August Wilson, Doubling, Madness, and Modern African-American Drama

Abstract

My first association with August Wilson came in the spring of 1987 when I was cast in the Studio Theater's production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in Washington, DC. This was the second professional production of the play, and so August Wilson came in from Minneapolis to see the production. It was a hit and ran for over twelve weeks, well into the swelteringly hot and humid DC summer. I played Ma's stuttering nephew, Sylvester. Sylvester's — and my — shining moment occurs well into the second act, when, after unsuccessfully stuttering through two previous attempts to record the intro to the title song, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," with Ma's coaxing he/I steps trembling up to the mike and produces a stammer-free rendition.[…] Sylvester marks Wilson's first venture into a form of character that becomes a repeated trope in his dramaturgy, one he develops through Gabriel in Fences, Hambone in Two Trains Running, Hedley in Seven Guitars, and Stool Pigeon in King Hedley II: figures who appear mentally or physically handicapped. Paradoxically, in Wilson's works those characters who appear mentally impaired, besieged by madness, unable to grasp the reality of the world around them, represent a connection to a powerful, transgressive spirituality, to a lost African consciousness, and to a legacy of black social activism. By "madness" here I mean a condition within these figures that operates on both symbolic and literal planes. Their madness has both individual and cultural significance; it both constrains and empowers these characters. Unlike the others, Sylvester does not suffer from madness; his sense of consciousness or activism is rather nascent. Nonetheless, his act of delivering the song intro without stuttering is a moment of personal and collective transcendence that benefits the gathered community. As such, it serves as precursor to the redemptive acts and transgressive rituals performed by these other figures in Wilson's subsequent dramas, rituals that will be the focus of this paper.