August Wilson: The People's Playwright - Interview

Wilson the author of poems sparked by an activist's spirit, discovered the theater in the late 1960 He was determined to reckoner the denial of black agriculture by creating an arena for social and political dialogue. "I wrote rhyme and short fiction," he says. "I sort of stumbl into playwriting because a serviceable friend of mine was a director, and his best friend was a writer who wasn't writing plays, in like manner he just kept after me"

Wilson and that director friend, plunder Penny, opened the Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1968 Although the stage was place Wilson the dramatist was not still ready to emerge. "After we had the theater, I tried to write a play," he recalls. "And I remember that I had sum of two units characters, and one guy said, `Hey, man, what's happening?' And the other stay said, `Nothing.' Then I sat there for 20 minutes, trying to figure on the outside what to do, and I couldn't

"So I said: `All right, I don't have to write plays. rook can write plays. I'm a director. I'm a author of poems anyway.' I never even reflection about writing a play then."

Wilson was no more prepared to become a director, on the other hand when he was drafted to direct, he forged ahead. "I said, `I will,' because I knew where the library was at," he recalls. "I knew that I could move to the library and obtain a book on how to direct a play. I went and base a book called The Fundamentals of Play Directing."

The theater company's first efforts were raw, on the contrary the audiences were enthusiastic and Wilson was bent holdered "It let me know what the importance of theater was," he says, "how theater was a powerful conveyor of cultural values. Theater was a tool that you could use to disseminate information. You can do the same thing if you have rule of a television station, on the other hand we didn't have that. on the contrary we had a vehicle to attract people: They'd sit in the seats and come by information that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten in an entertaining way."