Exorcising The Demons of Memory

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

August Wilson was only 15 when he stormed out of school forever. After quitting a Roman Catholic academy, where white pupils harassed him because he was black, and then a vocational program he considered academically worthless, he made one last try at a public high school. But when he proudly submitted a 20-page report on Napoleon, the teacher accused him of having it ghostwritten by an older sister. That confrontation ended with Wilson defiantly shredding the essay. "The next day," he recalls, "I went and played basketball outside the principal's window, obviously in the unconscious hope someone would ask why I wasn't in class. No one did, and that was that."

Fortunately for the American theater, the end of Wilson's schooling was not the end of his education. He haunted the local libraries, reading everything from anthropology to verse, and eventually began to try his own hand at writing, first poetry, then folktale adaptations for performance at a science museum, then plays. By the time Wilson, 42, brought his poignant Joe Turner's Come and Gone to Broadway last week, he had established himself as the foremost dramatist of the American black experience. His Broadway debut, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, ran nearly ten months and earned the 1985 New York Drama Critics Circle prize. Fences won the theater's triple crown -- the 1987 Tony, Pulitzer Prize and Critics Circle award -- and is still playing, having set a record for nonmusicals by grossing $11 million its first year.

Wilson is not a "black" playwright in the sense the term was applied in the confrontational 1960s and '70s. He movingly evokes the evolving psychic burden of slavery but without laying on guilt or political harangues. The son of a largely absent white father and a devoted, enterprising black mother whom he revered, Wilson keeps his white characters at the periphery, yet emphasizes the humanity that binds Americans together. Although his vision is steeped in sadness, it is equally rich in humor and wonder at the everyday joys of living, from the umpteenth retelling of a beloved family anecdote to a mock- scandalized peek through the window at the neighbors, from the swing of a baseball bat to the cradling of a newborn child. Like the blues music he threads through them, his plays transcend ethnicity. Playgoers of any race who come as emotional tourists depart realizing they have seen themselves reflected onstage.

In person, Wilson seems as gentle and contemplative as his plays. He frets about a "whole generation ((of black youths)) that has not learned to read," but offers neither sweeping solutions nor invective. He was not always so mellow. Drawn to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, he helped found a volunteer troupe in his native Pittsburgh that mounted the incendiary works of LeRoi Jones. "I tried to write myself, but I wasn't any good at dialogue," he says -- a surprising judgment for a playwright whose characters speak with color and dialectal authenticity. Within a few years Wilson was hatching the idea for a whole cycle of dramas, reflecting black life in each decade of this century. In 1982, through the playwright-development program at Connecticut's O'Neill Theater Center, he met Lloyd Richards, dean of Yale's drama school, who offered the plays a home -- staging them at Yale and later on Broadway. Ma Rainey, the first of their collaborations, depicts a 1920s blues singer who deals with segregation by staying fiercely within a black subculture. Fences, set in the 1950s on the eve of the civil rights era, centers on an embittered former baseball player, too old for the majors when the color bar fell.

Joe Turner, Wilson's third major work, is a sprawling ensemble piece, full of grace notes and epiphanies. It takes place in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911 where the tenants are mostly drifters in work and love: they act as aimless as if newly freed, though they are much too young to have been slaves themselves. The dramatic center is Delroy Lindo's harrowing performance as the one driven character, Herald Loomis. Poor and desperate, clutching his painfully thin eleven-year-old daughter, he bursts in seeking his wife, whom he lost years before when he was taken captive by Joe Turner -- an actual figure who tricked blacks into servitude long after emancipation. Despite this historical reference, Joe Turner works by intuition more than logic. At the end, when Loomis seems pathetically shorn of his consuming purpose, Ed Hall, as the most spiritual boarder, perceives in him instead the "shiny man" of a folkloric religious vision. In that moment, spectators too find themselves transported from pity to admiration: Loomis has transformed his pointless suffering into an ennobling search for life's meaning.

Wilson's fourth opus, The Piano Lesson, has already been produced at Yale. Like Joe Turner, it marries a naturalistic slice of life with mystic imagery. Set in 1936, it portrays a clan divided between struggling toward independence in the rural South and seeking a new life in the urban North, and it ends with a ritual exorcism. In a sense, all Wilson's plays are exorcisms, doomed but determined attempts to drive out the demons of memory. Says he: "The stigma of slavery is powerful. A few years ago, I went to a Passover service, and the first words were 'We were slaves in the land of Egypt.' They are remembering events of thousands of years ago, not just a century. My work is about how the past must inform your future."

Wilson says he has a "thing" about not going into rehearsal for one play < until the next is written. The night before Yale started staging Piano Lesson last October, he drafted the first scene of Two Trains Running, set in 1968. It is to play at Yale whenever Wilson can finish it, in between revisions on Piano Lesson and a screenplay for Fences to star Eddie Murphy.

Theater sources estimate that Wilson earned more than $1 million last year. "Success has not changed me," he says in his soft rasp. "I still have the same wife, the same car -- a 1979 MG -- and the same apartment in St. Paul, which I moved to about ten years ago, after I divorced my first wife. I still buy my clothes at the Goodwill. All I ever needed was a few dollars for cigarettes and beer."

In all Wilson's work, his keen awareness of black America's painful past is balanced with an emphasis on the possibilities of the future. Like his boyhood self, who, he says, "gave up on school but not on life," the adult August Wilson sees both injustice and opportunity. Yet he retains a skeptic's discerning eye for the frailties of human nature. "The teacher who challenged me on that paper and made me quit is still around," he muses. "He knows what became of my life. It would be nice to say that he wrote and told me he realized he was wrong. But it never happened."