Remembering August Wilson

In New York Sunday night, the lights of Broadway will be dimmed in memory of playwright August Wilson. A few days ago, only a few hundred miles away and yet very far in other ways, there was a memorial service in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, where August Wilson grew up.

Ben Brantley offered his thoughts on August Wilson in the New York Times. Here is part of what he wrote:

People talk about an artist having an eye. But with playwrights, it's the ear that counts. Mr. Wilson had a peerless pair. His writing comes closer to the sweep of Shakespearean music than that of any of his contemporaries. Edward Albee creates intense and elegant chamber pieces; David Mamet, machine-gun jazz; Sam Shepard, rhapsodic plainsong; Harold Pinter, monastic chants; and Tom Stoppard, jaunty concertos. But these days only Mr. Wilson has written plays that sound like grand opera - and it is no contradiction to say that it is opera rooted in the blues.

Mr. Wilson's majestic cycle of 10 plays of the African-American journey through the 20th century, each set in a different decade, doesn't just sound operatic. Even though his characters are almost all poor and socially powerless, their stories bring to minds the gods of Wagner and the doomed royalty of Verdi.

Poltergeists, mad prophets, fatal curses, visions of unavenged dead men and of roads to heaven, genealogies that twist into constellations of legend, and bloody crimes of passion that seem as inevitable as they are unnecessary. These elements recur regularly in the works of the Wilson cycle, the last of which ("Radio Golf") was first produced this year.

Yet the mythic and otherworldly are always anchored to a landscape dominated by the physical and economic facts of hard lives: the exact costs of shoes and coffins and bottles of liquor; the potential for profit in stolen refrigerators and dog feces; precise psychological descriptions of bodies scarred and shattered by knives and bullets; the hungry before and depleted after of quick sexual couplings. It is the music of Mr. Wilson's prose that connects the mundane and the mystical, and allows earthbound men and women to raise voices that fly to heaven.

In "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," Mr. Wilson's 1984 breakthrough drama about a fractious recording session of blues artists in the 1920's, the combustible title character speaks about the music she performs. "White folks don't understand about the blues," she says. "They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life."

Not everyone in Mr. Wilson's plays - including, by the way, Ma Rainey - is always in touch with this music of illumination. Nor is this music the same for everyone. Mr. Wilson's major characters are all in search of songs that define them both as individuals, as specifically as handwriting, and as parts of a shared history.

In a prefatory note to his masterpiece, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (on Broadway in 1988), set in 1911, Mr. Wilson writes of the African-Americans who have made the exodus from the South to the North: "Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their bags a long line of separation and dispersement" as they "search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy."

This describes not only the quest of Mr. Wilson's major characters but also his own emergence as a playwright. Mr. Wilson said - and said so many times that the story has acquired the burnished sheen of myth - that it was discovering vintage blues recordings, as a young man living in a Pittsburgh boarding house, that made him start to listen to the people around him with a new sense of the notes beneath the words.

Transforming that perception into fluid theater took Mr. Wilson years. He spoke with wry disparagement of the self-conscious poetry of his early work. But it would be foolish to mistake the voices in his plays as mere transcription of overheard conversations from the Hill. That would be like assuming that Elizabethans spoke in Shakespearean blank verse.

The actor Charles S. Dutton, who has starred in several of Mr. Wilson's plays, has said of the dialogue: "It is a lingo that has an inherent rhythm of its own. Most of us have been black all our lives. But we kid each other about August's writing. We'll say, 'I've never heard anything in my life like that, have you?' "

Pick up any play by Mr. Wilson, and a few pages into it, you'll start to pulse to the music. He uses real songs, from children's game-playing chants to raunchy scorchers à la Smith like "Anybody Here Wanna Try My Cabbage" (in "Seven Guitars"). And his characters, especially those wild-eyed soothsayer types who show up a bit too persistently, will sometimes speak in the manner of oracular professors about the nature and importance of song.

But none of this would count for much if Mr. Wilson didn't deliver the music that infuses his characters' talk. It buzzes like traded jazz riffs when men argue about subjects as pedestrian as train schedules. It acquires the wistfulness of Puccinian lament when lonely souls recall love. It shifts into subversively antiphonal call and response when fathers and sons quarrel in the voices of their respective generations. And it soars into gospel chorales when characters journey into the historical night of their slave ancestors, as in "Joe Turner" and "Gem of the Ocean."

In such passages, the subliminal movement is from disjointedness and friction into transcendent, seemingly unwitting harmony. And then there are the arias - the monologues of remembered losses and thwarted ambitions that build in Wagnerian crescendos, given reverberant life on Broadway by actors like James Earl Jones (in "Fences") and Delroy Lindo (in "Joe Turner"). Some of these arias end in defeated dying falls; others in moments of epiphany. But in either case, there is triumph in the very music, in the sense of pain and chaos woven, however briefly, into an ecstatic symmetry.

Music here is always a way of remembering, a congenital, instinctive force that reaches back through the centuries to the first slave ships. It seems telling that in the last play of the cycle, a tale of capitalist pipe dreams set in the 1990's, the music often sounds fainter than before. The central character in "Radio Golf" is an urban redeveloper, which in the world of the Hill means he is an eraser of history. In other words, he has lost his song. Mr. Wilson sets him on the path to looking for it by the end.