sign in sign up
<<
Home , Fences (play), Ruined (play)

MYLES WEBER Rescuing the Tragic Bully in ’s

t the end of Fences (1985), the third entry in what would become August A-Wilsons ten-play cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the twentieth century, Gabriel Maxson attempts to instruct Saint Peter to open the gates of heaven and receive the soul of his recently deceased older brother Troy, the play’s self-absorbed bully of a protagonist. The surviving Maxson sibling, a brain-damaged military veteran bearing a metal plate in his head, believes “with every fiber of his being” that he is actually his Christian namesake, the archangel Gabriel; but without a mouthpiece for his trumpet, Gabe fails in three attempts to produce sound through the instrument. Having waited some twenty-odd years for this moment, though, the character refuses to accept defeat. “He begins to dance,” writes Wilson. “A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature and ritual.” Once Gabriel finishes, claim the stage directions, the gates of heaven open “as wide as God’s closet” to receive Troy’s spirit. “Hence, the menacing Troy has been forgiven,” observed Ladrica Menson-Furr, “and will find a home in the spiritual realm.” By having a character summon a divine force to rescue the deceased protago­ nist—whether that force is truly Christian in nature or pagan and African as nu­ merous Wilson scholars have contended—the playwright seems to break with Aristotelian tradition, which would normally oblige the protagonist to endure, unhappily ever after, the consequences of his own hubristic error. Yet in 1998, after seven of Wilson’s ten major works had been staged, Joan Herrington wrote, “Of all Wilson’s plays, Fences most closely follows orthodox western views of tragic form.” In 1996 Wilson himself told Carol Rosen that Fences was the most “conventional” of the plays he had drafted to that point—plays that included, in addition to Fences, the apprentice work (1982), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), (1987), (1990), and (1995). With the exception of Fences, explained the playwright, these

648 MYLES WEBER

works were ensemble pieces with “their own rules” or what he called “my own way of executing Aristotle’s Poetics. My interpretation of all that.” But clearly Fences does not solicitously observe Aristotle’s structural rules either: at play’s end, Troy Maxson is offered the same spiritual deliverance provided to the title character at the end of Oedipus at Colonus, a drama notable precisely for the sort of deus ex machina ending Aristotle counseled against. If by the mid-1980s Wilson was creating characters who undergo self-inflicted crises in accordance with the classical Greek tradition, an African American coun­ terforce, the blues, had much earlier seized hold of Wilson’s artistic imagination, conveying a sustaining power amid its mournful observations of black American life. This placed Wilson in a bind, for while Aristotle’s Poetics instructed that Troy Maxson must thwart his own good fortune, the songs of Bessie Smith and other blues artists implied that a black protagonist possessed the ability to endure. Wilson attempted in Fences to reconcile these two competing impulses by emulating the dramatic source Aristotle would probably have found least objectionable as a model for structural variation: the Sophoclean oeuvre itself, specifically one of the Theban plays. But, truth be told, these clashing imperatives produced a puzzling work in Fences, a play whose egotistical protagonist is rescued from a self-imposed state of dishonor for no clear reason other than his racial identity and the political implications of being black.

Sophocles certainly provided Wilson with a viable model for a protagonist’s spiri­ tual deliverance. Robert Bagg, in the prefatory materials to his translation of the Theban plays, sets the scene for blind Oedipus’s liberation from his worldly suffer­ ing at the end of Oedipus at Colonus: “In the sacred grove of the Eumenides”—the former Furies, identified in the play as the Kindly Ones—“Oedipus will find the mercy, and in a sense the rebirth, Apollo promised him at Delphi—almost as an afterthought—when as a troubled young man he received the worst news any Greek ever heard from a god: he was doomed to kill his father and his mother would bear his children.” Within that grove, explains Bagg, elderly Oedipus is transformed “from a reviled exile into a revered hero,” and he achieves “an inner peacefulness during his final hour that precedes his entry into Hades and his promised emer­ gence into the afterlife.” After Oedipus’s departure the play’s Messenger reports to all assembled that, as the end of Oedipus’s life approached, the gods sent an escort for the deposed king, with “the lightless depths of Earth bursting open in kindness to receive him.”

649 :------THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ...... =

Likewise in Fences, following eight years of estrangement from his son Cory and eight years spent as “a womanless man”—declared so by Rose, the wife in whose care he dumps his baby daughter from another woman—Troy Maxson is redeemed, though posthumously. When, while on bereavement leave from the service, Cory reappears on stage in his marine corporal’s uniform, he is determined to ceremo­ niously skip his father’s funeral. “I’ve got to say no to him,” he tells his mother. “One time in my life I’ve got to say no.” But Rose wins this rhetorical battle— “Disrespecting your daddy ain’t gonna make you a man,” she tells him—so by the time Uncle Gabe shows up, trumpet in hand, even Cory is prepared to pay his respects as the patriarch’s spirit ascends to the heavens. For this reason Fences, like Oedipus at Colonus, seems to conclude with the benign ending of a comedy, notwithstanding its reputation as Wilson’s most Aristotelian tragedy. “Do you think of your plays as tragedies in the classic sense?” Wilson was asked in 1990. “I would certainly hope so—I aspire to write tragedies,” he replied. “Tragedy is the greatest form of dramatic literature. Why settle for anything less than that?” Further toeing the Aristotelian line, the playwright clarified: “My sense of what a tragedy is includes the fall of the flawed character; that is certainly a part of what is in my head when I write.” Six years later, when commended for his decision to have the character Floyd Barton murdered by a close friend in Seven Guitars, Wilson returned to this point. “It’s tragic. It wouldn’t be tragic if the police killed him,” the playwright explained. “Floyd has to assume the responsibility for his own death, his own murder.” Actually, had the police killed a well-armed Floyd Barton fleeing the scene of a robbery, the spoils of which make him the mistaken target of his homicidal friend Hedley, Floyd’s poor judgment could still be said to have triggered his own demise. But having a protagonist get shot down by white police officers in 1948 would have raised questions about the notion of culpability for a black thief in a racist culture and distracted attention from the playwright’s primary aim: to de­ vise a plot in which the hero serves as his own worst enemy. “Wilson,” concluded Sandra G. Shannon, “peoples his plays with black men and women who grapple with themselves within the racist scheme of things.” Such grappling was the outcome of one of the most remarkable mentoring relationships in the history of American theater. “Without a question he’s been sin­ gularly important to both my work and my career,” Wilson freely admitted in 1991 about , the longtime dean of the Yale School of Drama and head of

650 ------' ---- MYLES WEBER ------the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut (where many of Wilson’s plays received early public readings), and ultimately the director of six Wilson plays, nearly all of which debuted at the prior to their runs on Broadway. “I count myself fortunate to have had Lloyd Richards as my guide, my mentor, and my provocateur,” Wilson acknowledged. “From the O’Neill to Yale to Broadway, each step, in each guise, his hand has been firmly on the tiller as we charted the waters from draft to draft.” According to Charles Dutton, the actor who originated the roles of Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson, Lloyd Richards was responsible for most of the struc­ tural changes to the scripts Wilson produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Fences. “August doesn’t limit himself,” Dutton observed about the playwright’s ini­ tial drafting process. “He just lets the plays run for as long as they like to.” But when the resulting scenes needed to be pared down, reordered, or cut, Wilson accepted input from Richards. “If it’s one thing that Lloyd is an expert in, it is the way a play should move,” Dutton told Herrington. “And August listens, intently, to Lloyd’s suggestions.” On the latter point, Richards concurred with the actor, explaining about Wilson: “The very simple fact is that he is a poet, and a poet does not write a dramatic story line.” The task Richards faced, then, was to instruct Wilson on how to draw upon the “very marvelous characters” and “wonderful events” in his drafts and “put a spine in the play.” Naturally the playwright was no innocent bystander to the revision process, but even Wilson himself gave extensive credit to Richards for “shaping” the final form of the manuscripts on which they collaborated. It’s no huge dramaturgical leap from step one, offering a playwright traditional advice about plotting, to step two, suggesting that his protagonist commit a self­ sabotaging error, but the two matters are by no means identical. And while Richards’s contributions regarding structure are acknowledged throughout the numerous interviews Wilson sat for and in comments from his theater colleagues, the scale of the director’s influence on shaping the fundamentally tragic nature of Wilson’s works is less well documented. However, in one significant exchange between Richards and Sandra G. Shannon, the director’s comments suggest what impact he may have had on the disposition of Troy Maxson and other Wilson characters. Prompted by Shannon to weigh in on the perceived weaknesses of the female characters in Wilson’s plays, Richards replied:

The fact that a character has a weakness only means that he is human. I don’t think that any of the characters that August writes are inhuman, which means that they

651 THE SOUTHERN REVIEW

have strengths and weaknesses. They have likes, loves, fears, but they are interesting human beings which is an essential component to an interesting character. Otherwise, you’re writing a figure or an idea, not a human being.

Not all complex characters are necessarily tragic in the Aristotelian sense, of course, but if Richards’s approval of complexity along with his advocating for vulnerability and culpability on a character’s part did not account for Wilson’s high esteem for tragedy, it certainly did nothing to weaken it. Obscuring the extent of Richards’s influence on Wilson’s writing is the almost telepathic method of communication both claimed they used during rehearsals, which resulted in what Shannon deemed the director’s “subtle imposition” on the playwright. “We don’t have to talk a lot,” Richards told in 1988. “I seem to know what is on August’s mind. I seldom have to ask, ‘What do you mean by this?”’ Wilson, in turn, told Yvonne Shafer, “Lloyd and I developed a way of working over the years, which actually calls for very little dialogue. There’s an intuitive kind of understanding I think, of the overall arc of my work and what I am trying to accomplish.” The playwright offered as an exemplary incident an exchange the two had while readying The Piano Lesson for its premiere, specifically a conversation in which Richards informed Wilson the play’s second act contained “one too many scenes,” though the director did not specify which scene was su­ perfluous. Wilson accepted Richards’s assessment and removed a passage from the second act. “And he said, ‘Good,’” Wilson recounted. “And that was the end of that. To this day I don’t know if we were talking about the same scene or not. We never got specific about it. That’s an indication of the way we work.” Whether Richards had as much influence over the inclusion of tragic protago­ nists in Wilson’s work as he did over the construction of the “spine” of his plots probably cannot finally be determined. The evidence is simply that Wilson con­ sidered tragedy to be the greatest dramatic form and Richards was his strongest influence in such matters. Complicating their relationship was a Freudian element that no doubt exacerbated Wilson’s occasional regret about honoring Richards’s dramaturgical wishes, no matter how subtly they were conveyed. In a 1989 Vanity Fair profile, Wilson commented on Richards’s impact on his writing. “Now, Lloyd is old enough to be my father,” Wilson tellingly explained. “Having grown up without a father, that has a lot to do with my relationship with him. I always view him in a fatherly way. You know, you want to please Pop. You want Pop to be proud of you.” It would be no surprise, then, if the playwright as the compliant son capitulated to what he imagined were his father figure’s wishes.

652 ■■ - ■ - ----—------"MYLES WEBER ------

“Richards’ traditional dramaturgy may, in fact, have limited the scope of Wilson’s work,” Joan Herrington has suggested. At least concerning Fences, the playwright agreed. “Do you consider Fences your signature play?” Sandra G. Shannon asked the author in 2003. “I want to say here for the record,” Wilson replied, laughing as he did so, “of the plays that I have written, it is my least favorite play. It’s not my signature play.” That honor he reserved for the work he wrote immediately after drafting Fences under duress. “My signature play would be Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” Wilson insisted. Yet Shannon argued elsewhere that same year that Fences is the playwright’s signature play, and she had no trouble making her case. “Fences has become a familiar item on reading lists, syllabi, and exams in high school and college cur­ ricula,” she noted. “Not only is the play one of August Wilson’s most critically and commercially acclaimed works, but it is also one of the most read and discussed, the most performed (nationally and internationally), and the most accessible of his eight-play repertoire.” (The eighth play in Wilson’s cycle, KingHedley II [1999], had premiered by then. Still to come were [2003] and [2005]. None of his three final plays enjoyed the same astounding level of commercial success as Fences.) “By all accounts,” concluded Shannon, by 2003 the acclaimed Fences had already “been inducted into the canon of classic American literature,” where, by general agreement, it remains. The play’s canonization may have merely aggravated Wilson’s resentment toward the work and rekindled his ire about the conditions under which it was written, for Fences was “very much a product of Wilson’s response to commercial pressures,” Herrington noted. “While his previous play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, achieved great critical and box-office success,” she explained, “it was faulted by many crit­ ics for its non-traditional structure and its bifurcated focus. Wilson reacted to the criticism as a direct challenge and strove to write a play with a conventional narrative, one large central character, and a more universal theme.” Technically, Herrington was right about the critical response to Wilson’s first Broadway production inasmuch as Edwin Wilson observed in the Wall Street Journal that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, though full of atmosphere, was “not much of a play” and Clive Barnes complained in the New York Post that “nothing much happens” during the show except for an uncharacteristic eruption at the end— Toledo’s murder—which Barnes felt implied that Wilson had suddenly noticed he was running out of time and needed to bring the narrative to a close. But the chronology of events is critical here. “Fences was written before Ma Rainey was ever

653 ------THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ■

produced,” Wilson told Abiola Sinclair. Indeed, the Fences script had its first public reading in the fall of 1982 at New Dramatists in New York, two years before Edwin Wilson and Clive Barnes reviewed the Broadway production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. By the time Ma Rainey opened on Broadway in October 1984, Wilson had already drafted both the commercially viable Fences and the subsequent, corrective work foe Turner’s Come and Gone and workshopped them both under Richards’s tutelage at the O’Neill Center. If Wilson wrote Fences in response to commercial pressures, those were pressures imposed entirely by the O’Neill Center staff and, in particular, Lloyd Richards, who, as Wilson’s future Broadway director, had a financial stake in Wilson’s success. “I should have written Joe Turner after Ma Rainey, and then The Piano Lesson,” Wilson lamented to Dennis Watlington in 1989. “Fences was the odd man out, in the sense that it was not the kind of play I wanted to write. But all these people who are used to theater kept trying to tell me my work should be something different.” By “something different,” these dramaturgical voices apparently meant something more unified in its focus—less of an ensemble piece—and therefore something more self-consciously Aristotelian—i.e„ the commercial juggernaut Fences. In one of his final interviews, in 2005, the physically ailing Wilson, who was suffering from liver cancer, bitterly recounted his O’Neill Center experiences once again, this time to Suzan-Lori Parks. “I immediately heard from all the people when I first went to the O’Neill, ‘This is not right, you should cut this, you should cut that, you can’t have that speech there, it’s got to follow a certain throughline,”’ he recalled. “And I go, ‘Yeah, well, I see what you’re saying, but this is the way I do it.’” In thrall to the playwriting legend, Parks asked Wilson how he managed to survive the initial O’Neill Center ordeal. Wilson admitted he did make changes to the Ma Rainey script once he recognized that some of the suggestions he was offered were valid. But he accepted advice only when it did not violate his natural instincts as much as strengthen his writing, he claimed. Wilson, it would seem, rarely disregarded the imperatives of traditional playwriting entirely, nor did he make a habit of relying on instinct alone. He told Parks, “I was sort of mixing and matching them together.” If Fences was the one instance in which the playwright felt he erred on the side of conventional stagecraft, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and subsequent ensemble pieces constituted for him a more satisfying mix of Aristotle and Wilson, or Richards and Wilson. Though the author never claimed as much, the incongruous final scene of Fences, delivering undeserving Troy to the heavens, might have served as a preliminary corrective move from an artist who already knew which direction

654 MYLES WEBER his playwriting was going to take next, having workshopped Joe Turner’s Come and Gone the summer before Fences premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Harrington, after studying a succession of manuscript versions of the Fences script, reported that in the play’s very first draft Cory steadfastly refuses to attend his father’s funeral. Only after conceiving Joe Turner did the playwright change course in Fences. By having Troy’s son make a gesture of forgiveness at the last minute and thereby help deliver the protagonist to the spiritual realm, Wilson may have been attempting to put his singular stamp on a work he considered severely compromised by a European tradition that called for one towering figure to suffer a tragic fate. “Few comedies end with a funeral,” conceded Joseph H. Wessling, “and there is no denying that Troy’s character and life are the stuff of tragedy.” But, Wessling argued, August Wilson’s vision in Fences looks past Troy’s reprehensible deeds and omis­ sions and settles ultimately on a figure of flawed humanity in need of “grace and forgiveness,” in the spirit of comedy or, at the very least, “metacomedy.” Pressured to construct a narrative that de-emphasized the secondary characters—his preferred ensemble—in favor of a single protagonist, Wilson perhaps felt he should at least spare that figure, no matter how egotistical, the ignobility of a pitiable, tragic end. By this way of thinking, Wilson could allow Levee to commit a senseless murder in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and thereby forfeit his freedom, or have Floyd Barton rashly commit a burglary that leads to his own murder in Seven Guitars, because those men, as part of a true ensemble of characters, do not fully embody the black experience in their respective plays. But if Troy Maxson were to go down in Fences, all of black America would go down with him. “The challenge was to write a play that had a central character which was in virtually every scene, and the whole play spun around him,” Wilson explained. He accepted the challenge, but that singularity of focus seems to be what subsequently irritated him about his least favorite play. In 1989 Wilson bluntly voiced his dissatisfaction by stating: “I’m not going to try to write another Fences.” Yet by 1993 Wilson had softened on this point, confiding to Richard Pettengill that, precisely because Fences seemed like “the odd man out” among his plays, he might need to write a similar work to “complement it.” Four years later he repeated this point to Bonnie Lyons. Ladrica Menson-Furr has called King Hedley II Wilson’s “second attempt to compose a drama that centered on one character,” but that script includes substantial passages developing the Ruby and Elmore subplot in the protagonist’s absence. Tellingly, when Wilson finally did suc­ ceed in composing a second fully unified play—Radio Golf, in which the aspiring politician Harmond Wilks remains onstage for all but one brief beat—Wilson, who

655 ------THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ~ ~ ' rarely spoke kindly of middle-class blacks, spared the protagonist the indignity of committing a tragic error. Offered the chance to sell his soul for political gain, Harmond wisely lets the opportunity pass, out of loyalty to his black ancestors and relatives. “I don’t want to live my life like that,” Harmond states when he rejects the Mephistophelian offer, notwithstanding Wilson’s allegiance to tragedy. “So, we can’t expect you to be producing comedies in the near future?” Vera Sheppard inquired of Wilson in 1990. “No,” Wilson replied. Yet by drafting Radio Golf late in his career, while no longer under the watchful eye of Lloyd Richards, Wilson arguably did just that—even more evidently than in Fences, with its late-in-the- game rescue of the protagonist’s soul.

Taken together, Wilson’s idealization of tragedy, his appraisal of the Fences script as his most traditionally Aristotelian work, and his regrets about having written the play at all clearly suggest the playwright struggled to reconcile colliding impulses even beyond the mere mixing and matching of influences required of him at the O’Neill Center. He effectively conceded this fact in The Ground on Which I Stand, his 1996 address to the eleventh biennial Theatre Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University. “In one guise, the ground I stand on has been pioneered by the Greek dramatists—by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles,” Wilson explained to the conference attendees, “—by William Shakespeare, by Shaw, Ibsen and Chekov, Eugene O’Neill, , Tennessee Williams.” Curiously, this list of European and American playwrights mostly comprised figures whose works Wilson adamantly denied having ever read or seen staged. The playwright else­ where recalled the following about his beginnings as a dramatist: “When I sat down to write I realized I was sitting in the same chair as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen, Amiri Baraka, and Ed Bullins.” Yet he insisted that he was familiar, from among the works of these authors, only with the plays of the two African Americans, Baraka and Bullins. Referring to the com­ mencement of his ten-play cycle, Wilson told Kevin Kelly in 1990, “When I started seriously in 1979,1 realized I hadn’t read any plays. Still haven’t.” And in 2005, the year of his death, he told Parks, “I didn’t even know what a play was”—in 1979, that is. “I had only seen two plays in my life.” Wilson was exaggerating—or minimizing—for effect. In 1968, caught up in the fervor of the Black Arts movement, the twenty-three-year-old poet cofounded the Black Horizons Theatre in his native Pittsburgh and served as director for a number of productions. “We did Baraka, we did Bullins, we did whoever was out there during

656 MYLES WEBER that brilliant time,” Wilson later recalled. “We were surprised how many people came,” he reported. “And the people liked it. We were a good theater company.” Mikell Pinkney estimated that in the 1960s and early 1970s black theaters across America produced some four hundred plays penned by nearly two hundred play­ wrights. Wilson would by no means have read or seen all four hundred at that time, but while he was directing plays at his theater and considering other manuscripts for production, he certainly would have been exposed to a larger number of dra­ matic works than he later admitted, though most were probably not the type he cared to cite as influences on his work. “The overwhelming majority of these plays were unashamedly propaganda for the larger cause of the Black Arts-Black Power alliance,” Pinkney explained. Not that Wilson later distanced himself from Black Power politics. “Were you a Black Nationalist during the sixties?” Dinah Livingston asked him in 1987. “Sure. I still consider myself a Black Nationalist,” he replied. “That’s what I call myself.” The following year Wilson told Bill Moyers he remained both a black nationalist and a “cultural nationalist,” a term he explained thus: “I simply believe that blacks have a culture, and that we have our own mythology, our own history, our own social organizations, our own creative motif, our own way of doing things.” Moyers did not question whether the black way of doing things ever prohibited the use of Western conventions in Wilson’s dramatic works. But several high- profile essays from the 1960s would certainly have shaped Wilson’s early views of black drama and directed him away from Western norms. Larry Neal in “The Black Arts Movement” proposed “a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology” for black artists, since there existed “in fact and in spirit two Americas,” Neal claimed, “one black, one white.” In his essay “The Revolutionary Theatre” (1965), Amiri Baraka, then publishing as LeRoi Jones, similarly called for the cre­ ation of a new aesthetic order. With his emphasis on revolution, Baraka employed rhetoric that was more politically inflammatory than Neal’s. “The Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims,” claimed the author of such revolutionary plays as Dutchman (1964) and the absurdly conspiratorial one-act A Black Mass (1966). “[T]he Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western,” Baraka insisted. Ed Bullins in “Theatre of Reality” (1966) went perhaps even farther than Neal and Baraka in directing African American playwrights toward dramatic forms free of Western influence, though he elsewhere undercut his own argument by insisting, with no supporting evidence, that the

657 THE SOUTHERN REVIEW

Western dramatic models we trace to ancient Greece were originally derived from the “pre-industrial” societies of sub-Saharan Africa. Bullins explicitly urged black artists to adopt aesthetic criteria quite unlike those of white playwrights. “Aristotle and his aesthetic dogmas are not of this time and never had been meant for the black artist anyway,” he instructed. These three essayists spoke with a fairly unified voice: black theater, they main­ tained, should be separate from white theater; it should be anti-Western and anti- Aristotelian; and it should be characterized not by tragically self-destructive figures but rather by infuriated victims. Curiously, though, Baraka based A Black Mass on a Nation of Islam myth that, according to Lindsay Barrett, attributed the creation of the devious white race to “a botched experiment by a black scientist in the ancient past.” Even the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, it would appear, recognized the power of a narrative featuring self-induced calamity, and for an obvious reason: a plot element of this kind implies that the alleviation of an oppressed people’s suffering is within their own power. (Those who created the monster can tame him.) Asked in 1984 whether he, a black man in a white society, ever felt like a victim, James Baldwin replied, “Well, I refuse to. Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.” The nov­ elist Ishmael Reed, on the other hand, complained in the foreword to the Theatre Communications Group’s 2007 reissue of Jitney, “Black and white conservatives accuse blacks of wallowing in a cult of victimization. Hell, judging from the facts that I have studied, they are victims!!” Yet in the Jitney script itself, as in Wilson’s other plays, readers find black characters whose culture is in conflict with white culture but who, like Baldwin, acknowledge this conflict without capitulating fully to it. “I try not to portray any of my characters as victims,” Wilson assured Shannon. “We’re all victims of white America’s paranoia,” Wilson conceded to Bonnie Lyons, but he insisted, “My characters don’t respond as victims. No matter what society does to them, they are engaged with life, wrestling with it, trying to make sense out of it. Nobody is sitting around saying, W oe is me.’” Would his characters, though, be justified in lamenting, “I’ve done this to my­ self”? Wilson explained in a 2000 New York Times essay that he had decided from the beginning of his writing career not to focus on “the pathologies of the black community.” But the individual foibles of black characters like Troy Maxson were clearly fair game. Without a doubt, August Wilson would have read and been influenced by the theorists in the 1960s who cultivated a sense of black power by embracing the

658 MYLES WF.BF.Ii - -- role of a victim who has reached the limits of his patience and plans to fight back. “Revolutionary Black Arts dramatists such as Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka were models for authentic black creativity, Wilson maintained, and he placed himself in their direct line of descent,” wrote Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1997. Still, from the late 1970s on, Wilson took care to distance himself from some of the more outdated dogmas of Black Arts aesthetics. “I think black theater of the ’60s was angry, didactic, and a pushing outward,” he told Hilary DeVries in 1984, a decade and a half after the heyday of the Black Arts movement. “What I try to do is an inward examination.” An additional fifteen years later Wilson continued to insist his plays were not didactic. “From Amiri Baraka I learned that all is political,” the playwright explained to George Plimpton in 1999, “though I don’t write politi­ cal plays. That’s not what I’m about.” What Wilson was ultimately about, dramaturgically at least, was something fairly Western and traditional. “We have, in American theater, an art form that is based on European dramatic values, an age-old dramaturgy that is handed down from the Greeks,” Wilson stated in 1999. “That is the art form that I work in and one that I embrace.” By so stating, Wilson could hardly have disavowed more directly the dicta issued by Neal, Baraka, and Bullins regarding which aesthetic tradition most appro­ priately guides a black playwright. If Lloyd Richards cultivated Wilson’s commitment to Western dramatic traditions, he managed to do so despite Wilson’s early exposure to anti-Western theories of storytelling. But rather than canvasing the works of the major Western dramatists to familiarize himself firsthand with the European dramatic values he embraced, Wilson instead relied primarily on the theories of just one Greek philosopher. “As far as playwriting goes,” he resolved, “it’s Aristotle.” Wilson made the same argument in The Ground on Which I Stand: “The foun­ dation of the American theatre is the foundation of European theatre that begins with the great Greek dramatists; it is based on the proscenium stage and the poetics of Aristotle. This is the theatre that we”—he meant black theater artists—“have chosen to work in.” Still, Gates was right to suggest that Wilson placed himself in a direct line of descent from the revolutionary black playwrights of the 1960s— politically if not always aesthetically—since the ground on which Wilson stood, as tilled by the Greek playwrights and their descendants, was, Wilson made clear, just one guise of his foundational soil. “In another guise,” Wilson continued in his 1996 Princeton address, “the ground that I stand on has been pioneered by my grandfather”—obviously he meant his black maternal grandfather, not his white paternal grandfather, whom he never met—“by Nat Turner, by Denmark Vesey, by

659 ------THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ~ =

Martin Delaney [sic], Marcus Garvey and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” That this subsequent list of influences included not a single playwright suggests Wilson was not so much split by loyalties to competing artistic dicta as he was compelled to reconcile Aristotelian impulses (the aesthetic ground on which he stood) with political allegiances (the racial ground of personal affirmation that endured “in the face of this society’s urgent and sometimes profound denial,” as Wilson phrased it). Wilson did not write political plays, he claimed, but he acknowledged the political foundation to his art, explaining, “It was this ground as a young man coming into manhood searching for something to dedicate my life to that I discovered the Black Power Movement of the ’60s. I felt it a duty and an honor to participate in that historic moment.” Though Wilson and other black theater artists may have chosen ultimately to work in a europeanized environment and embraced the artistic values of that world, the playwright conceded they still reserved the right “to amend, to explore,” and to add their African American consciousness and African American aesthetic to the art they produced. Indeed, over time Wilson worked assiduously to formulate a black aesthetic philosophy to compete with or even subsume his allegiance to Aristotle and the Western dramatic tradition—a competing black philosophy that accounts for his regrets about having drafted Fences and also, I would argue, for his decision ulti­ mately to ignore the play’s Aristotelian blueprint and summon the gods to rescue his bully protagonist in the final scene. “In 1965, as a twenty-year-old poet living in a rooming house in Pittsburgh, I discovered Bessie Smith and the blues,” Wilson reported. “It was a watershed event in my life.” He would repeat and embellish the Bessie Smith anecdote elsewhere, in essays and numerous interviews. In the preface to Three Plays, a book comprising Fences and two other early works, he wrote, “One night in the fall of 1965 I put a typewritten yellow-labeled record titled ‘Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine,’ by someone named Bessie Smith, on the turntable of my 78 rpm phonograph, and the universe stuttered and everything fell to a new place.” To journalists from Esquire, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times the playwright similarly explained that, after amassing a collection of records that included works by artists such as Patti Page, Frank Sinatra, and Walter Huston, he was not prepared for the power of Smith’s voice. “I was literally stunned,” he told Ben Brantley. “And I listened to it again and again for 22 straight times. And I said, 1 don’t know about that other stuff, but this belongs to me. This is mine.’” Wilson was fond of citing four primary influences on his dramatic art: the American painter Romare Bearden, the aforementioned American author Amiri

660 MYT.F, S WEBER ------

Baraka, the Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the blues. But he clarified, “The blues I would count as my primary influence.” Indeed, Wilson ex­ plained, the blues functioned as the bedrock of his writing: “All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.” This musical form was “without question” the wellspring of his art and the greatest source of his inspiration, he told Vera Sheppard. “I see the blues as the cultural response of black America to the world that they found themselves in,” he commented. “And contained within the blues are the ideas and attitudes of the culture. There is a philosophical system at work.” Whatever allusions Wilson made in his writing to elements of his mother’s African heritage—whether the juba dance in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; the incredible longevity of the “omniscient” Aunt Ester character, serving as “spiri­ tual advisor to the community” onstage in Gem of the Ocean and offstage in four other works; or various supernatural events such as ghost sightings and blood sacrifices (“all that spooky stuff,” as Molly in Joe Turner calls it)—the playwright claimed access to these transplanted elements not through systematic research, which he shunned, but via the blues. Complicating any analysis of the influence of the blues on Wilson’s work, though, is the diffuse nature of what Ralph Ellison suggested was the blues impulse—an impetus, that is, “to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness”—and the resulting difficulty scholars have had in discussing the art form in clear, meaningful terms. (“It is hard to define this music,” Wilson conceded.) Employing a tortured melange of academese and jazzspeak, Houston A. Baker Jr. suggested that the blues offer “a phylogenetic recapitulation—a nonlinear, freely associative, nonsequential meditation—of species experience.” More usefully, Baker also cited the synthesiz­ ing function of the blues: “Combining work songs, group seculars, field hollers, sacred harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald humor, elegiac lament, and much more,” wrote Baker, “they”—the blues— “constitute an amalgam that seems always to have been in motion in America— always becoming, shaping, transforming, displacing the peculiar experiences of Africans in the New World.” Typically, a scholar attempting to identify the effects of the blues impulse on Wilson’s work will make reference to a play’s characteris­ tics (such as “aesthetic strategies of polyrhythm and repetition” or “choric call ’n’ response”) but neglect to illustrate these concepts with exemplary passages from Wilson’s plays. Alternately, critics will cite a kinship between Wilson’s works and

661 ------THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ------another musical form entirely. “In many ways its verbal riffs and emotional cadenzas resemble jazz,” Clive Barnes wrote of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Having just been told by the playwright that his greatest artistic influence was the blues, the interviewer Miles Marshall Lewis countered by observing that Wilson’s characters often riff off each other “like jazz musicians.” Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, insisted Kim Pereira, “resembles a jazz composition,” and Craig Werner similarly added, “Wilson crafts a vision closely related to the ‘neoclassical’ jazz of Wynton Marsalis.” Even Marion McClinton, who took over directing duties on Wilson’s plays from Lloyd Richards, claimed, “Hearing Jitney is like listening to the Modern Jazz Quartet.” Atypically, Harry J. Elam Jr. carefully cited specific passages from Wilson’s plays in The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (2004) to support his asser­ tions about the verbal jousting and oral transmission of black culture found in Wilson’s works. In one instance, Elam quoted a passage of dialogue from the fourth scene of the first act of Fences to illustrate the concept of “repetition and revision.” “He lying to me,” Troy complains about his son Cory to Bono, Troy’s colleague and friend. “Telling me he got his job back... telling me he working weekends ... telling me he working after school... Mr. Stawicki”—the manager of the A&P where Cory used to bag groceries—“tell me he ain’t working down there at all!” But this method of achieving musicality through repetition (“telling”) and revision (“tell”), Elam explained, could be found not just in the blues but also in jazz music, where repetition and revision “refigures the idea of forward progress as the music follows a more circuitous pattern.” Later in the same book Elam observed, “If Jitney is a jazz jam session, then King Hedley II embodies the feeling of a jazz opera.” The compulsion to compare Wilson’s work to jazz compositions appears irresist­ ible, despite the guidance Wilson gave journalists and scholars directing them to the blues as the primary influence on his writing. This preference may be due, in part, to the perceived sophistication of jazz compared to its more lowly predecessor. “In blues music,” observed Peter Wolfe, “there’s no approach too crude, no argument too simple, no question too naive. All can be elevated or embellished.” At the same time, there is a common thread of cultural and musical influences stitched through­ out all forms of African American music. “The blues developed from African and African-American work-songs and sorrow songs,” Pereira explained, reinforcing Baker’s point. “Field hollers, shouts, yells, and mournful spirituals provided the structural foundation for the growth of this music.” In turn, subsequent musical forms—jazz, gospel, rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, and even hip-hop—trace their development back to those early work songs through the blues. It is therefore not

662 — - - MY LF, S WEBER ------surprising if audience members recognize in Wilson’s plays certain elements com­ mon to both the blues and jazz. Still, the two are not the same musical form, a point reinforced in a passage from Andrea Lee’s 1981 travelogue Russian Journal. In a chapter titled “The Blues Abroad,” Lee reports on the reactions to a performance by B. B. King and his band at the Gorky Palace of Culture in Leningrad. The Soviet elites who could secure tickets to such a performance in 1979 were already fairly knowledgeable about American jazz music, notes Lee, but they had at that point benefited from very little exposure to the blues. Still, their responses are highly enthusiastic and quite astute, in contradiction to the claims of the Wilson character Ma Rainey, who sug­ gests, “White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there.” The Soviet citizens in Leningrad seem especially eager during intermission and after the concert to offer their observations to Lee, a black American journalist. “B. B. King astounded me. This blues music—it’s not like jazz,” one older fan exclaims. “He poured his whole heart and soul out there on the stage,” the man further states of the acclaimed blues guitarist. “Such feel­ ing is very Russian—we believe in emotion, in the soul. I never thought that an American could feel that way.” The raw emotion of the blues and its mutability are no doubt two qualities that sustained the form’s appeal as an inspiration throughout Wilson’s playwriting career. The blues’ more sophisticated progeny, jazz, might influence a play’s struc­ tural design—as it arguably did for Wilson in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and his other ensemble works—but, Wilson maintained, it was the more soulful and emotionally immediate characteristics of the blues that enriched the quality of his writing. “[T]he blues is basic, bottom music. Jazz comes out of the blues, gospel comes out of the blues,” Wilson explained. “It’s all blues.” Wilson was by no means the first black artist to honor the blues as a uniquely rich repository of African American knowledge and wisdom. In his 1962 essay “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature,”’ Amiri Baraka cited black music as “the one vector out of African culture impossible to eradicate completely.” For that reason, claimed Baraka, “the literature of the blues is a much more profound contribu­ tion to Western culture than any other literary contribution made by American Negroes.” Ralph Ellison, in his 1964 essay “Blues People,” built on Baraka’s analysis, insisting that “any effective study of the blues would treat them first as poetry and as ritual.” That same year, James Baldwin, in the essay “The Uses of the Blues,” chose to employ this musical form as a metaphor to illustrate how the oppressed

663 = THE SOUTHERN R F. V T F. W peoples of the world can make use of their anguish and pain. (“I am claiming a great deal for the blues,” he admitted.) “I don’t know anything about music,” Baldwin confessed. “But I want to talk about the blues not only because they speak of this particular experience of life and this state of being”—the state of anguish and pain, that is—“but because they contain the toughness that manages to make this experience articulate.” “I don’t know anything about music,” August Wilson likewise disclosed. “I don’t play an instrument. I never studied music.” But Wilson saw rooted in the blues not just a philosophical system but also an artistic method. “In order to pass along information,” he told Richard Eyre, “you have to make it memorable, you have to make the story memorable, so someone will go and tell someone else.” And blues songs excel at compelling the listener to retain details of a story and pass them on. So upon hearing Bessie Smith and other blues singers for the first time, the future playwright became intrigued by the idea of uncovering the social manners of black Americans through the blues and passing them down through a blues-inspired form of writing. Wilson’s decision to emulate the blues had specific implications for the ending of Fences, since the blues place value on simple endur­ ance above all else and through their triumph of articulation deliver an explicit narrative that speaks of surviving the worst that life could throw at slaves and the descendants of slaves—or, indeed, the worst that the descendants of slaves could throw at themselves in the plots of tragic works of drama. “They’re about work, love, death, floods, lynchings,” explained Baldwin about blues lyrics, “—a series of disas­ ters which can be summed up under the arbitrary heading ‘Facts of Life.’” The significance of Wilson’s admiration for the blues is therefore twofold: first, Wilson acquired in the blues an aesthetic project that naturally joined with his Black Power politics from the 1960s to augment or even compete with the Western aesthetics he was guided to by Lloyd Richards; and second, he acquired therefrom a philosophy that did not require or even permit his protagonist to end his days wallowing in misery. Ellison wrote of the blues tradition, “This has been the heritage of a people who for hundreds of years could not celebrate birth or dignify death, and whose need to live despite the dehumanizing pressures of slavery developed an endless capacity for laughing at their painful experiences.” To that capacity for laughter, argued Baldwin, was also owed the basic ability to articulate, to make art. “I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy,” Baldwin asserted. “Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with

664 ------MYI.F.S W F. B F. R ------what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist.” To the extent that Baldwin’s declarations about the true nature of joy might en­ courage authors to disavow sentimentality in their writing, they are welcome. But Wilson may have avoided saccharine content too assiduously in Fences by assigning to his tragic hero the unfeeling actions of a father who believes he owes his son no love or affection at all. For this reason, the protagonist’s spiritual deliverance at the end of Fences seems especially incongruous. In the third scene of the play’s first act, Cory tries to make the case for attending football practice after school over his father’s objections rather than working at the A&P. “I got to practice,” Cory explains. “The team needs me. That’s what Coach Zellman say.” But Troy will have none of it: “I’m the boss... you understand? I’m the boss around here. I do the only saying what counts.” Realizing his father’s obstinacy disguises a deeper obstruc­ tionist bent, the teenager bravely decides to address the true issue at hand. “Can I ask you a question?” he says to Troy. “How come you ain’t never liked me?” A deluge of parental scorn ensues. “Liked you? Who the hell say I got to like you? What law is there say I got to like you?” shouts Troy, taunting the teenager at length. “You about the biggest fool I ever saw.” In case he hasn’t yet made his point clearly enough, Troy explains, “I ain’t got to like you.” Finally playing his trump card, the ranting father concludes, “I done give you everything I had to give you. I gave you your life! Me and your mama worked that out between us. And liking your black ass wasn’t part of the bargain.” In his famous 1949 Partisan Review essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which he alienated his mentor Richard Wright by asserting that Native Son (1940) was a no less limited or sentimental novel than Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), James Baldwin made perhaps the best case one can for damaged characters like Troy Maxson, a tyrant who refuses to toss his son a bone of affection even when he openly pleads for one. “Sentimentality,” wrote Baldwin, “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity.” Still, through his strict avoidance in this scene of any kind of sentiment other than scorn, the playwright risks signaling a different type of inhumanity, derived in part from his determination to include in his play a supremely flawed hero. It is perhaps no surprise that, as Wilson amended and explored the Aristotelian form in Fences and applied Greek traditions specifically to the black experience, he felt

665 ------THE SOUTHERN R F, V T E W — compelled ultimately to deliver his protagonist from a dishonorable afterlife, no matter how forcefully that deliverance might have stuck in the craw of audience members who had witnessed Troy brutalizing his son. If the blues suggested to Wilson that black people were capable of articulating their most painful experi­ ences in a transcendent or even joyful manner, that suggestion could only have further inspired the playwright to rescue his bully protagonist and recognize him as a character who triumphs over the debilitating effects of racism.

Of course, a man with Wilson’s gifts could have simply chosen to disregard entirely the instructions he received from traditional dramaturgical voices. Had he been willing to accept the professional and commercial consequences of doing so, he might instead have featured only admirable black victims in his works—protago­ nists who commit no errors of significance but who, still burdened by the legacy of slavery, suffer primarily at the hands of others. But Wilson is by no means alone among black playwrights in creating heroes responsible for their own misfortunes. “The alluring quality of classical mythology transcends race and gender,” Tracey L. Walters has argued; the themes of Greek mythology are “equally appealing to both the black or white writer, male or female,” she observed. In her most Aristotelian play, In the Blood (1999), Suzan-Lori Parks offers a contemporary adaptation of The Scarlet Letter (1850) that features “a homeless black woman and the black preacher who seduces and abandons her,” as the critic Robert Brustein described the material. Actually, Parks’s Hester is abused in one manner or another not only by a religious minister but also by a medical doctor, a welfare employee, a disloyal friend, and a former beau who reenters her life only to hurt her once again. From a brief synopsis of the play, in other words, Hester might appear to be a victim, pure and simple. But in two essays from the mid- 1990s Parks warned in no uncertain terms that the dramaturgical habit of sparing protagonists the indignity of a tragic fate could mortally weaken American drama. “Overweight southern senators are easy targets,” she wrote in 1994 in reference to recent attempts to gut the National Endowment for the Arts of funding. “They too easily become focal points of all evil, allowing the arts community to WILLFULLY IGNORE our own bigotry, our own petty evils, our own intolerance which—evil senators or no—will be the death of the arts.” Just as left-wing artists must not blame every societal ill on right-wing politicians, she implied, black playwrights must not blame the misbehavior of their black protagonists on a racist culture. “Black presence on stage is more than a sign or messenger of some political point,” Parks

566 M Y LES W F. R F. R ------insisted. “The Klan does not always have to be outside the door for Black people to have lives worthy of dramatic literature.” In her own plays, she has always aimed to do something a good deal more exciting than place blame on white people, Parks explained. She has preferred instead to “explore the form, ask questions, make a good show, tell a good story, ask more questions, take nothing for granted,” all in an effort to form a “bulwark against an insidious, tame-looking, schmaltz-laden mode of expression”—melodrama, presumably—“that threatens to cover us all, like Vesuvius, in our sleep.” Every effort Hester makes in Parks’s tragedy to try to alleviate her family’s problems proves either pointless or self-defeating until, taunted by her oldest child, a thirteen-year-old who has begun to echo the adult world’s judgment of his mother as a “slut,” Hester murders one of her offspring. “If I model my plays after anything,” instructed Parks, “it’s Greek plays, where he’s stabbing his eyes out, she’s put the poisoned dress on and the horses jump off the cliff. Sure, it’s linked to African-American history but it’s also borrowed from the Greeks.” This classical European influence arrived early in her childhood, Parks explained: “When I was a kid I used to love to read Greek myths. That was my favorite thing.” Fittingly, and unlike August Wilson, who offered his flawed protagonist spiritual deliverance at the end of Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks was content to leave Hester rotting in prison at the conclusion of In the Blood—mumbling about the injustices of fate, no less.

Aristotelian guidance from Lloyd Richards arrived for Wilson well into his adult years, not in childhood. Still, one wonders whether the timing of its arrival is of much importance or whether Wilson, a full generation older than Parks, simply could not have allowed a character of Troy Maxson’s stature to meet a pitiable end in a society where so many black men, some of whom he knew, had met pitiable ends owing less to their own poor judgment and error-prone behavior than to the system that oppressed them. This raises a chicken-and-egg question: Was the influence of the blues and their sustaining power so potent that they compelled Wilson to give his protagonist in Fences a heavenly reward; or was August Wilson in his early twenties already so deeply committed to the idea of a triumphant black hero (like the ascendant Troy Maxson) that he seized upon the blues as a convenient aesthetic philosophy the moment he fortuitously discovered Bessie Smith’s recordings? Wilson’s attitude toward characters such as Troy, Levee, Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson, Floyd Barton, and King Hedley II, as evidenced in numerous interviews, was certainly one of defensive pride: regardless of the missteps he assigned to

667 ------T H F. SOUTHERN REVIEW them or their unorthodox beliefs and selfish attitudes, the playwright shielded the characters from insult and claimed that their ill-considered behavior was fully justified, even when the consequences of that behavior their lives and the lives of their family members. Suzan-Lori Parks, though sympathetic to her tragic heroine, would never consider excusing Hester’s crime. Wilson’s attitude toward his characters’ troubling flaws was considerably more accommodating. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the trumpeter Levee, having been double-crossed by a white record producer, transfers his resulting hostility onto a black colleague who has the misfortune of stepping on his shoe. “Levee’s a very spirited charac­ ter who does a terrible thing,” Wilson conceded to David Savran. “He murders someone. He’s going to spend the next twenty years in the penitentiary.” That’s one strike against him. “But he’s willing to confront life with a certain zest and energy,” Wilson reasoned. And those qualities, in Wilson’s eyes, made the character admirable: “[E]ven though he kills, for all his misguided transferred aggression and misguided heroics—he still has that warrior spirit.” In The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie attempts to abscond from his sister Berniece’s Pittsburgh home with the titular heirloom, an ornate musical instrument for which their family members suffered and died. Boy Willie plans to sell the totemic piano and use the money to buy part of the Mississippi estate on which their ancestors worked as slaves, much to the consternation of his sister, his uncles, and, presum­ ably, members of the theater audience inclined to support Berniece’s method of honoring the siblings’ ancestors (i.e„ retaining the heirloom) rather than passing the beautiful instrument on to the highest white bidder. Wilson himself, however, endorsed the actions of the larcenous brother. “Boy Willie, not his sister, is the one who embraces his history,” Wilson surprisingly argued. “He doesn’t need this piece of wood to remind him of who he is, to remind him of who his daddy was.” Rather, Boy Willie needs some land on which to build his economic future, explained Wilson. “That’s much more important than a piece of wood.” More broadly, August Wilson longed to rectify the political and economic conditions of black Americans in a manner that basically aligned himself with Boy Willie’s tactics in The Piano Lesson. Wilson wished to supplant white political power, at least in the former slave states, through black economic development, no matter the cost to black people themselves. “I think we should have stayed in the South,” remarked the Pittsburgh native, who at that point had already moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and would later relocate to Seattle, Washington. “We attempted to transplant what in essence was an emerging culture, a culture that had grown out of

668 - - - M Y I, P, S WEBER - — our experiences of two hundred years as slaves in the South,” he observed. “If we had stayed in the South, we could have strengthened the culture.” Furthermore, in an interview with Richard Pettengill, Wilson offered an unorthodox assessment of how millions of black Americans, with a slight nudge, could return, en masse, to their “ancestral homeland” (the Southern states, not Africa) and thrive there economi­ cally. Wilson went so far as to praise the benefits of a rigidly segregated economy and asserted that, in financial terms, African Americans were worse off under the largely integrated economy of the 1990s than they had been under segregation. In a similarly perplexing turn, Wilson condoned Troy Maxson’s ill-considered behavior in Fences, particularly his refusal to allow his son to play high school football, which scuttles the teenager’s chance to earn a college degree on scholar­ ship. Troy, a former Negro league baseball standout who resents that he never was allowed to compete against white players in the major leagues, flatly denies his son the opportunity to test his mettle in an integrated sports environment. “Times have changed since you was playing baseball, Troy,” Rose assures her husband in the opening scene. “That was before the war. Times have changed a lot since then.” “How in hell they done changed?” Troy fires back. “They got lots of colored boys playing ball now,” she explains. “Baseball and football.” Two scenes later Rose restates the point nearly verbatim: “Times have changed from when you was young, Troy. People change. The world’s changing around you and you can’t even see it.” Other decisions Troy makes, involving him in acts of sexual infidelity and the questionable use of his brother’s subsistence checks, further discredit the man and contribute to his undoing in his final scenes, but it is Troy’s willful blindness to the culture’s progress toward racial equality that the playwright emphasizes most insistently. Echoing Rose’s point, Troy’s friend Bono recalls that he and his wife used to live in a two-room apartment with an outhouse, even though they could have afforded better digs. “To this day I wonder why in the hell I ever stayed down there for six long years,” he reflects. “But see, I didn’t know I could do no better. I thought only white folks had inside toilets and things.” “There’s a lot of people don’t know they can do no better than they doing now,” comments Rose. “That’s just something you got to learn.” But Troy never does learn—that is his tragic error. “The white man ain’t gonna let him get nowhere with that football,” Troy pronounces on Cory’s situation. Two scenes later, he robotically repeats to his son, “The white man ain’t gonna let you get nowhere with that foot­ ball noway.”

669 ------THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ------

“If a wrong action is performed because of ignorance, the responsibility of the wrongdoer is not so great as if he had behaved irrationally,” observed James A. Arieti in reference to Oedipus’s not realizing that the road-rage victim from his past was his father and that his wife is his mother. “Not to know all the facts of any set of circumstances is a condition of human existence and of the finitude of human minds. Perhaps before acting one should do what he can to know everything, but it is, of course, an end impossible to achieve.” Troy, though, certainly should have noticed the changes underfoot in American society by 1957, a point made clear when the protagonist, a garbage collector by trade, receives a promotion to the position of driver despite the fact that, through years of complaining about discrimination in the workplace, Troy had never bothered to acquire a driver’s license. Piling one absurdity upon another, Wilson has Troy, once he receives the coveted promotion, begin to make noises about retiring, as if the character were planning to withdraw completely from the transitioning culture around him and retreat farther into a state of denial. Throughout the play Troy’s obstinate behavior seems to derive more often from an irrational streak than from ignorance of the facts. “You just come along too early,” Bono tells Troy, lamenting in plain terms his friend’s lousy luck. “There ought not never have been no time called too early!” Troy shouts before seeking solace from his liquor bottle. “Don’t care what color you were,” Troy insists. “If you could play. . . then they ought to have let you play.” Certainly, no one in the theater audience would have taken issue with Troy’s assertion upon the play’s premiere in 1985 or at any time since, but his argument is largely beside the point in regard to Cory. “He’s just trying to be like you with the sports,” Rose attempts to explain to her husband. “I don’t want him to be like me!” Troy responds. “I want him to move as far away from my life as he can get.” Under other circumstances, these might be the sentiments of a protective father attempting to guard his son against unreasonable expectations. But in Fences, amid a chorus of voices instruct­ ing Troy that times have changed—and among mounting evidence confirming as much—Troy appears to be a petty tyrant made irrational by envy for his son’s opportunities. (Cory: “You just scared I’m gonna be better than you, that’s all.”) As a final absurdity, Wilson, in numerous interviews, defended Troy’s actions. Just as he sympathized with Boy Willie’s plans for economic justice even when it meant trampling on the memory of the family’s murdered ancestors, Wilson considered Troy’s efforts to block Cory from pursuing a college education to be

670 MY I. F. S WEBER — of his protagonist’s wisdom and foresight. “I think Troy’s right,” Wilson told Savran in 1987. “Now with the benefit of historical perspective, I can say that the athletic scholarship was actually a way of exploiting. Now you’ve got two million kids who think they’re going to play in the NBA.” But Rose makes clear to Troy that their level-headed teenager’s aim is to get a college education, not to strike it rich as a professional athlete. “He ain’t talking about making no living playing football,” she explains. Still, asserted Wilson, blacks who accepted sports scholarships in the late 1950s and the 1960s, even for the purposes of earning a bachelor’s degree, were largely exploited just the same. “Very few got an education,” the playwright insisted, whereas a young black man who chose to forego college and instead learn a trade, like fixing cars, could always make a living. “That’s what Troy wants for Cory,” Wilson claimed. So does Troy qualify as a tragic figure at all? Or is he merely the administrator of tough love to an ungrateful teenage son? If one were to disregard the fundamental structure of Fences (up to but not including the final scene) and ignore the numer­ ous passages in the play in which Troy is overtly remonstrated by his loved ones for his obtuseness and intransigence, and if instead one read only Wilson’s interviews and the play’s concluding scene, one could easily come away believing, as Wilson maintained, that Troy’s cruelty constituted a clever method of challenging Cory— prudently, thoughtfully—in an effort to prepare him for the world at large. One could conclude that Troy was all along guiding his son away from a professional occupation toward a trade as a favor for which Troy may have expected eventual gratitude (and which he arguably receives, posthumously). Such is the muddle that resulted ultimately from, on the one hand, Wilson’s capitulation to the Aristotelian demands of Lloyd Richards when Wilson was initially conceiving Fences and, on the other, the playwright’s subsequent regrets about subverting his blues-centered artistic philosophy and its political trappings. “I’m trying to write an honest pic­ ture of the black male in America,” Wilson told Savran about his broadest artistic designs. “I try to present positive images, strong black male characters who take a political stand.” But a race-based agenda of this kind does not necessarily mesh well with the main tenants of Aristotle’s Poetics, as Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Ed Bullins warned in the 1960s. The outcome is the not-so-nimble back tracking the playwright performed not only in interviews but also in the final scene of the text, wherein the play’s central character receives the just rewards for his commendable parenting skills, or so Wilson later implied.

671 THE SOUTHERN REVIEW

* * * Though Wilson’s overt regrets about capitulating to the wishes of the O’Neill Center staff were limited mostly to his experience with Fences, that work is by no means his only play with an unanticipated resolution. As Stephen Bottoms has noted, Two Trains Running has its own startling incongruities. “At times, Two Trains Running seems so bleak in its perspective—so lacking in faith that America’s institutional­ ized racism can be effectively fought—that the situations faced by its characters acquire the existential overtones of absurdism,” Bottoms argued. Yet the character Memphis, who has been negotiating with city hall about selling a piece of property, in the end receives a payment from the government that exceeds even his own highest quoted sale price—“to everyone’s surprise,” as Bottoms remarked. “This turnabout, which flies in the face of the play’s bleak logic of structural injustice, reads on one level as a fantasy deus ex machina conclusion,” claimed the scholar, alluding to the offstage intervention of the spiritually enlightened Aunt Ester, who dispenses fortune-cookie wisdom (“Make better what you have and you have best”) to African American supplicants, including Memphis. “Nothing in the play has prepared us to believe that this could occur,” Bottoms observed. “So why does it? Is this simply a case of the political need for hope in the future winning out over dramatic coherence?” It may well be. And the price of similar dramatic incoherence in Fences is a con­ fused or highly mixed response from audience members to the protagonist. Having brought a significant reservoir of goodwill from other projects to the part of Troy Maxson, the actor , who originated the role of Troy both at Yale Rep and on Broadway, introduced this tyrannical father figure to 1980s audiences in a remarkably ingratiating manner. But even he couldn’t win over everyone to the belief that Troy deserved to ascend to the heavens. Part of the problem was that, unlike in Oedipus at Colonus, wherein we witness the protagonist’s postreversal agony for the entire length of the play before he is rescued by the gods, in Fences nothing but a blackout separates some of the later scenes, in which Troy loses his son’s respect and Rose declares Troy “a womanless man,” from the concluding scene, in which Troy receives his spiritual reward. Whatever hardship Troy suffers during the eight years subsequent to his downfall and prior to his deliverance is simply elided from the plot. Regardless, Brent Staples, writing in the New York Times as a spokesman for members of the middle-class black audience—the children of the Troy Maxsons from the 1950s, in other words—confessed to being reduced to tears by play’s end. Others, though, have found the character simply objectionable

672 MYLES WEBER

(as anyone who teaches the play to college undergraduates, black or white, can attest). “Troy is exceedingly selfish toward those around him,” concluded Edwin Wilson in the Wall Street Journal upon the play’s Broadway premiere. Thomas Disch published a much harsher verdict in The Nation. He wrote, "What’s wrong with the play is what’s wrong with Troy’s family: no one but the lord and master is allowed to breathe.” In Disch’s case, admiration for the lead actor’s performance failed to generate any affection for the character himself. “Jones delivers every line with perfect pitch,” the critic conceded, “but the effect, even so, is like spending an evening with a garrulous drunk. In the course of such an evening, you may find out a lot about that drunk, and you may have a few good laughs, but it doesn’t add up to a fond memory.” Part of what these and other detractors have found unsatisfying or confusing about the protagonist derives from the quandary faced by every playwright who attempts to write a tragedy: How does one maintain sympathy for a character who, by definition, must alienate the audience by bringing harm upon himself and oth­ ers? The protagonist in Fences, a thief and murderer in his youth, commits a full array of errors in middle age: He cheats on his wife, he exploits his brain-damaged brother, he covets and then blocks his son’s promising future, he speaks endlessly but doesn’t listen. Most important of all, as his loved ones repeatedly inform him (and us), Troy fails to recognize that African Americans of Cory’s generation face greater professional opportunities than those of Troy’s generation did. And yet, claimed the playwright, Troy was not in error at all when it came to judging the impediments white society continued to impose upon black men in the 1950s. So it would seem that Wilson’s greatest difficulties here do not stem from the age- old problem of balancing a tragic hero’s sympathetic nature with his fundamental flaw, but result instead from the playwright’s attempts to synthesize an exceptional number of aesthetic influences and other considerations—Aristotle and the blues foremost, but also Black Power politics, racial pride, and the commercial realities every playwright must weigh. Wilson faced a special conundrum, ironically of his own making, in which he espoused special admiration for the tragic form as delineated by Aristotle while refusing to accommodate its most basic element: a protagonist whose downfall is both self-induced and, by implication of the final curtain, permanent. His solution was to nullify that downfall through spiritual deliverance and repackage the character’s blunders as admirable deeds. “I’m an artist first,” Wilson asserted, “a playwright second, and a black third. But art is always first.” Yet he also claimed, “Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I

673 - T H F. SOUTHERN R E V T E W am an African American.” Perhaps no two statements could better illustrate the competing demands on August Wilson’s allegiances, resulting in the mixed signals of Fences. James Earl Jones was asked by journalists about the crudest aspects of Troy’s personality. “Those are just abrasions and scars from being a common man,” the actor claimed. He assured Janice Arkatov of the Los Angeles Times, “Troy is more than good. He’s standing up on his hind legs reaching for Heaven”—exactly where he arrives by play’s end. But not everyone was placated by such assurances. Wilson was fond of recounting an incident from an early performance of Fences where, as Gabe raised his musical instrument to his mouth and impelled the deceased Troy to ready himself to meet his maker, a black woman in the audience, her patience exhausted, stood up. “You don’t need to blow that trumpet,” she shouted to the stage, “cause he’s going straight to hell!”

674 Copyright of Southern Review is the property of Southern Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.