Updated “Mapping the Influences, Wilson’s 4B’s” is now August Wilson’s Art System, (4B’s)
Notes on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – 03142024
Let’s recall that Gertrude Pridgett, aka Ma Rainey, did not exist in a vacuum. The play is set in an era known as the roaring 20’s, and much of the behavior we see in the play reflects common behaviors of the era. The excessive makeup Ma Rainey wore, the short-cropped hairdos, the loose-fitting cloth were all reminiscent of the “flappers” of the post-WW1 era.
“In the 1920s, flappers broke away from the Victorian image of womanhood. They dropped the corset, chopped their hair, dropped layers of clothing to increase ease of movement, wore make-up, created the concept of dating, and became a sexual person. In breaking away from conservative Victorian values, flappers created what many considered the “new” or “modern” woman.”
“Flappers also started wearing make-up, something that had previously been only worn by loose women. Rouge, powder, eye-liner, and lipstick became extremely popular. Sneered a shocked Bliven,
“Beauty is the fashion in 1925. She is frankly, heavily made up, not to imitate nature, but for an altogether artificial effect—pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes—the latter looking not so much debauched (which is the intention) as diabetic.”
https://www.thoughtco.com/flappers-in-the-roaring-twenties-1779240
It seems odd, but in many respects, Ma Rainey’s “comportment” matched what all the modern white girls were doing at the time. Viewed in that light, Ma Rainey was far less an aberration than she might otherwise appear.
Ma made no secret of her alleged sexual orientation, which is to say, she flaunted her “queerness.” It was different for black women, but similar to what was the new normal for women in the roaring 20’s. It was rumored that she had a “tryst” with her protege, Bessie Smith, alluded to in one of her hit songs, Prove It On Me Blues,
“Went out last night with a crowd of my friends, They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men. It’s true I wear a collar and tie, Makes the wind blow all the while.”
We don’t frown at queerness when we read about it in F. Scott Fitzgerald. We should expect something at least similar in black celebrities of the same era. Diversity, equity, inclusion, so they say.
As Angela Davis points out in 2011’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Rainey’s songs are full of women who “explicitly celebrate their right to conduct themselves as expansively and even as undesirably as men,” drinking, carousing, even baiting law enforcement.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-queer-black-woman-who-reinvented-the-blues
A podcast on Jitney (and other things)
A friend interviewed me for a podcast which she just published at Morley College (U.K.). Here is a link to the podcast along with a blurb she put together. Enjoy!
Morley Prize Podcast https://morleyradio.co.uk/programmes/morley-prize-s3ep3/
Series 3 Episode 3: Raymond Maxwell
The Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour now accepts manuscripts in non-fiction.
In this third series of podcasts in support of Morley College’s Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour, Dr Florence Marfo speaks to world–travelled Raymond Maxwell. Raymond’s love of literature has been a constant in his life. Learning to read and write at a very young age, Raymond has said ‘I’ve never not known what to do with a book’. When Florence catches up with him, they discuss reading, his own writing and his love of August Wilson’s work. See here for a list of books and poems referred to during their chat: Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: ‘The Psalm of Life’ W.E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk, Paul Laurence Dunbar: ‘We Wear the Mask’, Jessica George: Maame, Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God , Gene Andrew Jarrett: Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, Raymond Maxwell ‘Not a Concrete Poem Sonnet’ in On Lockdown: Poetry of the Pandemic 2020+, Ntozake Shange: Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery August Wilson: Jitney.
taking a break from the study groups
I won’t be leading study groups for the August Wilson American Century Cycle this spring, summer and fall. I have six years worth of notes that I am slowly but surely consolidating. And I have added groups on Zora Neale Hurston for spring and fall to explore themes I continue to see between the two authors.
I do hope to get up to Pittsburgh to take look at the Wilson papers this fall. I think by then things should be nice and settled down.
If you are curious, come over to the Zora Neale Hurston page to see what’s going on!
I look forward to posting some August Wilson content as the weeks progress.
Meanwhile I’ll be doing some reading on Interart Inquiry. The lines in my mind separating music from drama, from poetry, and et.cetera, across all art forms keep getting more blurred and more fragile. I looked a a poem last night and said to myself, that’s a spiritual!
Upcoming Jitney podcast with Morley College 02/17/2023
Tomorrow I’ll be connecting by Zoom with an old friend and colleague, Dr. Florence Marfo of Morley College, UK, to do a podcast on Jitney, which played last year in the UK. I wanted to jot down some notes to share with her to somewhat guide our conversation.
Jitney is the first play in the August Wilson Cycle. But at the time of its first writing Wilson had no idea he’d be writing a series of ten plays, one for every decade. He only came upon that idea some five plays and eleven years later. So revising the first play in the 90’s, that had not been performed since the early 80’s, required some thought. By that time a much better playwright, Wilson added dialogue and scenes that presented his characters and themes in a much better, much improved way. One other thought. Before, Jitney was a stand-alone play. In its revision it would need to represent its breadth of place as the first in a series. Work was required. I think Wilson pulled it off quite well.
There a lot of tough issues that we engage our minds in when we do a deep reading of Jitney. There is the impact on the family of long-term and mass incarceration that we see playing out between father, Becker and son, Booster. There are all those unwritten cross-generational expectations. There is the social dynamic of veterans returning home that we see with Youngblood, coming back from Vietnam, and Doub, mentoring him, having experienced his return home a generation previously from the Korean Conflict. There are relationships in the play between workers, lateral relationships and vertical relationships that must be taken into account. There is one man-woman relationship, Youngblood and Rena, that cuts across a couple of categories. And overhanging all, there is urban renewal, forcing black businesses and black residents out of the center of America’s cities, which occurred nation-wide in the 70’s. And there is the ever-present thought that no matter how bleak things seem, there is still a reason for gratitude, for rejoicing.
When we deep read, which is what a careful analysis of literature requires, we enter a process that involves inference, critical analysis, and empathy. Ultimately, as Maryanne Wolf presents in both Proust and the Squid and more recently in Reader, Come Home, we as readers literally enter the perspective of others, and a contemplation, a “passing over” takes place.
Here is what I want to get to in this blog post today. Reading Wilson’s plays can undoubtedly be a transformative experience. Reading the complete series can be so transformative that it actually “rewires” our brains, altering the neuroplasticity of the reading brain function, much like they say listening to great music or contemplating classical art and sculpture can. I know I have never been the same since seeing those Bernini sculptures in Rome, or since being introduced to jazz and blues as a young 8th grader. Or reading all the plays in the American Century Cycle.
I’ll miss the biennial August Wilson Colloquium in Pittsburgh this year. Zora Neale Hurston book club groups begin in early March. But I will be here engrossed in making the next reading of the American Century Cycle as relevant and as transformative as humanly possible.
Some notes on Radio Golf, the final play in the American Century Cycle. December 14, 2022
When August Wilson started writing serious plays in the 1980’s, journalists, drama critics, and literature professors took notice. A morning star had pierced the dawn of literature’s world. And the storytellers and truthsayers all began to write. They wrote reviews positive and not-so-positive, they wrote academic essays, they wrote dramatic criticism, they wrote analyses, inside accounts, outside accounts. Then the awards started coming, the Pulitzers, the Drama Critics Circle Awards, the diplomas and honorary degrees. The more plays Wilson wrote, the more the critics and scholars wrote. And the volume of material accumulated as the performances proliferated. Broadway, regional theaters, college and university drama departments, high school and community drama programs all played a role.
It’s an additive process. More has been written on the early plays in the Cycle than on the later plays. They have been around longer and have been performed more often. And now, with film adaptations of three of the early plays, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, and most recently, The Piano Lesson, that additive process grows and grows. Correspondingly less has been written and discussed about the later plays, which some call “the darker plays.”
As Wilson’s skill as a playwright progressed and developed, the plays became darker in tone, perhaps more tragic. Even Wilson himself said that tragedy was the highest form of dramatic writing.
That brings us, in a roundabout way, to Radio Golf. There are a few good critical pieces out there on Radio Golf. Excellent essays by Harry Elam (Radio Golf in the Age of Obama), Alan Nadel (The Century That Can’t Fix Nothing with the Law – Radio Golf) and Margaret Booker (Radio Golf: the courage of his convictions – survival, success and spirituality) provide quality, exceptional quality, but not quantity. Radio Golf is just too new, still, too recent, and perhaps too politically sensitive, still. Plus, all the other, earlier plays continue to stimulate scholarly and popular output in some ways disproportionately to that of the later plays.
In Radio Golf, the principal character is Harmond Wilks, grandson of Caesar Wilks whom we encountered as local enforcer and slumlord in Gem of the Ocean. Harmond Wilks has done well in life, following his father (and grandfather) in the real estate business, so well in fact that he is now poised to run for mayor of Pittsburgh. His sidekick, Roosevelt Hicks, was his roommate and fraternity brother (inferred) at Cornell and they are together about to develop a large commercial real estate project in the Hill District. Hicks is not from old money as Wilks is, but he has lots of ambition even though his understanding of how things work is slightly superficial. Wilks’ wife, Mame, works in political public relations and is helping her husband with his campaign. Their campaign. There are only two other characters in the play. Sterling, a recently released ex-con when we first encountered him in Two Trains Running in the 60’s, is still basically the same rascal in the 90’s, but he has managed to survive. And then there is Old Joe. Old Joe, it turns out, is the son of Black Mary who was the half sister of Caesar Wilks, Harmond Wilks’ grandfather. So you see, it is a very inter-generational play that cuts through and organically links three plays in the Cycle.
Harmond and Roosevelt are all set to demolish a house in the Hill District to make way for a high-rise commercial complex that includes modern apartments, Whole Foods, and a Starbucks, when Harmond learns through Old Joe that the House in question belongs to Old Joe through his mother. After some investigation, he learns that the house was never properly and legally acquired by his real estate company before in turn selling it to the Wilks/Hicks redevelopment project. What is Harmond to do? How strong is a family link that has been forgotten and lost in time?
Of course, I’m leaving out a lot of details because I don’t want to spoil the story for you. Suffice it to say that Harmond makes the right decision but it results in strained relations with his wife and best friend who don’t really understand his motivation. Arguably, it is because of their respective backgrounds that they are focused primarily on life’s superficialities and not more substantive ideas and issues.
Finally, there is some serious signifying going on in Radio Golf. The title itself, Radio Golf, is perhaps an inside joke, even an oxymoron (a self-contradicting group of words). Hicks (pretty much a country “hick”) puts up a poster of Tiger Woods in the project office, while Wilks puts up a poster of MLK, another oxymoron, perhaps. Wilks wants to name the neighborhood health center for Sarah Degree, the first black RN in Pittsburgh, to remember her and her contributions to the community. It is a history of which we are aware as we have already encountered the real Sarah Degree in Seven Guitars (40’s) and Two Trains Running (60’s). Mame, Harmond’s wife, says no one remembers Sarah Degree and fails to notice that, by implication, the real history has already been erased, cancelled.
Harmond and Mame are having dinner with friends and Harmond suggests taking the husband of the other couple (illegal) Cuban cigars he bought in Costa Rica (and illegally smuggled back into the US). Later Sterling accuses Harmond of receiving stolen property, both in the golf clubs stolen from Harmond’s car that Sterling acquired and sold back to him and in the disposition of Aunt Ester’s house. Harmond’s brother Raymond, we learn, rejected his father’s plan for his Ivy League education and instead ends up on his own and enlisting in the Army. He dies in Vietnam, but it is something nobody in the family likes to talk about. Harmond even refuses to discuss his brother with Sterling, and quickly changes the subject. Roosevelt, named for a former President though most likely not related by blood, has a fixation on business cards as a surrogate for what he does in real life.
Old Joe tells a story about a guy he served with in WWII who dies in battle while carrying the flag. The guy’s name is Joe Mott, which just so happens to be the same name as one of the pipe dreamers in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, the once owner of a “colored” gambing house who dreams of reopening a bigger gambling house and has visions of passing for white. Interestingly, critics have compared Wilson to O’Neill. Critics also try to compare Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone to O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh but the resemblance is barely superficial. There is a lot more to be said about comparisons between Wilson and O’Neill but for another time.
There are more, but the one that most struck me was when Roosevelt betrayed Harmond. Roosevelt bought Harmond out with money from a white entrepreneur who also used Roosevelt as the front man to get a Minority Set Aside on a radio station. Harmond accused Roosevelt of being a “high class thousand dollar whore” and referred to him as “the nigger in the woodpile,” a term used by Democrats in the 1860’s to accuse Republicans of trying to sneak an anti-slavery plank into their party platform. There is a silent film in the playlist that illustrates the original concept.
Long story short, there is a lot more than meets the eye going on in Radio Golf. I can’t wait for this final discussion with you all tomorrow night!
Postscript. 12152022. In each play this session, we have made brief remarks about the play’s dedication and about the making or the structure of the play. Wilson dedicated Radio Golf to long-time friend and associate Benjamin Mordecai, Broadway producer and general manager, former managing director of Yale Repertory Theater and dean of Yale’s drama department. Mordecai died just a few months before Wilson, also at age 60, also of cancer. “To Benjamin Mordecai, who was there from the beginning – good company, a friend, a brother.”
And we learn from press accounts when Radio Golf reached Broadway in 2007 that much of the re-writing of the play, from rehearsals Wilson was unable to attend, was done basically from Wilson’s death bed. Wilson’s emails to director Kenny Leon and instructions shuttled back and forth by dramaturg Todd Kreidler shaped the play as it progressed in regional theaters en route to Broadway. Death is never easy to discuss and it’s hard to be productive and creative, I would imagine, when you are in immense pain, you know you have cancer, you know it is inoperable, and you know it is terminal. In that regard, much of Radio Golf might be, no, must be viewed through the prism of Wilson’s last will and testament.
Notes on Gem of the Ocean for DCPL study group. December 10, 2022
There is a lot to unpack in Gem of the Ocean and we won’t get it all done in one sitting. But let’s at least get a start.
Wilson dedicated Gem of the Ocean to his two daughters, Sakina and Azula. To me, that dedication indicated Wilson’s intent that the play be one for future generations, one whose themes and plots would endure and continue to inform readers and theater-goers. Interesting that Wilson wrote eight plays before dedicating one to his children. Also interesting that the play is the first one, chronologically, in the Cycle, though the penultimate one in order of plays written. I found a couple of Wilson poems in various places on the theme of advice to future generations, one expressly written by him for his daughter. Here are the two Wilson poems:
“Song, go to those yonder hills
and sit with the gods –
Call out their names
as Gabriel, a mighty note
on his judgement horn.
Hide not your face,
for you are not a sparrow
and thunder breaks not your wings –
As the gods go,
go with them in my name.”
******************************************
“Lean ahead! Languish not in the toils
of distant dreams gone by.
Be willing as a warrior, brave,
but donned with wicked intelligence
That dispels and frightens foolishness.
Remake each error with courageous correcting –
Conceive, conspire with each instance for its terrible honesty –
Give to each hallowed star its own revolving orbit –
And many roads will open for you.”
******************************************
Gem of the Ocean is the second play in the Cycle to begin with a defined prologue. The first one was King Hedley II, the seventh play in the Cycle, and the play in which Aunt Ester dies, as opposed to Gem of the Ocean, a play that fully features Aunt Ester as a character, more than any other play in the Cycle. So both “Aunt Ester” plays open with prologues, establishing Wilson’s chops as a playwright in the classical tradition established by the Greek and Roman dramatists and Shakespeare. As an aside, five plays by Shakespeare open with prologues, Pericles, Henry V, Henry VIII, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. Two others, Macbeth (the Witches) and King Richard III (as Duke of Glouscester before he became King) open with what may be called prologues. See my notes here for more on the structure of the play.
What is the source of the title, Gem of the Ocean? There is no ocean in the play itself. There is a river, but no ocean. Only in the play-within-the-play, i.e., the mystical journey to the City of Bones, do we encounter an ocean. We know of the song, an almost American hymn, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, and we know of the controversy between the American, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” and the British, “Britannia, Price of the Ocean,” as to authorship and precedence. The initiation journey to the “City of Bones” almost suggests that the City is the Gem of the Ocean. Aunt Ester tells Citizen, “The people made a kingdom out of nothing.”
That brings us to a series of comparisons between Gem of the Ocean, the first chronological play in the Cycle, and Jitney, the first play written in the Cycle. Several similarities are pointed out by Professor Alan Nadel in his edited volume of essays, Completing the Twentieth Cycle. (“Returning Again, Again: Business in the Street In Jitney and Gem of the Ocean”). In Jitney, Booster, a star student-athlete, elects to murder his white girlfriend after being falsely accused of rape, while in Gem, Garret Brown chooses to die of drowning rather than be punished for stealing a bucket of nails that he did not steal. In both cases there is a suggestion of a sense of honor and an adherence to truth. Both plays highlight spaces sheltering families formed not by bloodlines but by mutual affiliations: the jitney station is a place brought together by a need (for transportation) not being met by the local economy, a gathering of men who create a livelihood essentially out of nothing. The sanctity of the jitney station (and, thus, the livelihood of the workers and their customers) is under attack by eminent domain and urban renewal. The sanctity of Aunt Ester’s house (This is a peaceful house!) is under attack from Caesar’s arrest warrants.
Let’s talk for a moment about Wilson’s inclusion of the closing lines from the poem, Thanatopsis (a view of death) by William Cullen Bryant. By way of background, Bryant was considered by many the first distinctive American poet, all former being British imitations or derivatives. For 50 years, Bryant was regarded as the leading American poet. He was an abolitionist and a founder of the Republican Party. By archiving and memorializing the poem’s final lines in Gem of the Ocean, Wilson connects the plight of African American life with the great struggle for progress that is the essence of being American. And while “thanatopsis” the word is Greek for “a view of death,” Wilson turns it on its head and makes it a call for life. Eli says, “You die by how you live.”
I recorded the entire poem, Thanatopsis, by William Cullen Bryant, here for my blog readers:
It is also worth mentioning here Sandra’s observation of the similarities between the City of Bones and the Valley of Dry Bones in the Old Testament. Ezekiel 37:4 connects Gem of the Ocean to Herald’s vision in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
In previous sessions I have discussed the mask wearing during Citizen’s voyage to the City of Bones. Here I propose that the wearing of European dramatic masks by Eli, Solly and Black Mary during Citizen’s initiation both connects Wilson’s playwriting to that of the great Roman and Greek tragedians who preceded him and foreshadows the use of blackface and war paint (masks) in Radio Golf.
Fences by National Players at Hyattsville Publick Playhouse – December 9, 2022
Last night (Friday, December 9, 2022) Filomena and I met old friends Val and Doug at Publick Playhouse in Hyattsville, MD for a National Players performance of August Wilson’s Fences. We were all a bit curious about the one-night performance, but we just went with it. By the way, Val has been a participant and supporter of my Zoom American Century Cycle study groups and is a former co-worker.
Turns out, the National Players are a touring theatrical company based in Olney, MD, that has been in constant operation since 1949, the nation’s oldest touring company. And this performance was the final performance of their 73rd season AND their first selection of a play by a black writer with an all-black cast. We didn’t know any of this up front! In yet another coincidence, the company was founded by a Catholic University professor, Father Gilbert V. Hartke. The last time we hung with Val and Doug was at my CUA post-graduation party after finishing my MSLIS.
Separate added feature of the performance include that it played before a hometown crowd (Hyattsville is not that far from Olney), many of the cast members were from DC or had DC area connections, and the price was right (for senior citizens like us, barely more than what you would pay to see a movie). The packed playhouse was filled with the usual suspects: August Wilson aficionados like us, family members of the ensemble, and mostly locals out for good entertainment. All three groups were fully satisfied by the performance.
And the play. If you’ve been reading this blog, you already know I’ve led study groups on the August Wilson American Century Cycle since 2018. Every year, sometimes twice a year, we’ve studied Fences, Wilson’s most famous and, by his own account, his best-written play (Wilson said his favorite play was Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, but Fences was his best play). I saw Fences on Broadway in 1987, saw the Denzel Washington produced film in which Viola Davis won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and have seen several local productions. But this one, and specifically this Rose Maxson played by Ria Simpkins, was the first one whose performance was so authentic and so compelling that it actually brought tears to my eyes. And I’m not just talking a wee weeping, I’m talking boo-hoo tears. This Rose nailed the character for me in ways neither Mary Alice (in the James Earl Jones production), God rest her soul, or Viola Davis (in the Denzel Washington production and Oscar winner) ever did.
I think a lot of my emotional response may have been a result of the stage manager’s use of the set and the stage on the particular monologue (end of Act Two, Scene 1) when Troy comes home and announces his adulterous relationship with Alberta and the inevitable consequence, her pregnancy. Although it’s not in the actual stage directions, while Troy is talking he and Rose are separated by the entire width of the stage, with Troy in the foreground pacing back and forth making baseball analogies and Rose in the background at the edge of the porch, disbelieving (in her facial gestures) his every word. Then when it reaches the part where Rose says “I been standing with you,” both have moved and are standing side by side center stage, their physical positions reflecting Rose’s words “standing with you.” It was poetry and drama and choreography all compacted into a single moment in time. That is some serious stage management. August Wilson would have been proud. He also may have shed a tear or two! The Stage Manager, by the way, Ryan Anthony, is in the last semester of a BFA program at Bowie State University, according to Instagram (@NationalPlayers) and Twitter (@NationalPlayers). But back to Rose. Ria Simpkins. Remember that name.
The other characters who stood out for me include Donte Bynum, who as Bono grew on me over the course of the play (which is to say, I didn’t immediately like him from the start, but I loved him at the end, so something was happening!), and Avery Ford, who added charm, character and authenticity to the character Lyons, with his personable gestures repeated in his every interaction, especially with his father, Troy, his brother, Cory, and Bono.
Two more final things about the production. To really understand August Wilson, I think it helps to see his plays performed in front of a black, church-going audience. The crowd’s vocal responses throughout the play, the “boos,” the “amens,” the applause at the end of every scene add so much value to the play. My readings of multiple August Wilson interviews suggest that was his exact intention. It’s the direct interaction by the theater-goers with the action on the stage as that energy transfers from the characters to the public via Wilson’s poetry.
And finally, last night at the end of the play, after the curtain call, the characters all came down into the audience to talk, to chat, to groove with the people in attendance. I call it Act Three of a two act play. Normally, at Arena Stage for example, the cast disappears into their dressing rooms and are never heard from again. And even on nights when there is a scheduled discussion, the actors behave in a somewhat stilted way, bothered to have to be there. I managed to meet “Rose” in the vestibule with her elderly mother and told her how her performance brought tears to my eyes. She thanked me and said, “Let me give you a hug.”
I scarfed a photo of the cast from Instagram:
It was all well worth the drive in horrible end-of-week commuter traffic from DC to Hyattsville. By the way, “Hyat” in Arabic means “Life.”
Some notes on King Hedley II for DCPL 12.01.2022
These are just some random thoughts from my notes and later, our discussion.
Wilson dedicated the play to his mentors and colleagues, to Rob Penny and Nicholas Flournoy and Chawley Williams, all cofounders with Wilson of the Centre Ave Poets and later, the Black Horizons Theatre. Williams, a bit older, was a mentor to a teenage August Wilson, and some sources say Williams’ somewhat chaotic life provided the model for Wilson’s depiction of King Hedley in the play. Legend also has it that Williams, a former heroin addict, slammed a fellow addict’s head into the wall for offering a young August Wilson a hit of heroin.
It bears repeated mention here that King Hedley II is the only play in the Cycle named for one of the characters and that it is the first play to begin with a defined prologue. It is also the first play in the Cycle to serve as a sequel to an earlier play, Seven Guitars. Both plays have the same set, the backyard of Wilson’s house in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and several characters repeat from one play to the next, either as themselves or as their offsprings, giving some sense of continuity to the sequence of the plays over the generations.
How about the position of the play in the overall Cycle? King Hedley II holds the center position in the sub-sequence we refer to as the Aunt Ester plays, third of five beginning with Two Trains Running and ending with Radio Golf. Aunt Ester’s death early in the play sets the tone for the rest of the play, even though lots of plot action not related to Aunt Ester continues in the background and the foreground.
Tonya’s monologue is one of the longest in all the plays in the Cycle. This play focuses in on abortion in a way that it has not focused on current issues in most of the plays. See my earlier notes on this subject. In the end, Tonya speaks in present tense about the baby and its needs, suggesting that the pregnancy was never terminated.
Speaking of termination, the play has lots of talk about murder as an almost everyday occurrence. There are echoes of Hedley I’s murder of Floyd Barton in Seven Guitars, we know Elmore killed Leroy over a gambling debt, and King killed Pernell over a name calling episode. It also gets mentioned that Pernell’s cousin killed a man over an argument at a football game and some one mentioned reading that Pernell’s father committed several murders. Stool Pigeon says he once saw a man get killed over a fish sandwich. There is a lot of murder, a lot of death.
Similarly, characters appear almost nonchalant about planning and executing crimes, especially the midday jewelry store heist that King and Mister pull off. King and Elmore have some deep conversations about manhood, about being a person in the world, and not everything they say comports with reality. Although it may sound good, and although you may be inclined to agree with what’s being said, you catch yourself when you realize it is totally absurd. Like their conversation about honor and dignity towards the end of Act 1. Wonderful talk, but no honor or dignity in it, really.
King and Mister’s plan to start a video business by selling hot refrigerators and robbing jewelry stores comes off as a bit of a pipe dream, but as a dramatic device it keeps the story moving forward. As a playgoer or as a reader, though, does anybody believe the whole video store vision will ever come to past? It is hardly a credible proposition.
Stool Pigeon plays a key role in the narrative arc of the play. I have written in earlier session notes that Stool Pigeon serves as the chorus in this Greek drama. I won’t beat that dead horse here. Stool Pigeon’s biblical, almost scriptural manner of speaking also serves the function of suffusing the flavor of folkloric tradition throughout the play.
At the end of the play we ask ourselves the question, who was the most tragic figure in King Hedley II? Was it King, who lived a chaotic and disappointing life and experienced a humiliating death? Was it Ruby, who loses a son who never truly acknowledged her as a mother? Was it Elmore, who, now in his 60’s is dying from cancer after surviving prison and a broken heart? Was it Tonya, who has lost a husband and whose unborn child is losing a father? Was it Aunt Ester, who died with her palm stuck to her forehead in worry and concern for her community? Was it the community? Is it all of humanity, including the play readers and the theater-goers watching the play.
And what becomes of Ruby? Does she marry Elmore and live happily ever after? Someone suggested that perhaps Ruby had a nervous breakdown, symbolized by her sitting on the ground singing “Red Sails” after firing the gun whose bullet kills her son.
My blog post on the recent King Hedley performance in Arlington: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.wordpress.com/2022/10/29/king-hedley-ii-at-dominion-stage-gunston-theatre-arlington-10282022/
Earlier blog post for the August Wilson Society: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.wordpress.com/2022/09/06/draft-blog-post-on-king-hedley-ii/
Previous session draft notes: https://raymondmaxwell.substack.com/p/fe8a23bb-27f1-4d81-80d7-241495728e06
Notes on Seven Guitars for DCPL study group. 11172022
Let’s begin with the title.
No matter how hard you look or how much latitude you allow in terms of definition, you will never find seven guitars in this play. There are no seven guitars. So it must be a metaphor.
In fact, at the very beginning, there were seven guitars. Seven men on a stage, each with a guitar. According to Wilson, that was the image he saw that originally inspired the play. In a 1997 interview with Theater Week’s Carol Rosen, Wilson said,
This play started with an image of seven men with guitars on a stage. Someone named Floyd – it was Bannister at the time – but someone named Floyd Barton had been killed, and these men were in a lineup and they were responding to this unheard and unseen voice, this disembodied voice. “No sir,” “Well, I know Floyd for however many years,” etc.
I thought by doing that, I would go on to do two things. I wanted to expose – sort of look behind – the songs, the interior psyche of the individuals who create teh songs so you see how the blues are created and where in essence they come from.
I was interested in showing the relationship between those men and white society, and between those men and black society, where from one viewpoint, they’re seen as drunkards and vagrants and things of that sort, and then from the other, they’re seen as carriers of the tradition, a very valuable and integral part of the community and the culture.
Later in the same interview, Wilson clarified that the play’s seven characters represent the seven guitars, each with their own voice and their individual character. There is a lot of numerology in the play. But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .
Wilson said later in the same interview that the play began with four men in a turpentine camp in Georgia, a definite hat-tip to Zora Neale Hurston who did extensive research on turpentine camp workers under the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930’s (Boyd, p. 323). It moved to Chicago in Wilson’s imagination before settling back in Pittsburgh and in his mother’s back yard. (Murphy, p. 124). The way the three women entered the play was told so many times, and with so many variations, that it became folklore, but all versions centered around one woman, Vera on the edge of the set, asking for her space in the play, then two other women coming in behind her.
After the title, there is the dedication. Wilson dedicates the play, “For my wife, Constanza Romero, without whom my life would lack the occasion of poetry her presence demands.” After the dedication in the last play, Two Trains Running, and its obvious tonal flatness, this one almost sings. No, this one definitely sings.
And then there is “A Note from the Playwright.” In the note, Wilson lists seven items, contents of his mother’s life:
I happen to think that the content
of my mother’s life –
her myths,
her superstitions,
her prayers,
the contents of her pantry,
the song that escaped
from her sometimes parched lips,
her thoughtful repose
and pregnant laughter –
are all worthy of art.
Could they also be the seven guitars?
Scene 1 of Act 1 is “prologue-ish.” A murder has been committed and a funeral held. The existence of the prologue alerts us that the drama is a tragedy, but the murder up front tells us the play is a murder mystery. A lot of information is conveyed immediately!
The rest of the play is the working out of both the murder mystery and the tragedy. So we know who dies but we don’t know how (the mystery part) or why (the tragedy part). We are glued to our seats until the final curtain.
In prior session notes, I have discussed the numerology, the listing of things, the card games, even the radio broadcast of the Louis-Conn fight (an obvious instance of poetic license since the fight didn’t even occur in the year in which the play was set) all exist as “dramatic devices” to fill in the narrative arc of the play.
Wilson experienced an interesting shift in revision strategy in Seven Guitars which he repeated for all remaining plays. In Wilson’s own words:
In the past I would rewrite the whole thing and bring it in, and, of course,
there were certain revisions that were made in the rehearsal process. But the
bulk of the work had been done, so I would sort of lay back off of it (if that’s
away of saying it) because I already did the rewrite, and now I was just
patching up various things. With Seven Guitars I didn’t do the rewrite prior
to rehearsal. I came into rehearsal knowing that the play had to be rewritten.
And I did my rewrite there in rehearsal, which didn’t allow me to lay back off
the material and do patchwork. I had to get in there and do the actual work,
which seemed to work better in the sense that I wasn’t writing in a vacuum.
l had the actors there, so you could press and then you could see a response,
or you could do something and see an immediate response. If you’re at home
doing the rewrite, you can’t get that response – you’re sort of working in a
vacuum, so to speak.
We also cannot not mention Hedley as the only West Indian black in the whole of the American Century Cycle. As the first character we’ve come across who is not from nearby or the deep south like so many other migrants to Pittsburgh, Hedley’s presence sets up a different dynamic in personal relations that we see playing out in his interactions with other members of the ensemble. This reflects what actually happened with so many black Caribbean immigrants moving to Northern cities and having to interact with a new country, a new black society unlike what was most prevalent in the south or in their original home, and in many cases, a new religious order. In effect they, these immigrants from the Caribbean faced somewhat different challenges than the run of the mill southern migrants. Hedley makes Seven Guitars a special case for studying the great migration.
Still another aspect of the great migration not covered in the American Century Cycle, however, is the rural to urban migration that took place within the south and never crossed into northern states.
Finally, for now, while Seven Guitars certainly serves as a prequel for King Hedley II, it has organic ties to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as both examine (1) the transformation of blues music into a marketable commodity and (2) the exploitative structure of the recording industry. But there is a twist. In Ma Rainey, the modernist Levee kills the black nationalist Toledo by stabbing him with a knife, while in Seven Guitars, the black nationalist Hedley kills the modernist Floyd Barton by cutting his windpipe with a machete. In both cases there is tragedy, but the tragic action is inverted, a double tragedy for both as Levee goes to prison and Hedley dies in the sanitarium (we presume).
I will continue this post after our discussion.
One of the study group members, a woman, mentioned that the three female characters in Seven Guitars represented three stages of maturity of a single female, sort of the three in one. Ruby being the young adult eager to branch out and interact with the world, Vera being the middle-aged looking for a second chance in life, and Louise, the experienced and seasoned matriarch. It hadn’t occurred to me before, this Wilson’s Holy Trinity of female characters in Seven Guitars. I find it to be an ideal worth exploring.
August Wilson's American Century Cycle 