August Wilson’s Century Cycle of Plays

The wit and wisdom offered by great artists

August Wilson proclaimed the centuries old matriarch, Aunt Ester, his most significant character. Her presence incarnates a key Wilson idea: The need for African Americans to move forward into the future through embracing their past.

The Yale Summer Series was held by Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, in the early 1980s, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, by August Wilson, was workshopped there. August Wilson was an unknown then, and I didn’t attend that workshop, although I was there. Decades later, I mailed that copy of the workshop program to The Penumbra Theater.

I never met August Wilson either, but he is braided into my life. I admire his brilliance in creating the Century Cycle, a play for every decade of the twentieth century. Characters appear at different ages in the cycle, in major or minor roles, or in passing mention in the plays, or off-stage.

We learn the history of America through the cycle, but we also learn the history through the prism of black experience, as The Penumbra Theater says on its website.

August Wilson grew up in Pittsburgh

August Wilson was born in Pittsburgh, but started his professional playwriting career in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was associated with the Penumbra Theater. (The penumbra is the shadow part of an eclipse when the sun is still visible.)

It was while Wilson was at the Penumbra that his plays debuted on Broadway, and he became associated with Lloyd Richards, the black director of the Yale School of Drama.

I spent evenings at the Penumbra Theater watching many of Wilson’s cycle plays. They made me laugh and suck in my breath in wonder. They remind me of my companion who often accompanied me to the plays, and the best of the Twin Cities.

August Wilson is said to have written the Aunt Ester character with Greta Oglesby in mind, and she originated the character at the premiere of the play at The Goodman Theater in Chicago. The Oglesbys and our family were friends during the growing-up years of our sons. Although Greta Oglesby was an understudy on Broadway, she has never gotten on the Broadway stage. She was known more as a regional actress. She has often been on stage at The Goodman Theater, or in the Twin Cities, or as part of the company at Ashland, Oregon’s Shakespeare Festival.

I wanted to quote a scene from Fences, a play about baseball and many things, but August Wilson makes my point best in talking about his Cycle characters:

They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor…In all the plays, the characters remain pointed towards the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics.” — August Wilson

So why do we continue to read books or see movies or plays? I learn something from the great artists, I learn something about how they worked, how they worked out what they think, at least for the moment. I figure out dilemmas in my own life by seeing or hearing from characters who faced similar dilemmas. We are reminded how to survive very tough times; that there have always been very tough times.

I also believe Aunt Ester, that we should pay attention to synchronicities, the mysteries of the Universe, the hoodoo. We can be seers, bridges.