Author : Mary L. Bogumil
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 124 pages
File Size : 33,9 MB
Release : 1999
Category : African Americans in literature
ISBN : 9781570032523
In this critical study Mary L. Bogumil argues that Wilson gives voice to disfranchised and marginalized African Americans who have been promised a place and a stake in the American dream but find access to the rights and freedoms promised to all Americans difficult. The author maintains that Wilson not only portrays African Americans and the predicaments of American life but also sheds light on the atavistic connection African Americans have to their African ancestors.
Author : August Wilson
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 10,13 MB
Release : 2019-08-06
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0593087585
From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Now an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Viola Davis.
Author : Alan Nadel
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 22,71 MB
Release : 2010-05-16
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1587299356
Contributors to this collection of 15 essays are academics in English, theater, and African American studies. They focus on the second half of Wilson's century cycle of plays, examining each play within the larger context of the cycle and highlighting themes within and across particular plays. Some topics discussed include business in the street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean, contesting black male responsibilities in Jitney, the holyistic blues of Seven Guitars, violence as history lesson in Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, and ritual death and Wilson's female Christ. The book offers an index of plays, critics, and theorists, but not a subject index. Nadel is chair of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky.
Author : Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher : Modern Language Association
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 33,66 MB
Release : 2016-06-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1603292608
The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson’s plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America’s collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, “Materials,†the editors survey sources on Wilson’s biography, teachable texts of Wilson’s plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,†look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson’s work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.
Author : Alan Nadel
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 31,16 MB
Release : 1993-11-01
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1587291649
This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial to Wilson's canon: the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. The collection includes essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature.
Author : Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher :
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 42,26 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781578068302
Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.
Author : Joan Herrington
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 35,14 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780879102708
(Limelight). The most successful African-American playwright of his time, August Wilson is a dominant presence on Broadway and in regional theaters throughout the country. Herrington traces the roots of Wilson's drama back to the visual artists and jazz musicians who inspired award-winning plays like Ma Rainey's Come and Gone , Fences and The Piano Lesson . From careful analysis of evolving playscripts and from interviews with Wilson and theater professionals who have worked closely with him, Herrington offers a portrait of the playwright as thinker and craftsman.
Author : Laurence A. Glasco
Publisher :
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 17,92 MB
Release : 2015-12-15
Category :
ISBN : 9780996937207
August Wilson is one of America's great playwrights. He lived in Pittsburgh from his birth in 1945 to 1978, when he moved to St. Paul, MN, and later to Seattle, WA. He died in 2005 and is buried in Pittsburgh.Wilson composed 10 plays chronicling the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century--and he set nine of those plays in Pittsburgh's Hill District. He turned the history of a place into great theater. His plays, including Fences, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf have become classics of the American stage.August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays guides visitors to key sites in the playwright's life and work in the Hill District and beyond. This guidebook enriches the understanding of those who have seen or read his plays, inspires others to do so, and educates all to the importance of respecting, caring for, and preserving the Pittsburgh places that shaped, challenged, and nurtured August Wilson's rich, creative legacy.
Author : August Wilson
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 48,97 MB
Release : 2019-08-06
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0593087607
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences comes Joe Turner's Come and Gone—Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. “The glow accompanying August Wilson’s place in contemporary American theater is fixed.”—Toni Morrison When Harold Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man—in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents he begins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world—and it will take more than the skill of the local “People Finder” to discover it. This jazz-influenced drama is a moving narrative of African-American experience in the 20th century.
Author : Patrick Maley
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 19,17 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780813942995
"After August argues that August Wilson was foremost a bluesman working in drama, and that recognizing his blues techniques reveals American drama's fascination with the process of defining the self in collaboration with community. The book reads Wilson's Century Cycle plays alongside the cultural history of blues music, as well as the work of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Katori Hall, Lynn Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks, examining these dramatists' efforts to establish a sustainable identity for the self within social terrain that is often oppressive of racial, gendered, and sexual identity"--
