On March 13th, 1987, August Wilson sat at West Bank Cafe in New York City to have a discussion with theatre scholar David Savran. Midway through the interview, Savran asked: ‘When you first started writing plays, what playwrights influenced you most strongly?’ It’s an expected question to pose to a playwright; almost a cliche. But August Wilson’s answer was surprising:
‘None, really…I haven’t read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare—except The Merchant of Venice in ninth grade. The only Shakespeare I’ve ever seen was Othello last year at Yale Rep. I’m not familiar with Death of a Salesman. I haven’t read Tennessee Williams. I very purposefully didn’t read them.’
Wilson’s work has since entered the canon of American theatre, and is often compared to many of the playwrights that he chose not to study. This begs the question: from what source did August Wilson draw his inspiration? What inspired him to create such a detailed portrait of American life, expressed through a range of theatrical styles?
Over the years, August Wilson has acknowledged a multitude of influences from many different disciplines: music, painting, world history, poetry, and even real-life conversations overheard on street corners or in cafes. But across his career, he consistently made reference to four key sources of inspiration, which informed his artistic perspective. These are (as he called them), the four B’s: Bearden, Baraka, Borges, and the Blues.
Bearden
Romare Bearden was an American painter, who gained notoriety in the 1960s for his complex collages depicting African American life. These vivid, scenographic works incorporated imagery that was both American and African (often on the same canvas). By portraying the quotidian daily activities of his compatriots, in the context of an African artistic tradition, Bearden elevated the everyday to an almost historic status. It was precisely this quality that attracted and inspired August Wilson, who first encountered Bearden’s work in the late 70s. Wilson wrote:
“My friend Claude Purdy had purchased a copy of The Prevalence of Ritual, and one night in the fall of 1977, after dinner and much talk, he laid it open on the table before me. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’ The book lay open on the table. I looked. What for me had been so difficult, Bearden had made seem so simple, so easy. What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence. It was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience. I don’t recall what I said as I looked at it. My response became visceral. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn’t thought of before and have never ceased to think of since. In Bearden I found my artistic mentor and sought, and still aspire, to make my plays the equal of his canvasses.”
Wilson took quite a direct approach to this goal, taking inspiration for some of his plays directly from Bearden’s collages. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for example, was directly inspired by Romare Bearden’s Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, which depicts a despondent man seated at the table of a busy boarding house. This gloomy figure became the basis for Herald Loomis, the enigmatic central figure of the second play in Wilson’s The American Century Cycle. Similarly, Wilson’s The Piano Lesson was inspired by a Bearden painting of the same name.
Baraka
The only playwright to make the cut for August Wilson’s artistic pantheon was Amiri Baraka, a seminal voice in the black theatre movement of the 1960s. Like Wilson, Baraka was a poet-turned playwright, who likewise believed in the creation of a uniquely black artform that could exist outside of the dominant American literary aesthetic. Wilson cited Baraka’s Four Black Revolutionary Plays as an early theatrical influence:
‘I liked the language. I liked everything about them. In my early one-acts I tried to imitate that and then I discovered I wasn’t him and that wasn’t going to work.’
Though Wilson ultimately moved away from some of Baraka’s aesthetic choices, the latter’s continued commitment to art-as-activism remained a central inspiration for Wilson throughout his career. For both writers, theatre was a space where audiences could take an unflinching look at the lived realities of African Americans in the 20th century, whose stories had rarely been told prior to the 1960s.
Borges
Arguably the most unexpected artist on this list is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine short-story writer famous for a unique style that combined magical realism, postmodernism, and metafiction. On the surface, the conceptual, almost esoteric work of Borges seems to have little in common with Wilson’s commitment to realistic language and everyday scenarios. Nevertheless, Wilson was intrigued by Borges’ approach to storytelling, and the unusual way that he delivered information. Wilson stated,
“Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine short story writer—I was just fascinated with the way he tells a story. I’ve been trying to write a play the way he writes a story. One of his techniques is that he tells you exactly what is going to happen. He’ll say the gaucho so-and-so would end up with a bullet in his head on the night of such and such. At the outset the leader of an outlaw gang with a bullet in his head would seem improbable. When you meet the guy, he’s washing dishes, and you go, ‘this guy is going to be the leader of an outlaw gang?’ You know that he’s going to get killed, but how is this going to happen? And he proceeds to tell the story, and it seems like its never going to happen. And you look up, without even knowing it, there he is. He’s the leader of an outlaw gang.’
This technique is exemplified by Wilson, almost exactly, in Seven Guitars, which opens after the funeral of the central character Floyd Barton. Once his death is established, the rest of the play functions as a flashback which leads us to the moment of his gruesome murder. Thus, the dramatic question is no longer ‘will Floyd survive?’ but ‘how will he die, and at whose hands?’
Blues
Wilson’s final influence, and (according to him) the most important, is not an artist at all. It is an entire genre in itself: the Blues, which Wilson considered to be one of the most significant cultural achievements in African American history.
“I think what’s contained in the blues is the African American’s cultural response to the world. We are not a people with a long history of writing things out; it’s been an oral tradition: passing information, knowledge, ideas, and attitudes along orally. In order for the information to survive, you have to tell it in such a way that it’s memorable—so that someone else hearing the story will want to go and tell someone else. That’s a way of ensuring it’s survival. One way to make that information memorable is to put it in a song. The thing with the blues is that there’s an entire philosophical system at work. And I’ve found that whatever you want to know about the black experience in America is contained in the blues. They couldn’t stop ‘em singing and passing along all their information in songs. This is what I’ve found the blues to be. So it is the Book. It is our sacred book. Every other people has a sacred book, so I claim it as that. Anything I want to know, I go there and I find it out.”
This philosophy is manifested directly on the stage in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson’s 1982 play about real-life blues singer Ma Rainey. In the play, we see the tension between Ma’s artistic impulses, and the financial (and largely white) forces that hope to commodify her music. Ma summarizes Wilson’s perspective on the Blues succinctly in the second act, during a break between recording sessions:
‘You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ‘cause that’s a way of understanding life.’
