Word: broadway
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They used to call it Black Broadway: the stretch of U Street in northwest Washington where the likes of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane performed nightly. Then, in the 1960s, the neighborhood fell victim to urban blight as riots burned down much of the commercial district and affluent blacks moved to the suburbs. But these days efforts by local families to revive the area are taking hold. The result is a lively mix of recharged African-American culture and hip new shops and restaurants--less than 10 minutes from the National Mall...
...kind of principled pigheadedness seems perfectly in character for a man who has spent two decades of his creative life on a single mission: a cycle of 10 linked plays, each representing one decade in the black experience in 20th century America. The plays have received wide critical acclaim, Broadway runs, two Pulitzer Prizes (for Fences and The Piano Lesson) and upwards of 2,000 productions in regional theaters across the country. And now, finally, they are complete: the 10th play, Radio Golf, will open this week at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn. Wilson, an inveterate rewriter...
...typically start slow (anyone who says his eyes have never drooped in the first act of an August Wilson play probably isn't being honest), but build to thrilling, sometimes violent, often otherworldly, climaxes. And although the last one, Gem of the Ocean, almost didn't make it to Broadway (after an investor pulled out, producer Carol Shorenstein Hays, who had backed Fences, put in $1 million to save it), they have drawn black theatergoers in droves to a street that is still known, without irony, as the Great White...
Wilson's views haven't changed. The plight of black theater, he says, is even worse today, while color-blind casting has exploded--Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar and James Earl Jones in On Golden Pond on Broadway this spring alone. "If I see a production of Gem of the Ocean with a white cast, maybe I'll change my mind. But Death of a Salesman with a black cast--that's not the way blacks respond to this problem. It's a white play. It's intended to be." He realizes that is not a popular view among African...
...pardon. If you were to push ahead of him in line, he might offer to hold your briefcase. He is, in short, the round little guy with the slightly comical face you have seen in such movies as Manhattan and Lovesick, and he almost apologizes for having written Off-Broadway's newest hit, Aunt Dan & Lemon. "At the risk of sounding self-pitying, the project taxed my resources to the limit and sometimes beyond," he says. "It took more brains than I had, and to figure out how to write it, I had to borrow some of next year...