The day I met August Wilson (below) at Seattle Rep in the ‘80s, he shot me a look that could vaporize a glacier.
Unaware that he famously advocated all-black productions (like C. Rosalind Bell's five-year staged reading of his entire Pittsburgh Cycle in Tacoma, the next one Feb. 6), I advocated race-blind casting, to give blacks more jobs and improve cast excellence in all theaters.
Wilson didn’t say why he was peeved. And instead of explaining how I’d just stepped on an emotional land mine, the Rep’s Peter Donnelly just grinned, got even more twinkly-eyed than usual, and prompted us to get on with our interview. But in 1996, infuriated by his nemesis Robert Brustein, Wilson unleashed a legendary screed at the Theatre Communications Group conference. He called colorblind casting “an aberrant idea” perpetrated by “Cultural Imperialists” and “snipers—those who would reserve the territory of arts and letters and the American theatre as their own special province and point blacks toward the ball fields and the bandstands.”
Beyonce, representing all the single ladies
Assimilation struck him as cultural genocide, esthetic slavery. “Summoned to the ‘big house’ to entertain the slave owner and his guests, the slave that reached its pinnacle for whites consisted of whatever the slave imagined or knew that his master wanted to see and hear. This tradition has its present life counterpart in the crossover artists that slant their material for white consumption.”
The influential 1832 white crossover artist Thomas Rice as the black caricature Jim Crow
I hear him and wince. And I know Brustein was being a provocative elitist jerk. But I still think Seattle’s (and America’s) great playwright was being unreasonable. Wilson was being elitist vis a vis the ball field and the bandstand. And analyze his rage over Michael Bolton: “When the New York Times publishes an article on pop singer Michael Bolton and lists as his influences four white singers, then as an afterthought tosses in the phase ‘and the great black rhythm and blues singers,’ it cannot be anything but purposeful with intent to maim.”
Um, how about with intent to show that Michael Bolton’s esthetic is a lot more white than black?
The whole white/black issue made Wilson see red – and at times blinded him to common sense.
Last year, Seattle’s (and America’s) great director Bart Sher became the first white guy to direct a Wilson masterpiece on Broadway. Some people got peeved. Was Wilson’s widow Constanza Romero wrong to permit it? No! As one local mogul with Wilson-producing experience puts it (anonymously, so as not to get in trouble), “His career is her job now, and her job is to get his work seen as much as possible.” Would she torpedo a major Hollywood movie of Fences by demanding a black director, as Wilson did? One hopes not.
Sometimes the only thing to do is defy an author’s wishes. Max Brod declined to burn Kafka’s manuscripts. Mrs. Stephen King rescued his first novel, Carrie, inspired by his school janitor experience when he was a failure raising children in a trailer, from the trash. Vera Nabokov stopped Volodya from burning Lolita, and she broke her vow to burn his last, The Original of Laura.
Mrs. J.D. Salinger should break any promise she may have made and publish every one of those stories Joyce Maynard (that chippie blabbermouth) said he scribbled continuously since publishing his last one in 1965 (though I predict all will suck worse than The Original of Laura).
I say brava to Constanza. And I was right. And August Wilson was wrong.
But he was sure right about one thing. He once observed, "Chekhov could open The Cherry Orchard right next to Mamma Mia! People would go to Mamma Mia!"
August Wilson photo by Chris Bennion, courtesy Seattle Repertory Theatre
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Hot off the heels of an 
This Saturday poet Ed Skoog will be reading from his collection of poems, Mr. Skylight, at Elliott Bay Book Company. There are two things of note about this reading. For one, the number of readings you can attend at Elliott Bay's original location before the store moves to Capitol Hill is dwindling. And two, Skoog is a brilliant writer. Here's what I wrote about him in the NOW section of this month's 
