Pre-Show Enhancement Residency

1. Pre-Show Enhancement Residency

2. Residency Goals • To enrich and enhance your experience of Fences in performance • To foster an personal connection(i.e., an understanding or appreciation) between each residency participant and one major speech or dramatic moment from Fences • To solicit and inspire analytical and/or creative responses to the dramatic content and spirit of August Wilson’s Fences

3. What do you already know about August Wilson?

4. The Early Years (Review)

5. Wilson’s Initial Creative Impulse • “All I ever wanted was ‘August Wilson, poet.’” • Poetry = “the highest form of literature” “…the business of poetry is to enlarge the sayable”

6. “The Day Winds Up the Opposite”a poem by August Wilson Hearing her disembodied voice wash over me, A cascade of coin and blessing, With the delicious sounds of her waking I thought today might be a day of blazing sun With her hair a forest of red birds announcing themselves with song & surety That each whisper of wind moved to mute song & singing make a world of silence. And then I remembered the warning Issued by my old, tired, bedazzled heart: The space between a man’s hand & a woman’s hair are filled with many passages of tremor and trust “…the business of poetry is to enlarge the sayable”

7. Wilson and the Theatre • Co-founded Black Horizon’s Theatre in Pittsburgh (1968) “I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it.” • Begins writing plays in 1973 (age 28) • Early plays were “very poetic” OLD MAN Our lives are frozen in the deepest heat and spiritual turbulence. Terror hangs over the night like a hawk. The wind bites at your tits. Allow me, Madam, my coat. It is made of the wool of the sacrificial lamb. —The Coldest Day of the Year (1976) • “I didn’t recognize the poetry in the everyday language of black America.”

8. Wilson’s Influences “The Four B’s” • The BLUES • RomareBEARDEN • Amiri BARAKA • Jorge Luis BORGES

9. The Blues: Basics • Musical form/genre developed by African Americans • Origins in West Africa • Cultivated from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and ballads • Swept the US in the early 1910’s • Associated with • universal emotions, emotional performances • “twelve-bar blues” chord progression • a familiar/typical lyrical form • commercial marketing category

10. Wilson and The Blues … and Bessie Smith

11. Wilson’s Blues Revelation “…it was a birth, a baptism, a resurrection of my consciousness that I was a representative of a culture and a carrier of some very valuable antecedents…I had been given a world that contained my image, a world at once rich and varied, marked and marking, brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle.” “I began to look at people in the rooming house [where I lived] differently. I had seen them as beaten. I was twenty, and these were old people. I didn’t see the value to their lives. You could never have told me there was a richness and fullness to their lives. I began to see it.” Elders of the community = “walking history books” August Wilson = “anthropologist”

12. The Blues According to Wilson • “…the African American’s response to the world before he started writing down his stuff.” • “A cultural response of a nonliterate people whose history and culture were rooted in the oral tradition. The response was to a world that was not of their making, in which the idea of themselves as a people of imminent worth that belied their recent history was continually assaulted.” • “The thing with the blues is that there’s an entire philosophical system at work. And I’ve found that whatever you want to know about the black experience in America is contained in the blues…”

13. Wilson and Bearden

14. The Art of Romare Bearden The Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings 1964 Pittsburgh Memories 1984 “I paint out of the tradition of the blues…” “Let life prevail. And that is the great tradition of the blues.” —Romare Bearden

15. The Bearden Effect “What for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem so simple, so easy. What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence.” “In Bearden you’ve got all these pieces. There’s an eye here, a head over there, a huge oversized hand on a small body. It’s like that with me. I’ve got all these images, and the point is how I put them together. The pieces are always there; it’s how I put them together, the relationships between them that counts.” “I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures.” —Romare Bearden

16. Bearden Collages That Inspired Wilson Plays Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket1978 The Piano Lesson1983 Inspired Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 1988 Inspired The Piano Lesson1990

17. Continuities1969 Inspired Fences 1983

18. Wilson’s Artistic Agenda • Inspired by the Blues, Bearden, and JamesBaldwin’s call for: “a profound articulation of the black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house” “What I want to do is place the culture of black America on stage, to demonstrate that is has the ability to offer sustenance, so that when you leave your parents’ house, you are not in the world alone. You have something that is yours, you have a ground to stand on, and you have a viewpoint, and you have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by your ancestors.” “We want you to see us. We are black and we are beautiful… We are robust in spirit, we are bright with laughter, and we are bold in imagination.”

19. The Pittsburgh Cycle • 10 plays • Not originally a conscious plan • Became a self-actualized, “self-imposed” project: • “to write a play for each decade of the twentieth century” • “to focus on what I felt were the important issues confronting Black Americans for that decade” • AKA: The Century Cycle

20. Features of Wilson’s Dramaturgy • Language/Dialogue • Long speeches/monologues • Storytelling and storytellers

21. Language/Dialogue • Anthropological, analytical, and artful • Reveals (and revels in) the poetry, power, and personality of authentic black vernacular speech (AAVE) • “Linguistic ability” = “a cultural value” • Captures the “rhythms and the manner” from Pat’s Place: “When you give the language, you are giving the thought pattern as well. There is an impeccable logic in the use of metaphor…” • Plays with “inferences”/“interior logic”—“a lot of things are done by implication” (See handout.)

22. What pops for you or has struck you about Wilson’s crafting of language in Fences? Are there any specific “language moments” that have specifically stood out to you? What have you noticed?

23. Fences Act II, Scene 2

24. An Actor’s Approach to Scene Analysis • Know and understand the story and back story of the play and its characters • Understand the context of the given scene (What’s happened on stage “the moment before?” The scene before? The act before?) • Note explicit stage directions the playwright provides for the scene (Who’s onstage? What are characters physically doing? Where are they in proximity to one another?) • Appreciate where the character is emotionally in this moment of the play (Where is s/he emotionally at the start? What is his/her attitude/mood? Does a change occur? How does s/he change? Why?) • Define the character’s objective (Why is s/he speaking? Why this? Why now? What does s/he want or need? What is s/he trying to accomplish?) • Notice and note things outstanding in the dialogue—attributes of character voice (traits and ticks); punctuation; tense/changes in tense; patterns; repetition; echoes (used elsewhere in the play); poetry/ metaphor; imagery; literary, historical, or cultural references

25. Features of Wilson’s Dramaturgy (cont.) Long speeches/monologues • “I think the long speeches are an unconscious rebellion against the notion that blacks do not have anything important to say.” • “There is a black person talking and he is talking a lot, and I think that we have not heard black people talk. Society views black life in a glancing manner, and no one ever stops to ask them, ‘What is on your mind?’ These are common, ordinary characters who have long speeches, and I want the audience to listen to them.” Paula’s dramatic echo: “Attention must be paid.”

26. Features of Wilson’s Dramaturgy (cont.) Storytelling/Storytellers • the telling of personal history/histories and tall tales • “a part of the culture” • “I discovered that the stories are all designed for a purpose, and that is to reveal ways of conduct which the community has put sanctions on.” When you hear a story you learn what is expected of you as a man, say, in the black community.”

27. Bibiliography O’Meally, Robert J., editor. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Rocha, Mark William. “August Wilson and the Four B’s Influences,” in August Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Marilyn Elkins. New York: Garland, a994. Various interviews with August Wilson from Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Wilson, August. The Art of Theatre No. 14 in The Paris Review. Winter 1999.