Close Search. Events Watch Series. Want notifications for future events? Sign up for our newsletter. Courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre 5. Courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre 6. Undaunted by his troubled high school experience, Wilson continued his education informally at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and on the streets of the Hill District, soaking in the language of its people and the culture of his community.
In , Wilson enlisted in the U. Army for three years, but left after one year of service. He then worked odd jobs as a dishwasher, porter, cook, and gardener to support himself.
At this time, Wilson began to write poetry. In the late s, at the threshold of the Black Arts Movement, Wilson joined a group of poets, educators, and artists who formed the Centre Avenue Poets Theater Workshop. Although there are no white characters in Fences , the white world is very much there, because the white world exerts a pressure on that family from the outside.
Racism is a part of Black life in America. So if you are going to write about Blacks, you have to write about racism, because that is part of their lives. One of my concerns is how racism actually affects Blacks. Would you like to comment on that? Well, I think I commented on that in Ma Rainey in a sense. At the end of the play, there is transference of aggression because of the pressures of racism. We have a tendency to turn it inward as opposed to pushing it outward.
If you are honest, you are forced to confront the part of yourself that you always have a tendency to run away from, which is the deepest part.
You have mentioned that you have refused offers from Hollywood. Do you think that might be something you would want to do in the future? It seems like that with the talent you have, it would be something you could conquer. Do you think you would like to do a screenplay? I would love to do screenplays of many of my plays, of Ma Rainey and Fences.
If someone wanted to make a movie, I would love to do that. Yeah, I would like to write the screenplays 10 years from now if someone would still ask me. After I have accomplished and established myself as a playwright, and continue my work and development, yeah, I would like to.
It is a fascinating medium. What concerns me are the utter lack of respect that Hollywood has for writers and the utter lack of control that you have over your work. Robert Townsend is one of the best screenwriters in America, and he still has no control over his work as the artist. That is the thing that has kept me away from the movies. I still see myself developing as a playwright; every play I do I learn more and more about the craft, and more and more about the form. I certainly do not see it as the end of—I certainly want to write two or three more.
I see this as a step in my development. Most writers write a great deal about themselves. What have you, as a writer, learned about yourself—what type of wisdom have you gained from writing? That is why you write. Writing is a process of self-discovery. I think it has made me a better person and a stronger person, having written these plays, because it has forced me to confront myself in this landscape of the self with your little bag of all the imperial truths that you have learned that is your weapon against the self.
When I interviewed Charles Fuller and Charles Gordone, they both said they had learned a great deal from you, from seeing your plays. Is there anything you think you gained from them? They are like my predecessors. That is something that August made me more aware of. When I started writing plays, I very consciously did not read them.
The only Shakespeare I read was in school—we did Romeo and Juliet. As a playwright with a voice, a well-respected voice, what steps do you think Blacks should be taking to correct some of the inequities that we have in society now?
I think I would have to claim the African parts of ourselves that we do not see as valuable. The piano had been used to purchase members of the family during slavery and the grandfather has carved African masks like totems of the family, and the grandfather stole the piano and brought it into the house and people have died over the piano.
I think one of the reasons I wrote Fences is that our parents have shielded that from us, trying to protect us from the indignities of things they had suffered being Black. She would accept that. I think the thing to do is to pass it on as opposed to holding it in there. I think once we begin to do that, and we understand that we can participate in a society as Africans—if we do that, then we are participating from our strength, from our strongest point. That is our difference, because Black people and white people do not think alike, and that is our basic philosophical difference, our different approaches to life.
We are living in a white society, and that is a dominant thing, and we try to adjust ourselves to fit in, when I think that white America has to accept us on our terms—the fact that we do things differently.
Now a tenth-grader, Wilson is assigned an essay on a historical figure. After being accused of plagiarizing his paper on Napoleon Bonaparte, the year-old drops out of Gladstone High. He becomes a voracious reader and educates himself by spending his days at the nearby Carnegie Library. Wilson works a variety of jobs and begins writing poetry. He purchases his first typewriter and discovers Bessie Smith and the blues. His biological father dies. Vernell Lillie.
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