The Unconscious Rebellion of August Wilson

Read: ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ and the liberating power of music

The politics of dramatic structure might appear tenuous. It’s not obvious that a director’s request, say, for Wilson to trim his characters’ monologues so that Ma Rainey would build more swiftly and clock in at under three hours (as, indeed, he was asked—and eventually agreed—to do) has a racial valence. (The new Netflix film, directed by George C. Wolfe from a script adapted by the longtime Wilson collaborator Ruben Santiago-Hudson, runs at a fleet 90 minutes.) For Wilson, however, holding space for a character’s story was an invitation for audiences to listen to the speech of ordinary Black people—rhythms that first captivated Wilson in the songs of Bessie Smith, and then in stories he’d hear elders swap in his native Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As he explained to an interviewer in 1990, “I think the long speeches are an unconscious rebellion against the notion that Blacks do not have anything important to say.” If that derailed the expectations of a well-made play, Wilson didn’t mind. In a 2003 interview, he welcomed the development of “a Black theater that is not based on Aristotle’s Poetics and European conventions,” constructing a Black aesthetic instead from sources such as the blues and Black nationalism.

At stake was a broader issue of assimilation. The fundamental question that African Americans had faced since the end of slavery, Wilson said, was: “Do we assimilate into American society and thereby lose our culture, or do we maintain our culture separate from the dominant cultural values and participate in the American society as Africans rather than as Blacks who have adopted European values?” As a playwright, Wilson dramatized this question dialectically, and his characters repeatedly learn the danger of adopting European values at the expense of their ancestral heritage. “We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes,” the piano player mourns in Ma Rainey. “We done sold ourselves to the white man in order to be like him.” When Wilson disparaged Fences as his least favorite of his plays, despite its critical acclaim and commercial success, it was hard not to hear his resentment that the play had compelled him to adopt artistic values that weren’t his own.

One of the joys of the high schoolers in Giving Voice encountering Wilson’s work is that they perform monologues liberated from the plots of the plays. Their interest—and the judging criteria for the competition—is characterization, language, energy, not dramatic structure. The students find their own courageous voice onstage in speeches that play like earthy arias, revealing Black experiences in richly textured, everyday language, rather than advancing a theatrical arc. As one of the students says, the rhythm of a Wilson monologue is the blues: “The only thing you have to do is hear the song.” Listening to these teenagers’ voices becomes, in some ways, a return to Ma Rainey’s art—the blues liberated from white commercial restrictions.

Through interviews with artists such as Viola Davis and Denzel Washington (who produced Netflix’s Ma Rainey after directing and starring alongside Davis in a 2016 film of Fences), the documentary also insists on the universality of Wilson’s writing, putting him alongside Shakespeare as a poet of human experience. “August belongs to everybody,” the actor Stephen McKinley Henderson tells us. “Everybody that’s got a mother, father, sister, brother—this speaks to you.” It’s an inspiring message, but it appears slightly at odds with Wilson’s own professed aesthetics of a theater by and for Black artists. In a controversial 1996 speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” Wilson opposed the so-called color-blind casting of Shakespeare plays and other classics, arguing that it reinforces white drama as the norm into which artists of other identities have to fit: “The idea of color-blind casting is the same idea of assimilation that Black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years.”