Background
August Wilson was born at Pittsburgh on April 27, 1945.
(Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner of the New ...)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
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( Now a Major Motion Picture directed by Denzel Washing...)
Now a Major Motion Picture directed by Denzel Washington, and starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (winner of the Academy Award and Golden Globe for her role) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play "In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that give vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life."The New York Times From legendary playwright August Wilson, the powerful, stunning dramatic work 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. Denzel Washingtons film adaptation received nominations for awards from the Academy Awards, African-American Film Critics Association, American Film Institute, Critics' Choice Movie Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and NAACP Image Awards, among others.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452264014/?tag=2022091-20
August Wilson was born at Pittsburgh on April 27, 1945.
His goal is to write a play set in each decade of the 20th century, each dramatizing a major issue confronting blacks in that decade. The first four plays in the cycle established his reputation: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), set in the 1920's; Fences (1985), set in the 1950's; Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), set in the 1910's; and The Piano Lesson (1988), set in the 1930's.
In the late 1970's, he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. , and began writing scripts for a children's theater. Some of his early plays, such as Black Bart and the Sacred Hills (1981) and Jitney (1984), were staged for St. Paul's Penumbra Theater. The success of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom launched his career. Influenced by blues and jazz, Wilson's language alternates between mournful cadences and spirited riffs. His fluid dramatic structure derives from the black oral tradition of storytelling. Wilson also avails himself of theatrical devices borrowed from mysticism and African folklore, such as magic spells, incantations, ghosts, and visions. Typically, Wilson's characters are torn between their roots in Africa and their need to "make it" in white America. Joe Turner's Come and Gone is set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. After years of indentured service to his white oppressor, Harold Loomis searches for his estranged wife. His personal odyssey becomes symbolic of the search for family and identity. The Piano Lesson (1988) deals with the conflict between Berniece and her brother, Boy Willie, whether or not to sell the piano that is the family heirloom. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano in order to purchase the land on which his ancestors toiled as slaves. Berniece refuses to part with a family legacy that her father died to obtain. The play reveals the characters' differing attitude toward history and the moral dilemma that results from this difference. Two Trains Running (1992) makes the storytelling genius of regulars at a Pittsburgh ghetto lunch counter in 1969 reflect both the hope and resignation of younger and older generation blacks respectively. Seven Guitars (1995), set in 1940's Pittsburgh, combines the realistic and the magical to tell the story of the last week on earth of Floyd Barton, a guitar-playing scoundrel.
(Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner of the New ...)
( Now a Major Motion Picture directed by Denzel Washing...)
( Series introduction by John Lahr with individual volume...)
( No one except perhaps Eugene ONeill and Tennessee Wil...)
( The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording stu...)