August’s Century

When August Wilson died in 2005, the theater community lost one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century. Originally a poet, the Pittsburgh native and high school dropout (he didn’t want to deal with the intense racism he experienced in the classroom), turned his attention to writing plays.

What Wilson left behind is one of the most impressive and quietly revolutionary bodies of work by any American playwright. Wilson’s plays transcended color lines and coaxed American theater’s predominately white audience into watching stories that weren’t about them. His plays aren’t just about black people—they are about being human, albeit a humanity filtered through the African-American experience.

Wilson’s greatest achievement is his Century Cycle, a group of ten plays that, taken as a whole, chart African-American experiences throughout each decade of the twentieth century.

This month, Penumbra Theatre kicks off its ambitious commitment to stage all ten plays in the Century Cycle in the next five years, at a rate of two a year, all directed by Penumbra artistic director Lou Bellamy. The first one up is The Piano Lesson, Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play about a family caught between the symbols of its past and its financial hopes for the future. (Wilson received his first Pulitzer for Fences, about a former star athlete who forbids his son from following his own career path.)

Bellamy’s original goal was much more ambitious, but he settled for what he could get. “If I had the resources, I’d like to stage them all in rep, so you could come here and see all of them in a weekend,” Bellamy muses. “But I do have the resources to give two of them my very best attention each year and turn all of the knowledge that we have about that work toward it.” (In April, Gem of the Ocean begins its run on the Guthrie’s Proscenium Stage.)

This is the first time Bellamy has ever directed The Piano Lesson, having acted in it under the direction of Marion McClinton in 1993. The reason he did not revive it sooner, he says, is that “August declared [ours] the definitive production, even though a Broadway tour had come through once before. He said that [our production] became a model of style and eloquence that would influence all of his future work. After he said that, I thought, ‘I don’t want to go back and try this again.’ ”

Interestingly, most of Wilson’s maturation as a playwright took place in the Twin Cities in the early 1980s. Bellamy was one of Wilson’s closest collaborators and has become, along with McClinton, one of the definitive interpreters of Wilson’s work. When New York City’s Signature Theatre was producing Wilson’s Two Trains Running off Broadway, Bellamy approached the theater multiple times about directing it, but heard no response. Unbeknown to Bellamy, Wilson put in a good word for him and Bellamy was hired to direct. He ended up winning an Obie Award, as well as the 2007 Lucille Lortel Award for Best Revival. As a result of these awards, the word got out: No one does Wilson better than Bellamy.

“One thing that is clear when we look at this in hindsight is that something very special was happening at Penumbra in those early years,” says Bellamy. “Wilson has given us vehicles to plumb the depths of our intellect and craft, without going outside of the African-American experience. It was thought—erroneously—that you could only scale those heights by embracing European art. Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov [were like the Himalayas], and the rest were foothills. Wilson proved this thinking wrong. He proved you can think as deeply about mankind doing Fences as you can about a King Lear.”

The Piano Lesson: Opens Feb. 19. Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul, 651-224-3180