Introduction: A Layman's Guide to the August Wilson American Century Cycle of plays
Welcome to Raymond’s Newsletter, A Layman’s Guide to the August Wilson American Century Cycle. Raymond Maxwell, librarian, archivist, retired foreign service officer, former naval officer and enlisted submariner from Greensboro, NC.
A Layman’s Guide to the August Wilson American Century Cycle
Introduction
Thanks for checking out this layman’s guide. By way of introduction, several years ago, after seeing three or four of the Wilson plays, I decided to buy the whole series of ten plays to read one by one. About the same time, in a conversation at the reference desk (where I worked part-time as a reference librarian at American University) 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. The proposal was accepted and a surprising number of learners signed up, once, twice, three times, now up to five times. Now it is an annual offering that is always fully subscribed. 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 and a consolidation of those notes and lesson plans.
Whether one goes to a bookstore or a theater to “buy” a particular August Wilson play, 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, 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 and a community at critical junctures along their evolutionary path 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 accounts for the continued popularity of August Wilson’s plays.
Here, I will analyze these learning system features, this pedagogical ecology as set forth in the plays, defining terms along the way. I will 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 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. Here 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.
The purpose of the guide is to provide a map for navigating the ten plays in the Cycle that avoids the overly academic language of most books and essays 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. 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 the retirees and housewives (and house husbands) in OLLI 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 and images of pieces of art that enhance concepts in the plays. For each play I will provide a link to a YouTube playlist I developed that includes excerpts from live productions, video reviews, behind-the-scenes videos, and any music mentioned in the plays themselves.
The layman’s guide is a work in progress, a working document, and a living document. Each Spring we hold the study group at OLLI-AU, and each Spring I read the plays weekly and draft notes, which I have come to call, field notes. These notes reflect what is going on in life during the session, in my life and in the lives of the group participants. One year, for example, we had a retired family psychologist in the study group. Sessions from that year, I think it was the third session, provide insights into family dynamics which form a core theme of the Cycle.
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 or film, I hope the guide helps you make sense of what you saw on stage or, increasingly, on the screen.
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p.s. Bio
A lifelong learner, I arrived late to the process of formal instruction as a teaching librarian/archivist, my former careers being in the military (Navy) and the diplomatic service (overseas assignments principally in Africa and the Middle East). Since retiring from government, I earned an MS in Library and Information Science and have worked as a reference and instruction librarian, an archives program analyst, a town archivist, and a manuscripts librarian. For the past four years I have led American Century Cycle study groups in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at American University.