Pre-Show Enhancement Residency

Pre-Show Enhancement Residency

Residency GoalsTo enrich and enhance your experience of Fences in performanceTo foster an personal connection(i.e., an understanding or appreciation) between each residency participant and one major speech or dramatic moment from FencesTo solicit and inspire analytical and/or creative responses to the dramatic content and spirit of August Wilsons Fences

What do you already know about August Wilson?

The Early Years (Review)

Wilsons Initial Creative ImpulseAll I ever wanted was August Wilson, poet.

Poetry = the highest form of literaturethe business of poetry is to enlarge the sayableThe Day Winds Up the Oppositea poem by August Wilson

Hearing her disembodied voice wash over me,A cascade of coin and blessing,With the delicious sounds of her waking

I thought today might be a day of blazing sunWith her hair a forest of red birds announcing themselves with song & surety

That each whisper of wind moved to mute song& singing make a world of silence.

And then I remembered the warning Issued by my old, tired, bedazzled heart:

The space between a mans hand& a womans hairare filled with many passages of tremor and trust

the business of poetry is to enlarge the sayable

Wilson and the TheatreCo-founded Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh (1968)I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it.Begins writing plays in 1973 (age 28)Early plays were very poeticOLD MANOur lives are frozen in the deepest heat and spiritual turbulence.Terror hangs over the night like a hawk.The wind bites at your tits.Allow me, Madam, my coat. It is made of the wool of the sacrificial lamb.The Coldest Day of the Year (1976)I didnt recognize the poetry in the everyday language of black America.

Wilsons InfluencesTheFourBsThe BLUESRomare BEARDENAmiri BARAKAJorge Luis BORGESThe Blues: BasicsMusical form/genre developed by African AmericansOrigins in West AfricaCultivated from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and ballads Swept the US in the early 1910sAssociated withuniversal emotions, emotional performancestwelve-bar blues chord progressiona familiar/typical lyrical formcommercial marketing categoryWilson and The Blues

and Bessie SmithWilsons Blues Revelationit was a birth, a baptism, a resurrection of my consciousness that I was a representative of a culture and a carrier of some very valuable antecedentsI had been given a world that contained my image, a world at once rich and varied, marked and marking, brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle.I began to look at people in the rooming house [where I lived] differently. I had seen them as beaten. I was twenty, and these were old people. I didnt see the value to their lives. You could never have told me there was a richness and fullness to their lives. I began to see it.Elders of the community = walking history booksAugust Wilson = anthropologistThe Blues According to Wilsonthe African Americans response to the world before he started writing down his stuff.A cultural response of a nonliterate people whose history and culture were rooted in the oral tradition. The response was to a world that was not of their making, in which the idea of themselves as a people of imminent worth that belied their recent history was continually assaulted.The thing with the blues is that theres an entire philosophical system at work. And Ive found that whatever you want to know about the black experience in America is contained in the bluesWilson and Bearden

The Art of Romare BeardenThe Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings 1964

Pittsburgh Memories 1984

I paint out of the tradition of the blues Let life prevail. And that is the great tradition of the blues.Romare BeardenThe Bearden EffectWhat for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem so simple, so easy. What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence.In Bearden youve got all these pieces. Theres an eye here, a head over there, a huge oversized hand on a small body. Its like that with me. Ive got all these images, and the point is how I put them together. The pieces are always there; its how I put them together, the relationships between them that counts. I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures. Romare BeardenBearden Collages That Inspired Wilson PlaysMill Hands Lunch Bucket 1978

The Piano Lesson 1983

Inspired Joe Turners Come and Gone 1988Inspired The Piano Lesson 1990Continuities 1969

Inspired Fences 1983Wilsons Artistic AgendaInspired by the Blues, Bearden, and James Baldwins call for:a profound articulation of the black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his fathers houseWhat I want to do is place the culture of black America on stage, to demonstrate that is has the ability to offer sustenance, so that when you leave your parents house, you are not in the world alone. You have something that is yours, you have a ground to stand on, and you have a viewpoint, and you have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by your ancestors.We want you to see us. We are black and we are beautiful We are robust in spirit, we are bright with laughter, and we are bold in imagination.

The Pittsburgh Cycle10 playsNot originally a conscious planBecame a self-actualized, self-imposed project:to write a play for each decade of the twentieth centuryto focus on what I felt were the important issues confronting Black Americans for that decadeAKA: The Century CycleFeatures of Wilsons DramaturgyLanguage/DialogueLong speeches/monologuesStorytelling and storytellersLanguage/DialogueAnthropological, analytical, and artfulReveals (and revels in) the poetry, power, and personality of authentic black vernacular speech (AAVE)Linguistic ability = a cultural value Captures the rhythms and the manner from Pats Place:When you give the language, you are giving the thought pattern as well. There is an impeccable logic in the use of metaphorPlays with inferences/interior logica lot of things are done by implication (See handout.)21

What pops for you or has struck you about Wilsons crafting of language in Fences? Are there any specific language moments that have specifically stood out to you? What have you noticed?

FencesAct II, Scene 2An Actors Approach to Scene AnalysisKnow and understand the story and back story of the play and its charactersUnderstand the context of the given scene (Whats happened on stage the moment before? The scene before? The act before?)Note explicit stage directions the playwright provides for the scene (Whos onstage? What are characters physically doing? Where are they in proximity to one another?)Appreciate where the character is emotionally in this moment of the play (Where is s/he emotionally at the start? What is his/her attitude/mood? Does a change occur? How does s/he change? Why?)Define the characters objective (Why is s/he speaking? Why this? Why now? What does s/he want or need? What is s/he trying to accomplish?)Notice and note things outstanding in the dialogueattributes of character voice (traits and ticks); punctuation; tense/changes in tense; patterns; repetition; echoes (used elsewhere in the play); poetry/ metaphor; imagery; literary, historical, or cultural references24Features of Wilsons Dramaturgy (cont.)Long speeches/monologuesI think the long speeches are an unconscious rebellion against the notion that blacks do not have anything important to say.There is a black person talking and he is talking a lot, and I think that we have not heard black people talk. Society views black life in a glancing manner, and no one ever stops to ask them, What is on your mind? These are common, ordinary characters who have long speeches, and I want the audience to listen to them.Paulas dramatic echo: Attention must be paid. Features of Wilsons Dramaturgy (cont.)Storytelling/Storytellersthe telling of personal history/histories and tall talesa part of the cultureI discovered that the stories are all designed for a purpose, and that is to reveal ways of conduct which the community has put sanctions on. When you hear a story you learn what is expected of you as a man, say, in the black community.BibiliographyOMeally, Robert J., editor. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Rocha, Mark William. August Wilson and the Four Bs Influences, in August Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Marilyn Elkins. New York: Garland, a994.

Various interviews with August Wilson from Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

Wilson, August. The Art of Theatre No. 14 in The Paris Review. Winter 1999.