A Layman's Guide to the August Wilson American Century Cycle:

Title page, dedication, acknowledgements, table of contents, preface and introduction

A Layman’s Guide to

August Wilson’s

American Century Cycle:

Collected notes for study groups

Raymond D. Maxwell Copyright page

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A Layman’s Guide to

August Wilson’s

American Century Cycle:

Collected notes for study groups

Raymond D. Maxwell

Dedication

I dedicate this collection of consolidated notes on the August Wilson plays in the American Century Cycle to the playwright, August Wilson, to everyone who has every acted in one of his plays, to every member of a stage crew, to the dramaturgs and drama teachers who help with the play interpretation, and finally, to the critics, the reviewers and the people involved in financing and sales. My wife, Filomena, helped me at every step along the way in organizing the study groups and in arranging these notes. I hope I have gotten it right. All mistakes are mine.

Acknowledgements

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the places who hosted my August Wilson study groups over the past seven years. They are OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) at American University, OLLI at San Diego State University, and the DC Public Library - West End branch. They approved my course proposals, furnished me classroom and Zoom space, and offered me technical assistance in arranging the study groups.

Additionally, I acknowledge the participation of hundreds of study group attendees whose presence and engagement enriched weekly conversations from 2018 to the present, 2025. A handful of family members, friends and former work colleagues who joined independent study groups I hosted on Zoom also contributed to the process of understanding the wonderful stories extracted from August Wilson’s plays.

How To Use this Layman’s Guide

If you are doing the ten-week study group, you should read through the play in its entirety first, then browse or scan each chapter (Chapters 1-10) for context. Save the three-week course for the end to get additional and integrated context on the American Century Cycle as a whole work. The three-day intro course (Chapter 11) provides a good overview with brief synopses for each play.

The afterward/epilogue (Chapter 12) provides a “wrap-up” for the whole cycle and serves as a fitting complement to the three or ten-week group.

Postscript. There’ll be some repetitions across the chapters as it is a compendium of notes across several study group sessions extending from 2018 to 2024. Also, the three day intro repeats some info from the ten-week survey.

Table of Contents

Dedication/Acknowledgements p. 5

Preface p. 8

Introduction p. 9

Ten-week course

Ch. 1. Notes on Jitney p. 11 - 28

Ch. 2. Notes on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom p. 29 - 48

Ch. 3. Notes on Fences p. 49 - 70

Ch. 4. Notes on Joe Turner’s Come and Gone p. 71 - 92

Ch. 5. Notes on The Piano Lesson p. 93 - 114

Ch. 6. Notes on Two Trains Running p. 115 - 132

Ch. 7. Notes on Seven Guitars p. 133 - 148

Ch. 8. Notes on King Hedley II p. 149 - 166

Ch. 9. Notes on Gem of the Ocean p. 167 - 187

Ch. 10. Notes on Radio Golf p. 189 - 210

Ch. 11. Three-day intro course

Day 1 - Synopses, clips, mapping the influences (4B’s), p. 211 - 218

Day 2 - The "Bearden Period,” p. 219 - 223

Day 3 - Greek and classical themes in the last four plays, p. 224 - 229

Ch. 13. Afterword/Epilogue - A Recapitulation p. 231 - 232

Supplementary Reading p. 233 - 235

Index p. 237 - 240

Back cover, Author’s bio

Preface

Whether one goes to a bookstore or a theater to “buy” a particular August Wilson play performance, one is not merely purchasing entertainment for the evening in the traditional sense of going to a movie or a play or taking part in a temporal event. My experience of leading discussions of the American Century Cycle plays in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program and at my neighborhood branch of the DC Public Library, one by one, over several sessions, has convinced me that each play in the Cycle, and all the plays in the aggregate, represents a collection of human records (I used to be an archivist and manuscripts librarian on my day job), in a continuous and dramatic form, encoded documents that not only tell us a history of a people at a critical juncture in their evolution as a people, but present us with a learning system for understanding human existence, theirs and ours, on the page, on the stage and screen, and in our lives. Exposure to this encoded learning system, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what I propose accounts for the continued popularity of August Wilson’s plays.

It is worth our while to analyze these learning system features, this pedagogical ecology as set forth in the plays, defining terms along the way. One should include in the discussion the learning aids we developed in our discussions that smoothed the bumps in the learning process, obstacles I contend the playwright intentionally placed in the learning path to aid the student, the reader or the playgoer in achieving the mastery he intended for us to achieve. In our study groups we discuss the Cycle as a voyage, a journey, and an initiation into a mystic order. In this workbook we begin the process of unmasking the process, revealing the aspects of the Cycle’s inherent learning system so that it becomes universally accessible and applicable.

Future editions

Future editions might include inevitable corrections, notes and insights from on-going study groups and well overdue footnotes and endnotes. An appendix containing really outstanding performance reviews might be a good edition. And of course, there will be improvements in the existing text. The plays August Wilson wrote are fixed, like stars in the night skies, but their interpretations are endless.

A Layman’s Guide to August Wilson’s American Century Cycle

Introduction

Thanks for checking out these study group notes. Why a layman’s guide, one might ask? Most people haven’t really studied drama or theater or acting in a formal way. So most people are laymen. But laymen, especially need an inkling of what is happening in a play and on the stage. So part of the study groups we designed contained elements of drama, elements of plot and character development. The next edition may examine these leads further.

By way of introduction, after seeing a two or three of the Wilson plays, I decided to buy the whole series to read one by one. About the same time, in a conversation at the reference desk where I worked as a reference librarian with a library user who was also an OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) learner, I decided to submit a proposal to form a study group so I wouldn’t have to read the plays alone. The proposal was accepted and a surprising number of learners signed up, once, twice, three times. Each time, each session, I maintained a set of notes and lesson plans by posting them to a running blog. The text of this guide is in large part a compilation of those notes and lesson plans.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a map for navigating the ten plays in the Cycle that avoids the overly academic language of most books that cover the plays. Hence, a layman’s guide. There are lots of excellent academic books, written by academicians for academicians, and I will list my favorites in an annotated bibliography at the end. This guide is expressly written for the non-academician who might be looking for a few ideas about relationships in and interrelationships between the ten plays. I will not provide a list of characters or a scene-by-scene synopsis of each play. You can find that at Wikipedia and I will provide a set of Wikipedia links to each play in one of the appendices.

What this guide will provide is an honest appraisal of the action in the play, as discussed by OLLI and DCPL participants who read the play each week and came to class anxious to discuss what they had read. At infrequent intervals, as we did in the discussion groups, I will introduce outside readings that enhance concepts in the plays. For each play I will provide a link to a YouTube playlist that includes excerpts from live productions, video reviews, behind-the-scenes videos, and any music mentioned in the plays themselves.

I hope you will find each chapter readable and relatable to the play you are studying or whose performance you are preparing to attend. And if reading in retrospect, after seeing the play, I hope the guide helps you make sense of what you saw on stage or, increasingly, on the screen.