www.WrensJournal.blogspot.com

I keep intending to post here each day. Maybe this is the day. I just posted this on my Facebook wall:

"My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have... Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues. If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that. All the components of culture."

August Wilson, born on this date in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). He wrote the plays Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982), set in the 1920s; Fences (1983), set in the 1950s and 1960s; and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1984), set in 1911, African-American experiences throughout the 20th century, decade by decade. 

His final play in the 10-part Pittsburgh Cycle, Radio Golf, which is set in the 1990s, was produced in 2005, Wilson died of liver cancer six months after it opened. The Denver City Theater Company has presented them all, and has started through the cycle again, Fences last fall.

I was at the opening of the Denver Center's production of Radio Golf, March, 2009 There was a very interesting talk back with the director Israel Hicks. Last falls production of Fences was outstanding, the American dream teetering on the edge.