing play and worth seeing. It’s got historical
significance and major relevancies as a work of art.
Wilson said he didn’t find his voice as an author until he discovered the blues. Does that come
through in the play?
It’s all over the play: the stories that are told; the expressions of pain; the value of spiritual self-esteem;
and having an understanding of who you are, where you come from and why that’s important. It’s all
rooted in the blues. In terms of the expression of pain, there’s a theme running through the play of being
able to sing your song. It’s spoken literally, but it refers as well to the ability to connect to your soul and
express yourself in your own terms in spite of oppression. Interestingly, you can hear in the music of
many oppressed peoples styles and sounds that sound like the blues, for example in Jewish Klezmer
7
A dispersion of people from their original homeland.
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music8. You’ve got this sense of displaced peoples having keening (vocal lament similar to a wailing)
kinds of music.
Does Loomis find his song at the end of the play? Is the completion of his journey that simple?
My first instinct would be to say: ‘Yes, he does’. But that’s not the end of his journey; it’s his beginning.
Perhaps he doesn’t actually find his song, but he becomes a person with the potential to find his song.
8
Traditional musical form of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe.
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12. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wilson’s Plays (in chronological order within the Cycle)
Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson (Theatre Communications Group: 2006)
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson (Samuel French: 1990)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson (Plume: 1985)
The Piano Teacher by August Wilson (Plume: 1990)
Seven Guitars by August Wilson (Plume: 1997)
Fences by August Wilson (Samuel French: 2010)
Two Trains Running by August Wilson (Theatre Communications Group: 2008)
Jitney by August Wilson (Overlook TP: 2003)
King Hedley II by August Wilson (Theatre Communications Group: 2005)
Radio Golf by August Wilson (Theatre Communications Group: 2007)
Further Reading
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable revised by Adrian Room (Cassell: 1996)
Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century by Richard Eyre and Nicholas
Wright (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC: 2000)
The Civil Rights Movement (Edinburgh University Press: 2004)
The Collected Works of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes (Vintage: 1995)
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre by John Russell Brown (OUP: 1995)
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The Penguin History of the United States of America (Penguin: 2001)
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (Vintage: 2004)
Internet
http://www.theparisreview.org/media/839_WILSON.pdf
http://www.augustwilson.net/Black%20Empowerment%20New%20Pittsburgh%20Courier.html
http://www.augustwilson.net/The%20Search%20for%20Black%20Identity.htm
http://www.augustwilson.net/The%20Souls%20of%20Black%20Folk%20Adrift.htm
http://north-american-playwrights.suite101.com/article.cfm/africanamerican_playwright_august_wilson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson
http://web.archive.org/web/20060902071459/http://www.umc.pitt.edu/media/pcc051010/august_wilson_
2005OCT10.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/nyregion/02theater.html?_r=1&scp=6
http://www.augustwilson.net/August%20Wilson%20Fact%20Page%20by%20Hilda%20Barlaz.htm
http://www.augustwilson.net/An%20Interview%20with%20August%20Wilson%20by%20Herb%20Boyd.htm
http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/nov05/wilson.cfm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/apr/07/theatre.usa
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http://www.amiribaraka.com/
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jlborges.htm
http://www.redhotjazz.com/rainey.html
http://www.augustwilson.net/Romare%20Bearden.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rellison.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rwright.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/dubois.html
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/83
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_LeRoy_Locke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Gordone
http://www.tcg.org/publications/augustwilson/series_intro.cfm
http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/2003/bones.cfm
http://www.tcg.org/publications/augustwilson/histories.cfm
http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/theater/reviews/17turn.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/28/theater/review-theater-panoramic-history-of-blacks-in-america-inwilson-s-joe-turner.html?pagewanted=2
http://www.answers.com/topic/joe-turner-s-come-and-gone-play-6
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