5 - August Wilson’s Time and History’s Black Bottom

Summary

August Wilson had one of the most impressive debuts in the history of theater in America, an area whose highest echelons had previously been dominated, overwhelmingly, by white playwrights. The four plays Wilson brought to Broadway between 1984 and 1990, however, not only changed the scope of American drama but also the shape of its audience, drawing Black theatergoers to Broadway in numbers significant enough to impact Broadway’s sense of its audience and of the infinite possibilities of live theater. These 1980s productions thus not only set the parameters of Wilson’s ten-play cycle – one play set in each decade of the twentieth century – as it explores the tension in African American history between community expectation and heroic disappointment, but, within those parameters, also enabled Wilson to create on the American mainstage some portion of the history that might have been visible in a world where American history is always already Black.