/ARTS WEEKLY/THEATRE: Wilson’s King Hedley II

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Beverly Andrews

LONDON, Jan 28 2003 (IPS) - August Wilson is America’s most commercially successful playwright. He is also African-American and it is his cultural, rather than national, heritage that informs his work.

King Hedley II, the latest in his epic cycle of plays, charts the evolution of African-American life. Wilson’s plays cover most of the last century and King Hedley is not only the latest, but also the bleakest. The play conveys the disturbing message that very little has changed for the vast majority of African-Americans and that those who do succeed are the exception.

The central character is not, as the title might suggest, a reigning monarch but rather a young embittered ex-convict struggling to create a new life in Pittsburgh in 1985 after having served a seven-year jail term for manslaughter.

Through his eyes, we see the other individuals who inhabit his desperate world. A loving but wounded young wife, an estranged mother eager to reclaim love from a son she abandoned long ago, and a smooth talking charmer who was once a friend of Hedley’s father.

Next door to this struggling family lives a neighbour who sees religion as the explanation for every tragedy these people are forced to endure. These characters inhabit a world of poor housing, causal jobs and early tragic deaths.

The play focuses on Hedley and his doomed attempts to create a new life, symbolised by the tiny garden he plants in front of his shabby house. The audience is shown his frantic struggle to escape his fate.

Hedley, in his quieter moments, acknowledges that it is a fate he cannot avoid. The situation, the playwright argues, has little to do with Hedley’s own actions but everything to do with the social and economic conditions, which he was born into. As Hedley says to a friend while trying to sell stolen refrigerators, "I know which way the wind is blowing and it ain’t blowing my way".

It is this self-awareness that gives the play certain poignancy. The characters realise that their lives are doomed but yet they retain their dreams. It is these small, but still unobtainable dreams, which give them dignity and help keep total despair at bay.

August Wilson is often referred to as one of the richest and most profound theatrical voices to come out of America today. A recent piece in Time magazine compared his works to those of other theatrical legends like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and concluded that Wilson was now at the very pinnacle of success.

It is perhaps all the more remarkable to note that Wilson’s plays, which take an unflinching look at stories of black disillusionment and political disenfranchisement, have managed to conquer the mainstream. This commercial success has also been mirrored by critically acclaimed recognition with Wilson having already been awarded two Pulitzer prizes.

August Wilson is the first black playwright to succeed on Broadway since Lorraine Hainsberry, author of ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ written over 25 years ago. He is also the first to have created an extensive body of work for black writers, directors and actors throughout the country.

But perhaps Wilson’s most significant achievement has been his documentation of a history which is often over looked but is crucial to understanding the current racial tensions which still exist in America today.

The playwright has also proved to be a valuable inspiration for black authors working in other countries. "There’s is nobody in this country, in my experience, who can be a celebrated artist…and who can remain, as August has said on a number of occasions, quintessentially the man that he was when he entered into manhood," says Britain’s acclaimed playwright Kwaime Kwei.

August Wilson’s journey to theatrical prominence was not a typical one. He was born Frederick August Kittel in 1945 in the African-American district of Pittsburgh. He is the son of a white German baker and a black cleaner named Daisy Wilson.

He recounts how, when the family moved to a predominantly white suburb, the treatment of the siblings who were fair was very different to that of those whose skin was much darker. In a recent interview he states: "My brother’s pain was my pain. it pained me also to know that I would receive privilege that he didn’t."

All the children, despite their mixed parentage, gravitated toward their African-American heritage. His mother eventually remarried a promising African-American athlete who turned to crime and subsequently spent 23 years of his life in prison, dying in 1969. Wilson’s teachers knew him to be a bright intelligent child but he was forced to leave his all Catholic school because of the vicious racial bullying there.

Ironically, it was his experience at the subsequent African-American school he attended which drove him out of formal education altogether. There a black teacher questioned his honesty over a course paper.

Not believing that the child could have produced the quality of work he handed in the teacher gave Wilson an E, and in protest Wilson dropped out of school and instead spent all his free time at a public library.

It is this complex difficult childhood, which has given August Wilson the foundation he has needed to produce work of both power and insight. Work that questions the American dream and suggests that for at least one of its largest minority groups that dream can also be a nightmare. Many of his most acclaimed plays, such as the award winning Fences, charts characters’ violent reaction to the restrictions placed on their lives simply because of their colour of their skin.

In King Hedley, the central character’s attempts to reshape his life are finally put to an end by the knowledge that the old family friend in fact was responsible for his father’s death. A father he barely knew, but in Hedley’s mind a father he nevertheless has to avenge. In his doomed quest to reclaim family honour he himself is killed but ironically in death he attains a kind of dignity and self-respect he was never allowed to achieve during his short life. King Hedley is currently on.