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By Scott Brown
Scott Brown
Scott Brown
Scott Brown is a senior writer for EW and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio -- he has the tote bag to prove it

August Wilson — author of Fences and The Piano Lesson, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize — called himself ''a race man.'' He set most of his plays in the same black Pittsburgh milieu and argued for a ''black theater'' to address the modern stage's Eurocentric default. But the 10-play cycle he left us — a sumptuous, decade-by-decade chronicle of the 20th-century African-American experience — can't rightly be termed ''black theater,'' any more than Arthur Miller's work can be reduced to ''Jewish theater.'' Wilson, who succumbed at 60 to liver cancer on Oct. 2, was too expansive an artist to live comfortably under one adjective. The theater he created was black — inherently, insistently, and absolutely. But, according to George C. Wolfe, director of Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, Wilson's work contained multitudes: ''Some would call him a great African-American playwright, some would call him a great American playwright, some would call him a great playwright for Pittsburgh. And it would all be true.''

It's also true that Wilson was the first to give the black experience a long-term home on Broadway. ''We needed that desperately,'' notes playwright Adrienne Kennedy, author of Funnyhouse of a Negro. ''All those black characters on stage — that's something white America still needs to see.'' And hear: The bluesy music of Wilson's dialogue, drawn from memories of Pittsburgh's Hill District, became as familiar to audiences as Mamet's rhythms. ''I recognized the characters. I knew them. I knew how they spoke,'' recalls his longtime director, Lloyd Richards, who discovered and directed Wilson's first hit, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, in 1984. For both men, the cycle meant continuity, and continuity meant legitimacy: ''It was not some freak moment, but an integral part of American theater.''

All but two of the cycle (Jitney and the '90s-set Radio Golf, which premiered just last spring) came to Broadway, and Wilson's eight Tony nods for Best Play are second only to Neil Simon's tally. (The Broadway theater across the street from Simon's will shortly be renamed in Wilson's honor.) But, as fellow Pulitzer winner Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog) sees it, Wilson's success shouldn't overshadow the power of his work. ''He's an African-American man on Broadway. That's mind-blowing. I don't think people take a second look. Even black kids are like, 'He's the establishment,' like meat and potatoes. He's not. He's rich and strange, like Albee.''

A mercurial man (''quiet, almost introverted,'' recalls Richards, ''but very passionate when aroused''), Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, product of a mixed marriage. After tiring of racist abuse and general small-mindedness, he dropped out of school and became a library-dwelling autodidact. Wilson did odd jobs to support a poetry habit and launched a small Pittsburgh theater company with an Afrocentric theme. (He called the black power movement ''the kiln in which I was fired.'') White characters rarely appeared in his plays. He once said that ''there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life,'' and designed his stage worlds accordingly.


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