Word: wilsone
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...redevelopment office, where two black businessmen (one of them running for mayor) are seeking to clear space for a new commercial development. There are purposeful echoes of earlier plays: descendants of two characters from Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) are on hand, as is a character from Wilson's 1960s play Two Trains Running; and Aunt Ester's home is the last one marked for demolition. The social message is more overt than most in Wilson's canon: the play is about the "failure of the black middle class," he says, "who failed to return their expertise, participation...
...Wilson, who turns 60 this week, is sitting in an outdoor café on the Yale campus. A polite, doughy-faced man, he likes the outdoors because it allows him to puff on his Marlboro Lights, but on this unusually hot spring afternoon, he looks a bit formal and out of place in coat, tie and newsboy cap. He grew up in Pittsburgh's predominantly black Hill District, dropped out of school in the ninth grade and set out to educate himself by devouring books in the library. One of the first was anthropologist Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture...
...black folks on stage as black folks"--but was pretty much a theatrical naif. He hadn't read Shakespeare (except for The Merchant of Venice in school) or Tennessee Williams or virtually any of the other modern American classics. There was some calculation there. When he started writing poetry, Wilson immersed himself in poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas--and "as a result, it took me from 1965 to 1973 to find my own voice." In his plays, by contrast, "I was free to find my own way." Says Marion McClinton, who has directed several of Wilson...
...Wilson has caught up on his reading a bit since then; he is a fan of Chekhov and has seen a few more (but only a few) Shakespeare plays. He goes to movies rarely and says that for 11 straight years, starting in 1980, he didn't see a single one. (The last film he saw before he quit was Raging Bull, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro; the first one when he came back was Scorsese and De Niro's Cape Fear, so he figured he hadn't missed much.) He avoids the media spotlight, living...
...directors for participating in an "art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society" and decried the increasingly fashionable practice of "color-blind casting"--i.e., blacks playing traditionally white roles. The outcry was fierce; the drama critic Robert Brustein, in a blistering rebuttal in the New Republic, disparaged Wilson's plays and denounced his words as the "language of self-segregation...