A recapitulation of sorts – The American Century Cycle
Updated December 9, 2022.
As we enter the final week of the ten-week American Century Cycle of plays, featuring Radio Golf, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on where this journey has taken us while exploring the work of America’s greatest 20th century playwright, August Wilson.
We began ten weeks ago with Jitney. Jitney was originally spelled with an exclamation point, Jitney!, as if one were verbally hailing a cab, even though most of the initial transaction occurred by telephone. The play was first produced in 1985. Jitney would later be considerably expanded (1996) with the addition of some seven monologues. Dramaturges and critics say the expansion reflected Wilson’s success and experience as a playwright but I suspect after producing several plays in the Cycle, he felt the need to expand and expound on Jitney both as the first play and to properly introduce the whole cycle of plays, much like the first canto of Dante’s Inferno introduces whole The Divine Comedy and the second canto introduces Inferno itself.
The second play was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, already made into a full length film on Netflix. Hope it exists on a separate platform because all I hear is doom and gloom for Netflix these days. Toledo dies in Ma Rainey, the piano player who was the only band member who could read and write. In effect, literacy dies. And perhaps the brightest star of the film, Chadwick Boseman, who played Levee Green the trumpet player, dies in real life shortly after the film is released, heightening the sense of grief and gloom.
It was following the success of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom that Wilson decided, having written plays set in three separate decades at that point, that he could use the decade as an organizing principle. So the American Century Cycle was born, even though it was then called the Pittsburgh Cycle, even though Ma Rainey was set in Chicago.
From here, Wilson embarked on what I call “the Bearden Collaboration.” His next three plays, Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson, all great box office successes, were all related to images August Wilson had seen in an exhibition catalog at his friend Claude Purdy’s house from a Romare Bearden exhibition, The Prevalence of Ritual. It’s a shame Wilson and Bearden never actually met – the collaboration could have been perhaps deeper and richer. Much has been written on all three plays, and two have been adapted to award-winning films. So I’ll leave it to you to explore and discover.
The sixth play, Two Trains Running, was for me a bit of an outlier. It wasn’t a part of the earlier Bearden Collaboration, nor did it fit in with the darker and more tragic plays that followed. I mean, it was tragic enough, as most of Wilson’s plays were/are. Wilson himself said he aspired to write tragedies, referring to tragedy in one interview as “the greatest form of dramatic literature.” It was his last play before his divorce. He dedicated it to his former wife.
Insofar as Two Trains Running gives us the first mention of Aunt Ester, it is no outlier. Every subsequent play either references or features Aunt Ester except Seven Guitars, which gets honorable inclusion into the Aunt Ester sub-series of the Cycle due to its direct relationship as a prequel to King Hedley II.
The next four plays, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf, are increasingly dark in tone and texture, and increasingly tragic, in my estimation. Seven Guitars begins and ends with the death of the principal character, Floyd Barton, who was never able to get things right. In a Borgesian twist, Floyd Barton goes straight to heaven at his funeral. King Hedley II, Wilson’s true Shakepearean tragedy, ends with the death of the protagonist, King Hedley, accidentally, perhaps, shot by his own mother. We don’t actually know. Gem of the Ocean, a play Wilson dedicated to his two daughters that includes a complete sub-play inside it, ends tragically with the death of Solly Two Kings, a former Underground Railroad dragman and conductor.
Gem of the Ocean and and Jitney have their own set of similarities. In either case, the people in question came together, united not by bloodline but by circumstance, to build something from nothing.
Radio Golf, the only play in the Cycle to focus on the black middle class, takes dramatic “blackface” to a whole new level and ends in extreme disappointment as Harmond Wilks’ Pittsburgh mayoral campaign and honest intentions dissolve amid rumors of corruption and graft.
But don’t let me spoil it for you, they are all great plays, the last four as well as the first six. Even #6, the one that almost doesn’t really fit in with the rest, is a great play.
We talk at length about three of Wilson’s stated major influences, Baraka, the blues, and Bearden. Less is said, and less has been written about Borges, a fourth stated major influence, perhaps because his contribution to Wilson is difficult to understand, to extract. I have attempted to make up for that deficiency in my session notes. Suffice it to say Borgesian magical realism and storytelling features figure prominently in most of the plays of the American Century Cycle.
Wilson also mentions two additional “B’s,” the playwright Ed Bullins whose plays he directed during the Black Arts Movement, and the essayist/novelist/social critic James Baldwin, who influenced every artist in his orbit. We do not see in writing the influence of Zora Neale Hurston, but readers and followers of Hurston, aka “Zoraheads,” see her spirit manifested throughout Wilson’s work. (The August Wilson/Zora Neale Hurston nexus requires a much bigger space in a different blog post . . .)
Each play ends with the words “END OF PLAY.” Except the last one, Radio Golf, which ends, simply, “BLACK.” I don’t know what that means, but if the present year, 2022, is any indication, with all its wars and rumors of wars, rising prices and commodity shortages, the 20th century may have been the last opportunity for an American Century.