DX: Theater seems to capture black life in a way that movies can’t. Do you get more leeway in the theater? Movies tend to fail us.
CD: Putting it bluntly, it’s halfway less racist [on Broadway]. They don’t call it the "Great White Way" for nothing. The only time you’d get a black drama there was the occasional August Wilson play. You gotta look at it from a historical perspective. A Raisin in the Sun, in 1959, was the first black drama ever on Broadway. From ’59 up until the mid 60s, it was a long time before another drama came. Lorraine Hansbery’s second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, had a brief stint on Broadway. From a regional theater point of view, or at least a producing point of view, the theater has always been much more inviting and receptive to African-American themed projects than Hollywood has. Hollywood has a history of it, but we all know that history of buffoons, clowns, etc. On the one hand, Hollywood is constantly searching for the next Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz, but they’re never searching for that next person if they’re African American. They’re not searching for the next Denzel. They’re not searching for the next so-and-so until 10 or 15 years later and you get someone to take that spot. You could be a great director, male or female, and that door in Hollywood may not open. But if you’re a great writer in the theater, you’ll eventually find a home. It may not be immediately on Broadway, but it will be in a regional theater somewhere. You might hone your craft thousands of miles away from where you live. You might live in New York and your play opens in a small theater in San Francisco. Then it moves on from there to there. The regional theater people get to see it and say, “Oh, this is a great piece of work.” August Wilson is a prime example. The funny thing about it is that all of August Wilson’s plays started in the cradle of white theater practitioners. They didn’t direct them, but that’s where he sent them to. They say it. I used to tell August this all the time: Had you sent this [play] to a black organization, we might not have ever heard of you. I don’t mean that disparagingly; they just didn’t have the scope to get August out the way August needed to be gotten out.

DX: August’s plays seemed to be something for everybody.
CD: They were American plays. Chitlin’ circuit plays are chitlin’ circuit plays. A Latino person could sit in one of [Wilson’s] plays and say, “That’s my grandmother. That’s my aunt. That’s my uncle.” A Chinese person could say, “That’s my grandfather’s experience when he got over to America.” Lay persons, theatergoers, everyone gets August Wilson. The problem with August Wilson’s plays is this. The legacy is there. He’s got a canon of plays that will for another 200 years. Just like the Irish have their canon of plays and the English have their canon of plays. The Russians have their canon of plays. The Scottish have their canon of plays. Now African Americans have their canon of plays—10 plays covering 100 years. The legacy is there. What I’m a little afraid of is the doing of the legacy. What I mean by the doing of the legacy is that the younger generation coming and attempting August’s plays as actors and directors are missing one important element of August’s work. Every great playwright has some kind of genius in their writing. August’s genius is that his plays and all of his characters are a fine line between reality and farce. If you cross that line into farce then August Wilson’s plays can actually become derogatory about black people, or the characters can become buffoonish or overdone. Serious characters get to become fun. The audience laughs. And you know how we are as an audience! Black folks wanna laugh at every damn thing- even when it don’t need to be laughed at. You can have a serious moment but [the audience is thinking], “Don’t make me think. Don’t show me no pain. I came here to be entertained. I came here to laugh. I don’t wanna feel nothing.” What happens is that actors and directors have to realize August’s genius. It’s something as simple as this. I’ve seen productions of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom where the actor or the director chooses to have the character of Levy carry a switchblade instead of a pocket knife. When you give him a switchblade, it totally turns the play to the opposite end of what August intended it to be. A switchblade is for someone looking to cut somebody. A pocketknife is a tool. This is 1927. Everybody got one. You can open a can of beans with a pocketknife. You ain’t gonna open no beans with a switchblade ‘cause you’re scared you’re going to bend it. You stick that in somebody. In The Piano Lesson, for example, there are three major racial stereotypes: niggas with watermelons; niggas in tight shoes; and “Oh Lawd, there’s a ghost upstairs.” You put all three of them together and you got Amos & Andy. You have to be extremely careful with August’s works. Even the word “nigga.” He’s the only playwright in modern literature to use the word so much outside of the Hip Hop world. Only one time in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is it used in a negative or aggressive way- although they might say the word 35 times. This is what it is in a nutshell: Most black actors and black directors think, when it comes to August Wilson, that, “He’s black. We black. The playwright’s black. The director’s black. The stage manager’s black. One of the producer’s black. Let’s just be black and do it.” It ain’t that mundane. It ain’t that easy. It ain’t that simplified. It ain’t that under-complicated. August Wilson’s work is classic material. I’ve known black actors to minimize his work and then go up and do Shakespeare and talk about how intellectual it is for half an hour around some white folks. Get around some black folks and talk about August Wilson and, basically, it’s simple, something to do. Continued on page 3 »