NEW YORK
August Wilson, a master storyteller and playwright who fashioned his tales of the Black struggle in 20th-century America into a monumental 10-play cycle, died October 2 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, less than two months after he announced he had inoperable liver cancer. He was 60.
“He was a poet and a musician with words,” said Gordon Davidson, who produced eight of the 10 plays. “He knew the rhythms of speech and how you tell a story. He was especially interested in what you owe to history, and how it’s in your bones.”
Among his plays were “Fences,” the writer’s biggest Broadway hit, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “The Piano Lesson.” At the time of his death, Wilson was still working on the last play in the cycle, “Radio Golf,” which recently closed in Los Angeles and will have productions next year in Seattle, Baltimore and several other cities.
Wilson thought big. His plays were often epic, filled with rich, idiosyncratic language and memorable characters, steeped in the past, trying to survive in the present and wondering about the future.
It took Wilson more than two decades to complete his cycle, one play for each decade. He grappled with major themes — from the effects of slavery on those who could still remember the Civil War to a burgeoning middle-class on the cusp of the 21st century.
“The goal was to get them down on paper,” he told The Associated Press during an interview in April 2005 as he was completing “Radio Golf.”
