Summary Of The Production Of August Wilson's Seven Guitars

These characters are placed in a recording so they are able to discuss with one another their life stories on how they lived as African-Americans in an oppressive racist society. Wilson uses these different characters to show different perspectives of the spectrum of how these characters had to face the harsh reality of being an African-American during this time. At the beginning of the play, the agent/manager of the band, Irvin, is talking to the white studio owner, Sturdyvant. They are discussing that Ma Rainey will be coming with her band to record a few songs, and Sturdyvant does not want to deal with her diva attitude. Irvin then urges Sturdyvant to endure her attitude because then they are able to make "a bundle" (Wilson 19) through her music. Both Irvin and Sturdyvant do not see what Ma sees in the blues, as Ma sees it as a way of life for African-Americans and their sorrows enveloped into the form of music, while the white producers only see it as an exploit for money. Cutler, the trombone and guitar player of the band, described it "White folks don't care nothing about Ma Rainey. She's just another nigger who they can use to make some money" (Wilson 97).

At Pittsburgh’s Halfway Art Gallery he found his audience for poetry, and got to meet some of Pittsburgh’s black literati. In 1981, Wilson submitted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and it was accepted in the O’Neill Center. It did however, undergo many changes in the summer of 1982, it went on to play at Yale and became the first Broadway play in 1984. His next play that he wrote was Fences. Now Fences is a interesting play to read, because reading the background information I feel as if he was writing this book from his point of view. His dad was not always there, his dad cheated on his mom, his mom raised the kids, and his dad was a worker and then came home and never messed with the kids or played with them. Not so much as he treated the kids like slaves, but in a way you could say he did. Reading the play and then writing this paper has been a wonderful experience. Reading the play gives us some back ground information about what the “1980s” were about. The racism, the abandonment, the shame, the cheating, we see it all in this play. Wilson did a good job at showing us what it was like to be a boy in this time when you wanted to play baseball but could not because you were black, or wanted to go somewhere and you could not because you were black. Some people would think that only “blacks” would like to read something like this because they would “understand” it, but that is not true. Reading Wilson’s

In analysis of the texts of these plays, it becomes evident that both periods and cultures suffered from similar types of problems with interracialism, though to a slightly greater and more violent extent in the latter piece of Hughes’s. However, merely analyzing the texts sketches an often incomplete picture, as these plays were, to a large extent, created for the purpose of protesting and attempting to manipulate the very attitudes they presented. Therefore, in order to truly consider how the nature and extent of attitudes towards interracialism had evolved from the pre-Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, one must look not only at the texts of the plays, but also to their critical commentaries, manipulation in pre-production, and audience responses. These sources outside of the texts greatly contribute to the conclusion that although discrimination, maliciousness, and brutality were problems that accompanied interracialism in both periods, they were slightly increased in intensity and nature in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930’s compared to the late 1850’s.

The evolution of musical theater in America can be viewed through many lenses. Through the lens of hindsight, it is easy to reflect on the treatment and portrayal of African-Americans in the contextual fruition of live entertainment in the United States. Dating back to the later half to the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, ethnic representation in musical theater underwent a gradual change paralleling a shift in societal opinion toward racial equality. Though by today’s standards, its depiction of African-Americans may seem archaic at best, Show Boat changed the way audiences viewed musical theater through its success as the first show to deal with racial issues in the United States.

The playwright, 40-year-old Young Jean Lee, is currently one of the most acclaimed writers in America according to New York Times. Her work revels in subverting generalizations. With Straight White Men, Lee was contemplating and investigating the issue: What do you do with privilege— and do we abuse it and take it for granted? Lee, who is Korean-American, aimed to make Straight White Men, a play with four straight white men discussing this issue on stage in front of an audience. For the 21st century audience this play is more relevant today than it would have been a few years ago. It portrays opinions and displays some of the world's most pressing problems and debates that are surrounding us today. Yet, to what extent has this impacted upon her work? Using only 3 brothers and their father as the driving force behind the production, Lee’s intriguing play, performed by La Boite Theatre in association with State Theatre Company South Australia, goes a long way past cheap satire. It turns into an

August Wilson is a man who, outside of the theatrical world, is not very well known. Yet there are those, like Paul Carter Harrison, who would rank him in "the same 'artistic continuum' as Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Thelonius Monk."1 When I began research on August Wilson I asked myself, so what? So what if he's won awards and recognition? What has he done to merit them? What makes this man important enough to do a research paper on? Why not Langston Hughes or Martin Luther King, Jr.? What makes this man matter in this society? As I continued my research I realized that, throughout my entire life, I had been deprived of knowing about such a man as August Wilson. I

August Wilson’s plays relate directly to his African heritage, and were and are a part of his success. His expression of the struggles of the blacks

August Wilson’s plays cover the plight of black life and the central issues facing African Americans over the course of the 20th century.

August Wilson stands today as one of the most prolific and celebrated playwrights of the twentieth century. His masterwork, the “Pittsburgh Cycle” or “Century Cycle”, documents African American life over the course of the twentieth century, a play written for each decade. Wilson, through this, sought to portray the inter-generational struggles of legacy and inherited trauma underlying the everyday for African Americans. Viewing his role as a playwright as the rewriter of a largely white-dominated narrative of history, Wilson writes this cycle to create a new history and engage with questions of legacy and history in a unique and influential manner. Wilson’s 1930s play, The Piano Lesson, explores this carefully through the incorporation of familial

. This play takes place in 1963, the year in which the Civil Rights movement was being fought for. The main topic of this play is to understand how race and stereotype can affect justice being served, and the only way around this would be to view facts and override race and stereotype with evidence.

As Sam Pollard, director of the PBS special - August Wilson: The Ground of Which I Stand, asserts, August Wilson may be regarded as an American Shakespeare, for “his body of work really covers the whole 20th century of American history…and there is no other American playwright who did that body of work over a period of time.” (American Masters, August Wilson: The Ground of Which I Stand) While such grand comparisons may or may not be merited, August Wilson’s Pittsburg Cycle stands as a literary, historical, and cultural feat in which Wilson illustrates, teaches, and preserves the African American experience through an exploration into the poetics of the Blues. No literary scholar would deny this claim; and this assertion remains completely

August Wilson, the celebrated author of the Pittsburgh Cycle, has always opposed the assimilation of African Americans into the mainstream American society. Wilson uses his plays as a medium to uphold and celebrate African American culture while reflecting the plight of the African American community. One strong aspect that is consistently interweaved in Wilson’s works is the struggle of the black male and how he integrates and identifies himself with the mainstream American society. The theme of power struggle is seen across a plethora of Wilson’s plays, but two characters that really stand out are Troy from Fences and Levee from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. While these two men live in different times, they have a similar disposition. Both

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s insistence on including a message about racial tolerance in a commercial Broadway play a number of years before the civil rights movement. South Pacific marks a moment when musical theatre was striving to distance itself from its commercial roots and to redefine itself instead as art (Most). As the quintessential example of what mid-century critics called “middle-of-the-road” culture, South Pacific sits uncomfortably between the “low” culture of Tin Pan Alley and the “high” culture of legitimate theatre and

The production spearheaded with a solemn poem by Langston Hughes entitled "Harlem." Preparing for an emotionally empowering theater piece, the poem quieted the audience and placed a serious blanket over us. While appropriate for me, I found it extremely coincidental that the poem's title, ties in directly with James Baldwin and his extensive writings on the 1943 Harlem race riots. With the lights off and just a solitary voice reciting the poem, it gave us, the audience, an immediate notion of play's melancholy style.

The play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, written by the amazing playwright August Wilson, is definitely a dynamic play. From the beginning to end it is full of surprises, humor, and moments that really get you thinking about what was going on during the this was set in which was 1927. At first, due to the length compared to all the other plays read in class, it appeared as though I was never going to get through all 45 pages of the scrip. On contrary, when I got to last page I didn’t want it to end. In this short critique I would like to point one of the key ideas that Wilson addresses in the play, but first here is a brief synopsis on the play.