The August Wilson Century Cycle

Series Introduction by John Lahr

August Wilson liked to say that his plays were "fat with substance." And he was right: his ten-play cycle—Wilson wrote one for every roiling decade of the African-American experience in the twentieth century—transforms historical tragedy into imaginative triumph. The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically; so are Wilson’s plays, which swing with the pulse of the African-American people, as they moved, over the decades, from property to personhood. Together, Wilson’s plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the re-assembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner Come and Gone); the struggle for power in urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves thirties (The Piano Lesson); the promises made and broken to those who served in World War II (Seven Guitars); the fraught adaptation to the bourgeois values of the fifties (Fences); the stagnancy in the midst of sixties militancy (Two Trains Running); the disenfranchisement during the boom of the seventies and eighties (Jitney, King Hedley II); and the assimilation into the mainstream and the accompanying spiritual alienation of the nineties (Radio Golf). August Wilson died on October 3, 2005. “ I’ve lived a blessed life,” he said. “I’m ready.” Between the diagnosis, in May, and his death, he had enough time to finish the rewrites of Radio Golf, and to set up the usual gestation period of out-of-town productions before the Broadway opening\—a unique system that Wilson, Richards, and his producing partner, Ben Mordecai, had set up as a kind of quality control. Wilson also lived long enough to learn that he would be the first African-American to have a Broadway theatre named after him. No one else—not even Eugene O’Neill, who set out in the mid-thirties to write a nineplay cycle and managed only two—had aimed so high and achieved so much. His plays brought blacks and whites together under the same roof to share in the profound mysteries of race and class and the bittersweet awareness of how separate and indivisible we really are.

John Lahr
From the Series Introduction