While August Wilson had obvious ties to Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Seattle, his ties to the city of Chicago are less recognized. This chapter thus details how the city of Chicago shaped Wilson’s career. It suggests that the Goodman Theatre, in particular, served as a key site in a network of regional theatres that supported Wilson’s American Century Cycle. In so doing, it illustrates – through a close read of the Goodman’s archives and through interviews conducted by the author – how pivotal the theatre scene in Chicago was for Wilson’s development as a major playwright.

In 2015, actor, director, and producer, Denzel Washington and the Wilson estate committed to producing all ten of the American Century Cycle plays as films. Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom were the first to receive film adaptations. This essay considers the politics of adapting Wilson’s plays into films for contemporary audiences. It also assesses the implications of translating work for a new medium and how this can help cultivate new audiences.

This chapter adds to the chorus of critical scholarship aimed at addressing the women characters in Wilson’s dramas. It specifically interrogates what possibilities and limitations Wilson’s constructions of Black women accomplish within the context of when the plays are set, as well as within our contemporary (re)encounters with them. Utilizing the framework of Black feminist theatrical critique to examine Gem of the Ocean (2003) and Seven Guitars (1995), it maintains that even though Wilson chronicles the changing perceptions of Black women across the decades, contemporary (re)encounters with his work illuminate the persistent gender ideologies that his depictions of Black women are built upon.

This chapter situates August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean as a catalyst for emerging theoretical conversations such as Saidiya Hartman’s theory of critical fabulation and archival journey on the Recovery, and contemporary artistic undertakings like Vessels that mutually reckon with the utility of the vessel. In so doing, it explores how the Black body acts as a vessel for the facilitation of a radical poetics. The chapter asks: Can an analysis of the vessel position Wilson in these embodied and urgent contexts?

This chapter argues that Penumbra Theatre Company was integral to August Wilson’s development as an artist. It likewise contends that Wilson’s work was integral to Penumbra’s development as an institution. By doing so, it articulates the reciprocal relationship between Wilson and Penumbra – how the man and the organization and its artists drew inspiration from one another, helped one another, and enhanced one another’s artistry and legacy.

One critically overlooked aspect of August Wilson’s work is his repeated meditations on acts of perception. This chapter argues that it is precisely in this facet that an understanding of what the playwright learned from Romare Bearden – especially the artist’s collages of the 1960s – can prove most helpful in considering the cultural work Wilson’s monumental body of work does.

This chapter places August Wilson and David Henry Hwang in critical context by offering a survey of their careers that reveals just how complementary their work is, redefining theatre on its own terms. While Wilson and Hwang’s dramatic projects may differ where intentionality is concerned, their legacies have permeated throughout every sector of the theatre – from being produced in commercial arenas to becoming subjects of rigorous scholarly study across disciplines. Collectively, their dramaturgy engages with the frictions and anxieties of being a minority in the United States. Their work also explores intersecting themes such as family, identity, and claiming space through the complexities of race, religion, and gender. Both have employed elements of magical realism, and their commercial success has led to them being deemed principal representatives for their racial/cultural groups within the canon of American theatre.

This chapter examines images of two important events in African American history that took place on September 13, 1957 – Hank Aaron and his Milwaukee Braves teammates winning the National League Pennant against the St. Louis Cardinal and the Little Rock Nine integrating Central High School – to consider how this concurrence of disparate events can help readers recognize the dynamic of hope and despair that is essential to Fences, as well as to other plays by August Wilson.