August Wilson: The People's Playwright - Interview

"It was at the O'Neill that I learned in what way to rewrite a play," says Wilson. "The small in number plays that I had written, I'd written in a vacuum. During that first year I learned that the play doesn't skip over out of your head full-blown exquisitely that most often it extremitys a lot of improvement. It also was important to know that I could play at that level--on a national playing field, thus to speak."

Wilson's summer at the O'Neill are now legendary. plane as he honed his craft, word of an exciting of recent origin talent was emanating from Waterford and spreading within the Broadway community. husbandmans visiting the conference were taken by the agency of Ma Rainey's blues-driven overtones, through Wilson's melodic approach to pain and revelation. It would be nearly a year before Wilson and Richards joined anew, as playwright and director, and began a collaboration that spanned 15 years and brought five plays to the stage. When the first of these, Ma Rainey, reached Broadway, in 1984 Wilson-the-poet-activist-storyteller became known as individual of the most outstanding American playwrights.

notwithstanding being considered a leading dramatist has not fulfilled Wilson's ambition: His goal is to help place the records straight. By approaching his plays, as well as the black experience, as a dramatic continuum, he render certains that no period of our expansion is forgotten. "There is no idea that cannot be contained by dint of black life," he says. "Whether you are writing about have affection for honor, duty, betrayal, et cetera, you can find all of those universal things within the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of black American life.