August Wilson in Place
Consider anew Wilson’s work: what elements of place might you add to the map?
The concept of Place contains intangible memory, personal experience, and physical space—so how can we “see” the places of August Wilson? Why should we consider off-stage places, and on-stage “placed” resonances, of a Wilson work?
Map
All that Jazz
Sensory information is vital when we consider place--what do we see? Smell? Taste? Hear? Music, and music making, underscore works like Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson.
Costume Design sketches for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, stamped and signed by the United Scenic Arts union. Left: Costume design for Levee (black hat and black-collared and grey overcoat, blue pants, brown dress shoes, purple shirt and tie). Right: Costume Design for Ma Rainey (red flapper dress with light beading, matching red headdress and large feather fan, red flat shoes, finished with beaded bracelet and long beaded necklace)
The Pittsburgh Musical Society, later the Pittsburgh Musicians Union, was "located in a club on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. The club had offices on the first floor, with a piano bar and rehearsal space on the second floor. The club was a popular gathering place for musicians, both local and national, offering a congenial atmosphere for rehearsing and jamming. The organization was a powerful force in the development of community in the city's African American neighborhoods and the securing of economic and educational opportunities for local musicians and bands. Union members played in theaters, clubs, restaurants, ice follies, vaudeville acts, touring companies, churches and concert halls throughout Pittsburgh, the continental U.S., Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean" (African American Jazz Preservation Society of Pittsburgh Oral History Project, 1995-1999, AIS.1998.04, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System).
Through the African American Jazz Preservation Society of Pittsburgh Oral History Project Records and Recordings, you can hear union musicians talk about their experience moving through the music scene in the Hill. Below check out one such musician: Nathaniel Dunn, or "Tinky,"
Place & The Piano Lesson
By Spring 2023 Children and Media Scholars and their professor Dr. Ali Patterson
The Piano Lesson would at first seem object driven or organized around the property - the piano. However, it is very much centered in the space and place of Berniece's house and places we never see directly. Though the Lloyd Richards film (perf. Charles Dutton and Alfre Woodard 1995) begins on the highway and allows for "memory" images of sorts, we do not see the Sutton land for sale.
Berniece's house is a haunted house within which haunted people live and visit: some haunting might be explained by the piano, but Wilson leaves open the possibility of characters having actually seen an apparition of Sutter in the home . . . though he would never have been there.
The living room of her home is also a space of community as well as of dissent, argumentation, conflict and contest. Here the contest over power, including between men and women. While it is a ghostly burden that Berniece has inherited the piano, that the mother/sister has inherited the physical object and it exists in her living room also gives her standing and status. In this way, it determines her place in the family hierarchy, which is both empowering and a trap.
That it is a play may determine the restriction to a single location, though it needn't be so. The effect of BoyWillie wanting to buy Sutter's land that we never see is profound given that identity is for Boy Willie tied to land and land ownership. Boy Willie remarks that this is how he would carve "Boy Willie was here" as carving into a tree, though we see the physical carvings on the piano placed before us.
It is significant that The Piano Lesson takes place in Pittsburgh, a consequence of the great migration but where intergenerational trauma and segregation are inescapable nonetheless. Pittsburgh is still segregated, was segregated when the play was written and was so in 1930 - and Wilson tackles the limits of options available to a Black man in Pittsburgh through Boy Willie's paths (a watermelon man, pushing forward with a racist stereotype, and selling an heirloom) and his unwillingness to try with Lymon to make a go of it in Pittsburgh.
Intergenerational trauma is inscribed in the piano, but also in Berniece's mother's Mother Ola's insistence that Berniece play it, and in Berniece's resistance to playing after her death. Berniece refused to educate Maretha on the carvings' meanings but also could not remove them or the piano, perhaps preventing the daughter from being traumatized, but bringing the past physically into their present without acknowledging it, and the "ghosts" visited.
This requires Maretha to function as children often do for Wilson, as a vessel of progression. At first Maretha is terrified without knowing why: it's unclear to us if for her Sutter is in her imagination, or in the daughter's reflection of the mother's trauma. Is her scream a replication of the mother's terror or expressing the unexpressed? Materializing the immaterial? Within the narrative she actively moves to prevent her mother from shooting Boy Willie (and has to be removed from the scene) when Boy Willie attempts to take the piano. But thematically, while she is impacted by the piano at the center of her home, she also promotes the experience of it not only as a tool for exorcism but also for healing. The mother's confrontation with her trauma moves toward the resolution. Through the child and mother playing together, the past, present and future exist in the same place.
The Ground on Which I Stand
Left:The August Wilson House flags offer the mantra for community members and visitors to Claim What Is Yours. This idea connects with the renovation’s main design principle given by Wilson himself: to be a “useful” creative center for the community (August Wilson House). Center Left: During the renovation of 1727 Bedford Ave, portraits of actors in-costume as their Wilson characters hung in the windows of the house. Center Right: The renovated house. Right: The August Wilson house logo on the front window of the house.
Frederick August Kittel Jr., who later renamed himself August Wilson, grew up in the back rooms of 1727 Bedford Ave. Until age 13, Wilson lived here with his mother and five siblings (August Wilson House). The house sat defunct from 1998 until the August Wilson Organization restored the house into a community cultural center, which opened in 2022.
"Growing up in my mother's house at 1727 Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh, PA, I learned the language, the eating habits, the religious beliefs, the gestures, the notions of common sense, attitudes towards sex, concepts of beauty and justice, and the responses to pleasure and pain...that my mother had learned from her mother..." (Wilson, 17)
August Wilson Self-portrait, doodle, August 24,
August Wilson, doodle of King Hedley II on The Theatre Goodman stationary
Scraps of Place
What do we create when we're in a particular place?
How does writing live beyond the desk?
How do we capture the community around us?
These are questions that we might consider by exploring Wilson's "scraps" of writing and art.
(Did you know Wilson was a prolific doodler?!)
"Scraps" - Writing in place; ideas on stationary, postcards, napkins
Wilson & the Steel City
August Wilson did not set a play at a steel mill or a blast furnace. Yet these titans of the Pittsburgh landscape stand as backdrops and influences to the lives of characters, at times violently so as in Jitney.
Left: A Black steel worker uses a hook to move a pile manganese taller than him while wearing a cap, gloves, and googles in the 1940s. Behind him on the wall is painted the safety reminder “Wear your Googles.” Photo from Rivers of Steel Archives. Center: 1940's photograph of a Black steel worker watching a hook chain lift a large piece of scrap while signaling to the craneman. He is wearing a hat, gloves, long sleeves, and pants. The text offers information about this process. Photo from Rivers of Steel archives (Carl Bowman Collection). Right: A Black steel worker tending the hearth in Homestead in 1954 (photo from William J. Gaughan Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System).
Towards the end of August Wilson’s Jitney, car service station operator and driver Becker is called down out of his mill retirement to cover shifts at the Jones & Laughlin (J & L) steel works (Act II, Scene 2). Becker is killed off-stage during a mill accident.
Black mill workers like Becker were often were given the especially dangerous and dirty mill jobs, like iron making at the local Carrie Furnace instead of steel working across the river at Homestead Works (Henderson). The image at right above, shows one such mill worker confronting the flow of metal heated to 2,700 degrees. Note the (minimal) safety protection layers he wears. This type of job separation was still in place after World War II, when Black steelworkers were finally able to join steel worker unions, newly viewed as more than strikebreakers. For more information about the segregation of mill workers in Pittsburgh, see “ John Hughey & the Legacy of Black Steel Workers at the Carrie Furnaces” by Ryan Henderson , Interpretive Specialist, on the Rivers of Steel Blog, Feb. 24, 2021.
Around the time of the central image, 1940, the first wave of the Great Migration was ending, a “mass exodus of African Americans from the South to the North [… who] searched for stability, safety, and opportunity in new climates, new environments, and new communities” (Paine, Rivers of Steel Blog). The steel industry made cities like Pittsburgh appealing for newcomers. August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson contends directly with the Great Migration and the question of establishing, or reclaiming, roots in the North or South. For more information about the Great Migration and its connection to Pittsburgh steel mills, see “A Literary Look—Blood on the Forge” by Kirsten Paine, Interpretive Specialist, in the Rivers of Steel blog, Feb. 24, 2023.
Left: A view of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation from 1962, wedged between the Monongahela River and a neighborhood section of Oakland. This would be similar to how Becker viewed the mill during Jitney, which is set in early 1977. Center: Photographer Charles Richardson described this image as "This overlooks the J & L Pittsburgh works, about a mile and a half from Pitt.” The image juxtaposes the “sunny” side of the mills (economic stability and opportunity, technological progress) with the harsher side of steel history and experience (racial discrimination, hard-eared worker’s rights and safety protocols, environmental pollution). Right: Huntington Theatre Company’s playbill for their performance of August Wilson’s Jitney in 1998. The art style is likely a nod to Romare Bearden, a collagist, and one of Wilson’s influences (Archivist Diael Thomas). Notice the central character, Becker.
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