After August: Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama by Patrick Maley

Abstract

Reviewed by: After August: Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama by Patrick Maley Jonathan Shandell After August: Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama. By Patrick Maley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019; pp. 250. That August Wilson's "Century Cycle" transformed American drama is hardly news. But what is the exact shape of the impression his writing leaves? How differently does the surrounding landscape of American drama (past and present) appear, with that indelible mark at the forefront of our view? These are questions that animate Patrick Maley's monograph After August: Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama. Starting from the proposition "that Wilson's work is an especially evocative interlocutor with modern and contemporary American plays" (2–3), Maley examines this interlocution between Wilson and some of his American counterparts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The result is a study that offers valuable insights about a genealogy of American drama that (in terms of chronology) stretches before, during, and after August Wilson. The book's interpretive lens is the blues. Wilson famously credits the blues as a primary influence on his own writing (the first of his oft-cited "four B's"), and Maley foregrounds what he terms Wilson's "blues dramaturgy" (5) in the first half of After August. Chapter 1 revisits the blues as a cultural tradition of self-affirmation, shared suffering, social protest and resistance, dark humor, and communal interdependence deeply woven within the fabric of African American experience. Maley positions Wilson as a writer "deeply committed to a blues ethos as both a man and an artist" (41) by finding expressions of this ethos in speeches, interviews, non-dramatic and autobiographical writings (in chapter 2), and throughout the ten plays that comprise the Century Cycle (in chapter 3). The analysis highlights how—as an individual, an essayist, an autobiographer, and a social thinker—Wilson was a "bluesman who produced direct blues expression" (43). As playwright, Wilson uses "blues [as] the organizing metaphysics of the American Century Cycle" (65). Maley's analysis ranges across the entirety of Wilson's dramatic oeuvre, and gives extended focus to Joe Turner's Come and Gone as an illustrative case study into "the nature and import of the Cycle's blues methodology" (67–68). The book highlights three distinct Wilsonian character types. One is the "blues griot," a social muse "whose chief function is to guide and support others finding and singing their songs" (74). Another is the "warrior": who is, in Maley's formulation, a loner who "exists in discord with the community" and whose individualistic impulses lead "without exception to trouble" (98–99). There is also a revealing discussion of the Cycle's "blueswomen" (98); there, Maley echoes other critics in situating a rigorous reading of Wilson's female characters against the backdrop of the writer's clearly patriarchal worldview that mostly deprives those women of agency and consigns them to supporting roles as sex objects and suffering matriarchs. The focus on character types is illuminating, although it sits in some tension with the playwright's own words. As Wilson framed it in a 1988 interview, he sees the "warrior spirit" as an historic drive "since the first Africans set foot on the continent" to reject white supremacy and stand courageously against oppression, despite the fatal consequences for doing so.1 The warrior spirit is for Wilson a compulsion to resist dehumanization on behalf of (not in discord with) the dignity and integrity of a community. Such a spirit animates Sterling's righteous theft of the ham at the end of Two Trains Running, and Harmond Wilks's joining the fight against urban demolition to conclude Radio Golf. By attaching the "warrior" label to the most antisocial and self-destructive thrashings of Levee in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom or the titular King Hedley II, Maley adds some confusion to the Wilsonian lexicon. [End Page 221] The second part of After August looks to reinterpret American drama in light of Wilson's blues dramaturgy. In stark and revealing contrast to the preceding discussion of Wilson's blues aesthetic, chapter 4 explores the writings of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams as works bound up in...