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15 - Critics on August Wilson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2008

Christopher Bigsby
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

The only research I do is to listen to the music. There's a lot of history of our people in the music. When I was writing Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, I didn't want to know anything about Ma Rainey. I figured what I needed to know I'd get out of her music. Listening to her singing gave me a good sense of who she was . . . When I did Joe Turner's Come and Gone, I certainly did not think about anything that happened in 1911, but I had a sense that they didn't have cars but had horses. And I envisioned people coming into the cities, and there were boarding houses and people setting down roots. I believe if you do research, you're limited by it . . . It's like putting on a straitjacket.

August Wilson

It is not for nothing that Harry J. Elam, Jr.'s 2004 book is entitled The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, in that it acknowledges the extent to which Wilson's plays, set in the past, nonetheless address current concerns. Wilson may not have been interested in conducting historical research but he was concerned to trace the history of individual lives and the unfolding story of the African American community in such a way that present attitudes and values are seen in the context of past experiences.

Some critics have chosen to treat the plays as if they were written in the era in which they are set. So, for example, a number of articles approach Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) in terms of the history of the blues (Adell, Crawford, Gener, Mills, Plum, Smith, Snodgrass, Taylor), or jazz (Hay, Werner, Wolfe); the Great Migration (Anderson, Bogumil, Gates, Pereira, Shannon 'Transplant'); the conflicting views of African spirituality versus African American Christianity (Richards, Shannon 'Good Christian'); patriarchal roles (Brewer, Clark, Hampton, Sterling); women's roles (Elam 'Women', Kubitschek, Marra); 'Southernness' (Gantt) or 'folk traditions' (Harris).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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