FROM THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE COLLECTIVE: COMMUNITY IN AUGUST WILSON AND TONY KUSHNER By Copyright 2007 Richard Noggle Ph.D., University of Kansas 2007 Submitted to the Department of English and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ________________________ Chairperson, Maryemma Graham ________________________ Chairperson, Iris Smith Fischer ________________________ Paul Stephen Lim ________________________ William J. Harris ________________________ Henry Bial Date defended ________________ 2 The Dissertation Committee for Richard Noggle certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: FROM THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE COLLECTIVE: COMMUNITY IN AUGUST WILSON AND TONY KUSHNER Committee: ________________________ Chairperson, Maryemma Graham ________________________ Chairperson, Iris Smith Fischer ________________________ Paul Stephen Lim ________________________ William J. Harris ________________________ Henry Bial Date approved _______________ 3 ABSTRACT My study examines the playwrights August Wilson and Tony Kushner as “political” artists whose work, while positing very different definitions of “community,” offers a similar critique of an American tendency toward a kind of misguided, dangerous individualism that precludes “interconnection.” I begin with a look at how “community” is defined by each author through interviews and personal statements. My approach to the plays which follow is thematic as opposed to chronological. The organization, in fact, mirrors a pattern often found in the plays themselves: I begin with individuals who are cut off from their respective communities, turn to individuals who “reconnect” through encounters with communal history and memory, and conclude by examining various “successful” visions of community and examples of communities in crisis and decay. My work is informed especially by Pierre Nora’s definitions of “history” and “memory” and his thoughts on “collective memory” as embodied in particular sites, lieux de memoires. Studies of ghosts and “cultural haunting” by Avery Gordon, Kathleen Brogan, and David Savran are used throughout to illuminate Wilson’s and Kushner’s use of the “supernatural” to illustrate the necessity of “communal memory.” Both Wilson and Kushner view “community” as a source of collective strength, a tool for change, and I conclude by arguing for the necessity of a more interconnected community of politically-minded playwrights. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 5 Chapter One: “The Ground on Which I Stand”: The Politics of Wilson and Kushner 18 Chapter Two: ‘The Myth of the Individual: Disconnection and Rejection of Community 52 Plays examined: Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Kushner’s Angels in America Wilson’s Fences Kushner’s Caroline, or Change Chapter Three: Waking the Dead: History as a Bridge to Community 82 Plays Examined: Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Kushner’s Angels in America Wilson’s The Piano Lesson Chapter Four: “We Will Be Citizens”: Community Formation 118 Plays Examined: Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches Wilson’s Two Trains Running Kushner’s Angels in America: Perestroika Chapter Five: “If you live long enough, the boat will turn around”: 147 A Contemporary Crisis of Community Plays examined: Wilson’s King Hedley II Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (Homebody section) Wilson’s Radio Golf Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (Kabul section) Conclusion 182 Works Cited 188 5 Introduction I first encountered August Wilson in an English composition course in college. We read Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. My experience with drama at this time was limited at best. I am not entirely sure we ever read a Shakespeare play in my small, rural high-school. I know we read Our Town, and I wasn’t overwhelmed. My taste ran to novels at the time. Yet when I read Joe Turner, I realized that great drama--even when simply read from the page--could feel alive in the same way as a novel. A great play could show me a “whole world,” as Wilson has described his cycle of plays. As a southerner, I was drawn to Wilson’s storytelling, those long monologues, and to his sense of place and his interest in the blues. As a white southerner from a very white town, my experience with African-American culture was limited, and Wilson’s world was new to me. There was certainly nothing like Wilson’s “bones people” in Our Town. I was intrigued and fascinated when I learned about his “project”: ten plays, one per decade of the twentieth-century, a new “history” of African-American culture. While my work as an English major, extending into graduate school, led me away from drama for many years, I still followed Wilson’s career, watching the cycle develop, an extensive depiction of a literary community that surely rivals Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I loved Wilson’s ensembles, vastly different from the single-protagonist literature I was accustomed to reading. The notion of the ensemble, multiple-storyline approach is what originally led me to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. I remember reading the rave reviews that greeted the play’s arrival, and I was intrigued, trying to visualize what a production might look like. Seeing the play in Arkansas seemed fairly unlikely, however, and I was still years 6 away from the kind of extensive work with theatre that might have led me to travel far enough to see a production. Oddly enough, though, the play showed up at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre a few years later. The company staged Millennium Approaches one season and Perestroika the next. Naturally, this being conservative Arkansas, there were protesters, angered by the play’s openly homosexual sensibility. The productions were excellent. My experience with live theatre at the time was limited to a bit of Shakespeare and a few musicals, but Kushner’s work showed me something different. The stage, I realized as I watched Kushner’s spectacularly entertaining and moving work, could be a tool for explicit social change. Kushner wasn’t just out to ponder big ideas. He was out to make a difference. Like Wilson’s work, this was theatre with a purpose, but it didn’t feel didactic. It was many years later before the idea of linking Wilson and Kushner occurred to me. The project started with the issue of “community,” a term I saw as essential to the work of both artists. When I had the opportunity to hear August Wilson speak at Kansas City’s historic Gem Theatre, in connection with a performance of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I realized that the audience was there to hear his views on the problems of African- American culture at least as much, if not more, than his views on any particular play. The work, in a sense, had taken on a life outside the theatre. Wilson intends his project to speak to--and, in a sense, strengthen--the African-American community by taking a traditionally oppressed group and moving them to the center of American history. His plays remind his African-American audiences of an innate African sensibility that they, and many of Wilson’s characters, may have lost or forgotten through their experiences with a dominant, white culture. Wilson asks his audiences--black and white--to consider 7 the possibility of a self-sufficient African-American community in which such a sensibility is not subsumed but allowed to flourish. The plays, most of them large ensemble pieces, sometimes show us such communities but just as often show us communities in crisis, attempting to re-establish what has been lost. Kushner, in Angels in America, also takes an oppressed group, in this case homosexuals, and places this community center stage in a work set in a very specific historical and cultural moment, the Reagan years, while also looking back to consider the formation of America and forward to ponder its future. While Angels has an explicitly gay-activist aesthetic, the play, like all of Kushner’s plays, ultimately envisions a community stretching beyond easy boundaries. As the play ends, a central character addresses, and embraces, the audience in a moment that begins as one of homosexual solidarity but widens to provide a sense of “interconnectedness” that spans sexual, racial, religious, and political lines. “Community,” as a term, is a bit wide-ranging, and means different things to each playwright. Robert D. Putman, author of the bestselling study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, sees “community” as a “conceptual cousin” (21) to the idea of “social capital,” a term in existence since the early part of the twentieth-century, defined by Putnam as simply “connections among individuals--social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” (19). Putnam writes of “bonding capital” and “bridging capital,” terms he traces to Gittell and Vidal’s Community Organizing, and the terms are a useful means of considering the ways that Wilson and Kushner think about “community.” “Bonding” forms of social capital, Putnam writes, are “by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogenous groups” (22). This certainly seems the nature of 8 “community” in Wilson, who envisions a self-sustaining black culture in America, informed by a distinctive African sensibility. Wilson does not desire a “bridge” between cultures. Kushner, on the other hand, refuses any definition of “community” that does not look outside itself to acknowledge its inherent interconnection: “Bridging” forms of social capital, Putnam writes, “are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages” (22). Despite differences of definition, however, Wilson’s and Kushner’s work reveals a remarkably similar outlook regarding how to achieve “community.” Both see the term as inextricably connected to “political” concerns: to be a community is to be united; to be united is to have a “voice”; to have a “voice” is to have the ability to effect change.