[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 130 (Friday, October 7, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2045-E2046]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF AUGUST WILSON

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, October 7, 2005

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay my recognition and 
respect to the extraordinary contributions of the world renowned 
playwright August Wilson who died October 2, 2005 of liver cancer. Mr. 
Wilson was a Tony Award winner and two time Pulitzer Prize winner whose 
plays not only chronicled and captured the harsh realities African 
American families faced throughout the 1900s, they have provided 
insight into Black life, depicting its struggles to overcome 
discrimination and poverty with dignity and nobility amidst the pain 
and the struggle that all communities are able to appreciate. His plays 
poetically depict the effects of slavery and oppression on Black 
Americans in every decade of the 20th century, and show that despite 
the harshness of life, this crucible produced great strength and 
resilience that have enabled us to overcome.
  August Wilson was born on April 27, 1945 as Frederick August Kittel, 
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He later changed his name after his father 
left out of respect for his mother. Mr. Wilson grew up on ``the Hill,'' 
which was a predominantly Black and poor neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It 
was the daily experiences of this African American community that 
inspired the content of his plays. At 13 years of age he moved to 
predominantly White Hazelwood, but he did not forget the unique culture 
of the Hill, especially when he had to suffer the racial taunts in 
Hazelwood. The racial discrimination that Wilson faced led Wilson, at 
the age of 15 to drop out of high school because his teacher couldn't 
believe that a Black student could create a well written term paper and 
accused him of plagiarism. This however, did not impede his thirst for 
knowledge or his love for writing. With diligence and self discipline, 
August Wilson continued his education through self-study at Carnegie 
Library. He began reading Black literature and other Black works, like 
Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Arna Bontemps.
  His hopes of becoming a writer were quickly challenged when his 
mother urged him to become an attorney. Disapproving of his dreams for 
a writing career, his mother forced him to leave the house. In 1963, 
Mr. Wilson enlisted in the U.S. Army only to be discharged in 1964. 
Determined to continue his pursuit for a writing career, he invested in 
the purchase of his first typewriter and moved into a rooming house in 
Pittsburgh. To support himself he worked a series of odd ``blue 
collar'' jobs, like short-order cook, dishwasher, porter, stock boy, 
and gardener. Starting out as a poet, his poems were published in the 
late 1960s and early 70s in several periodicals, one being the Negro 
Digest created by the late John Johnson.

  However, it was not until August Wilson heard the voice of legendary 
Bessie Smith's record ``Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like 
Mine,'' he realized that it was his responsibility to carry the torch 
of his ancestors and assume the role as the representative of Black 
American culture, telling the world our history and dignifying our 
struggle. Hearing the blues motivated, challenged, and empowered the 
young poet to document Black American culture in his writings. Wilson 
describe this epiphany as the ``Universe stuttered and everything fell 
to a new place . . . I cannot describe or even relate what I felt . . . 
it was a birth, a baptism, a resurrection, and a redemption all rolled 
up in one. It was the beginning of my consciousness that I was a 
representative of a culture and the carrier of some very valuable 
antecedents . . . I had been given a world that contained my image . . 
. The ideas of self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense . . . 
are still very much a part of my life as I sit down and write. I have 
stood [these ideas] up in the world of Bessie Smith on the ground 
captured by the Blues. Having started my beginning consciousness there, 
it is no surprise that I would mature and my efforts would come to 
fruition on that same ground.'' As a result he established two 
organizations that promoted Black American writing: the Center Avenue 
Poets Theatre Workshop, and Black Horizons. Plus, he continued writing 
plays chronicling different experiences that Afiican Americans faced.
  His big break was the debut of the 1982 play ``Ma Rainey's Black 
Bottom,'' the first of a 10-drama series that would chronicle each 
decade of the Twentieth Century, which premiered at Broadway's Cort 
Theater on October 11, 1984. Set in Chicago in 1927, the play focuses 
on White record companies' exploitation of Black musicians. This play 
mirrored the images and positions that African Americans faced in a 
society dominated by White racism. The beauty of the play, grabbed 
national attention earning Mr. Wilson several Tony nominations, and the 
New York Drama Critics Circle Award. ``Fences'', however, a play 
depicting a 1950s Black family's personal and economic issues, grossed 
a record $11 million in a year, which broke the record for nonmusical 
plays. As a result, Wilson became The Chicago Tribune's Artist of the 
Year; the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best 
Play, four Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor and 
Best Featured Actress; and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Finally, ``The 
Piano Lesson,'' inspired

[[Page E2046]]

by Romare Beardon's painting illustrated family conflict over an 
heirloom built by a slave ancestor. This 1986 play earned the New York 
Drama Critics Award, the Tony for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award, the 
American Theatre Critics Outstanding Play Award, and the Pulitzer Prize 
for Drama. Wilson's subsequent plays continued to receive accolades and 
awards, solidifying his position in American Theatrical history.
  August Wilson was not only a champion of Black America by 
representing and dignifying African American culture during a time when 
it wasn't otherwise appreciated; he was a pioneer in the world of 
literature and theatre. Although his body is no longer with us, his 
work and his impact on American History will continue on for posterity. 
On October 17, Broadway's Virginia Theatre will be renamed the August 
Wilson Theatre in Mr. Wilson's honor. His final play, ``Radio Golf' is 
scheduled to be produced on Broadway during the 2006-2007 season. Mr. 
Wilson is survived by his wife, Constanza Romero; their daughter, 
Azula, 8, and an adult daughter from a previous marriage, Sakina 
Ansari.
  I submit to you an article from the October 4, 2005 edition of the 
Washington Post, illustrating the type of man and impact August Wilson 
had on this country.

                [From the Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2005]

                   The Cycle of August Wilson's Life

                            (By Peter Marks)

       The death of August Wilson does not simply leave a hole in 
     the American theater, but a huge, yawning wound, one that 
     will have to wait to be stitched closed by some expansive, 
     poetic dramatist yet to emerge.
       To say that Wilson was the greatest African American 
     playwright the nation has produced--as some inevitably do--is 
     to limit the scope of his significance as a contributor to 
     the country's dramatic heritage. Wilson wrote scathingly 
     about racism, yes, in ``Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' and the 
     indelible scars of slavery, in ``The Piano Lesson'' and ``Gem 
     of the Ocean.'' He also wrote about the Oedipal conflict of 
     fathers and sons (``Fences'') and the universal quest for the 
     easy score (``Two Trains Running''). His concerns were as 
     multifaceted as the hard-pressed people he wrote about.
       Over the past 20 years, Wilson had staked a legitimate 
     claim to the title of nation's most important dramatist. 
     During that time he won two Pulitzers and a Tony, and among 
     his plays he polished off at least three that will rank among 
     the classics: ``Ma Rainey,'' ``Joe Turner's Come and Gone'' 
     and ``The Piano Lesson,'' along with what will perhaps endure 
     as his favorite with audiences: ``Fences,'' the story of an 
     embittered former baseball prospect, played on Broadway by 
     James Earl Jones.
       All this may not have meant as much as it did in the days 
     when playwriting giants roamed the countryside, when a new 
     play by Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill 
     had the power to galvanize public discourse, and even land an 
     actor on the cover of a national magazine. We've moved away, 
     sad to say, from the era of the stage as a truly vital 
     pulpit. In the commercial realm, Wilson's plays were usually 
     not moneymakers. But the fact that he could consistently 
     count on clicking the ``send'' button and having a play end 
     up in the in box of Broadway--even in this lean and 
     inhospitable time for serious drama--stamps him as a theater 
     man of nothing but consequence.
       Wilson died ludicrously young on Sunday, at the age of 60 
     in his adoptive home town of Seattle, where he wrote plays, 
     big, garrulous, angry, lyrical, ponderous, often beautiful 
     plays, in an office in his basement. He went public with his 
     terminal liver cancer a little more than a month ago and when 
     he did, he came forward with a breathtaking serenity. He 
     pronounced himself prepared for what was coming. ``I've lived 
     a blessed life,'' he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the 
     paper of the city of his birth, the metropolis that served as 
     backdrop for many of his major plays. ``I'm ready.''
       He cannot, of course, have been content to leave his 
     family, especially his 8-year-old daughter, Azula, whom he 
     proudly told me last December was writing her own plays. 
     Work-wise, however, he may have been expressing a measure of 
     relief, in that he had satisfied the exacting requirements of 
     the towering assignment he had given himself: a cycle of 10 
     plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century. (``Radio 
     Golf,'' the last one, has yet to reach New York; its regional 
     debut comes at Center Stage in Baltimore in March.)
       Not that he was exactly through with writing. In an 
     interview over breakfast at a diner in the Edison, the modest 
     Times Square tourist hotel that was his longtime New York 
     base, he revealed that he was working on a comedy whose 
     milieu now seems heartbreakingly prescient: Pittsburgh coffin 
     makers.
       His dramas are connected by a palpable sense of geography, 
     usually, a rambunctious district of Pittsburgh; by the 
     mordant humor of characters who spit at hardship; by an eye 
     that seemed to see a story taking shape in every soul. They 
     also reveal the acumen of Wilson's ear in the cross currents 
     of language that flow from his characters as if pouring out 
     of deep, lustrous, meandering canals.
       He wrote for authentic-sounding stage creatures, and yet 
     his dialogue might have found a place in novels. ``Now I'm 
     gonna show you how this goes, where you just a leftover from 
     history,'' Toledo, the piano player, tells the other Black 
     musicians in dialect in ``Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.'' The 
     play, set in the 1920s, was the first of Wilson's to make it 
     to Broadway. It was an auspicious coming out. Wilson, wrote 
     drama critic Frank Rich in the New York Times at the play's 
     1984 opening, ``sends the entire history of black America 
     down upon our heads.''
       Wilson returned again and again to the idea of Black 
     America's unique historical inheritance, to reminders of how 
     the South's peculiar institution was not at all a dead memory 
     but a living shadow. As many other characters would in the 
     Wilson pantheon, Toledo offers in ``Ma Rainey'' his own 
     homespun history lesson about the African diaspora:
       ``Everybody come from different places in Africa, right? 
     Come from different tribes and things. Soonawhile they began 
     to make one big stew. You had the carrots, the peas, and 
     potatoes and whatnot over here. And over there, you had the 
     meat, the nuts, the okra, corn . . . and then you mix it up 
     and let it cook right through to get the flavors flowing 
     together. Then you got one thing. You got a stew.''
       Wilson's own favorite playwright was Chekhov, and you can 
     see how their theatrical stews might simmer well together. 
     Wilson was a conjurer of characters, not an accomplished 
     spinner of plot or master of compression. He was, in fact, 
     legendary for writing one overlong draft after another, and 
     working with a director--most successfully Lloyd Richards, 
     head for many years of the Yale School of Drama--who could 
     help him pare it down. A script was by no means complete once 
     rehearsals began, he told me. He even liked to seek out 
     actors and ask them what else they needed from him.
       He had a reputation for feistiness and a certain amount of 
     ego. The talk of the theater world in 1997 was his Manhattan 
     debate with Robert Brustein, the director, critic and founder 
     of Harvard's American Repertory Theatre, over their 
     disagreement about whether a theater exclusively devoted to 
     Black experience is desirable. Wilson was a passionate 
     advocate of Black theater, and the evening at Town Hall 
     stands as the last occasion on which a philosophical theater 
     argument grabbed headlines.
       When I sat down with him late last year, Wilson seemed 
     anything but combative. He was in a pleasant frame of mind, 
     as a playwright might be with the work of grinding out a play 
     completed. The play was ``Gem of the Ocean,'' set in 1904, 
     which as a result became the prologue of the cycle he'd been 
     writing for much of his professional life.
       As it happens, the first in the chain was the last he'd 
     ever get to see on Broadway. The chain he'd long promised, 
     and true to his word, the chain he delivered.

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