Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days discussing a deeply researched biography to get a full picture of the subject. This week, we are discussing Patti Hartigan's book, August Wilson: A Life. Wilson was described by The Atlantic as "the man who transformed American theater." Wilson was prolific and wrote an extraordinary 10-play cycle that traced Black American experiences through the 20th century.

The play that launched Wilson's career was Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Its success can be traced directly back to Director, Lloyd Richards. Richards made history as the first Black director on Broadway when he led A Raisin in the Sun to great success in 1959. The year Lloyd Richards first encountered Wilson's work was 1982, when Richards was the dean of the Yale Drama School, head of Yale rep, and artistic director of the prestigious National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.

Wilson had applied to the program many times, but when Richards read this big old messy work about a blues singer determined not to be taken advantage of by the man or any man, he knew he had to get Wilson into the program. Here's Lloyd Richards in conversation with August Wilson from 1990, describing those early days. This audio is from the WNYC archives, and first you'll hear Richards and then August Wilson.

Lloyd Richards: Then this guy who wrote the whole thing and provoked this arrangement or our working together simply by submitting a very provocative, powerful, potent play called Ma Rainey's Black Bottom to the National Playwrights Conference, where we do invite and work on new work of new playwrights. It excited us all. He's here with us today, August Wilson. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, going back to that, the beginning, where did Ma Rainey's Black Bottom come from, August?

August Wilson: The title came from a song that Ma Rainey sang, but it was really my concern with the ownership and control of the music, so I thought I would write a play that dealt with that.

Alison Stewart: The two would go on to what the New York Times described as one of the most successful artistic partnerships in American history. Richards helped shape Wilson's works, which were often overly long, as they work-shopped his plays in regional theater, including Fences, for which Richards won a Tony for Best Director, and the show won Best Play. It would go on to earn Wilson one of his two Pulitzer prizes. The other was for The Piano Lesson, which Richards also directed.

Richards and Wilson worked on six Broadway shows together, and for a time, it was the two of them and their inner circle protecting the work from inexperienced or opinionated producers, until they didn't. When Wilson began to accrue more power, the relationship faltered. We'll hear what happened in this edition of Full Bio that starts with a bit about August Wilson's very first play.

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Alison Stewart: His first play was titled Recycle, correct?

Patti Hartigan: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It was only performed once?

Patti Hartigan: Yes, it was performed in a park. Maisha Baton, the poet and August Wilson played in it and it was a character, a man and a woman.

Alison Stewart: Why did it only play once?

Patti Hartigan: The audience didn't really take to it very well. That summer they were doing work with kids in the park and the kids-- when they said, "Well, what do you want to do?" They said, "Let's do Superfly." He did his play and people just-- they didn't want it. As you said earlier in the last segment, it was a mix of this high poetic language with vernacular, and it went back and forth. The audience just didn't relate to it. At one point, Wilson ended up smacking the actress. She swore at him and then the whole audience swore at them, and that was it, that was over, so it was never done again.

Alison Stewart: His next big production, Black Bart, or "Big" was in 1980. Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. It was a musical. It was a little bit out there. It was also a big failure. What was it about and what did he learn from the failure?

Patti Hartigan: Oh, it was about Black Bart, the old bandit who's in the hills and he's going to turn water into gold. It was a rambling, sprawling western with a multicultural cast of not very finely tuned characters. He said that he was modeling it after Liz Estrada, so there were some body songs and the women were dressed like they were in a Bob Fosse show. It was a failure because it was just so out there and wild.

On the first night at Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, all the patrons of the theater came, all the people who were making grants. This is the beginning of the second wave of feminism. Most of the people who ran the foundations were feminist women, and they all walked out on the first night. In a subsequent production, I think a motorcycle went on fire on stage. It was a colossal failure. Lou Bellamy who was the artistic director of Penumbra Theater said, "I will never do a play by that August Wilson ever again." Of course, he went on to do all the plays.

When I interviewed August Wilson in early 2005 before he was diagnosed with liver cancer and he was about to turn 60 and about to produce the 10th play, Radio Golf. I mentioned Black Bart and he started laughing, just joyous laughter saying, "Oh, that was fun. Maybe I should revisit that."

Alison Stewart: Early in August Wilson's career, he didn't have these great successes. He divorced. He's not really seeing his kid as much as he'd like to. He'd moved from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis. From all of your research and having interviewed him, what was behind his perseverance to be a playwright?

Patti Hartigan: It was just dogged. He said he wrote from the blood's memory, but I think poetry and drama flowed through his blood. He was determined. I think partly when you grow up and you're told by the nuns and your mother how smart you are, and you're going to be such a roaring success, he just wanted to do this. He fell in love with it. It's that grit, that stick-to-itiveness that no matter what-- he applied to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center five times. He even sent the same play twice because he didn't think they had read it. He just kept going. He kept going and finally he did have the breakthrough with Ma Rainey.

Alison Stewart: That's where we're going next. We're discussing August Wilson: A Life. It is a new biography of the playwright. My guest is Patti Hartigan. This pivotal moment comes in 1982 when he attends the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Center. Just for context, what is the role of the Eugene O'Neill Center in modern theater? Why would this conference-- what would it offer any young playwright?

Patti Hartigan: At the time, that he was there, the Eugene O'Neal Theater Center was known as the launch pad of the American theater. It was an incubator, a place where playwrights could go. Usually they took about 12 playwrights out of however many thousands applied. First, there was a pre-conference where they read the play out loud, and then there was a two-week national playwright-- two or four weeks, and everything focused on the playwright, everything.

When Lloyd Richards was the artistic director, there was a regular company of actors. They arrived and they didn't even know what roles they were playing. They were told what roles to play. The directors got the work on stage, but their job was not to hide the flaws. Their job was to let the work be seen as it was and let the playwright figure it out for his or herself. It an extraordinary opportunity. I think this was way before places like Sundance were doing the same thing for film. It truly was just a gift to the playwright. They had amazing dramaturgs, amazing directors, everybody lived in community and it was theater boot camp for the playwright.

Alison Stewart: As you mentioned, August Wilson applied many times before he was accepted, which brings us to Lloyd Richards. This is where he forms one of the most important relationships of his life with Lloyd Richards, then the artistic director of the [unintelligible 00:09:38], dean of the Yale School of Drama since 1979 and an African-American man. At this moment in time, what was Lloyd Richards' reputation in the theater community?

Patti Hartigan: Oh, Lloyd's reputation, he was a Buddha. Everybody looked up to Lloyd. He wasn't a loud man. He walked quietly- -but when he said something, he had such gravitas, he had directed Lorraine Hansberry's, A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway, the first Black man to direct on Broadway in 1959. He had championed the work of Athol Fugard, the South African playwright who wrote about apartheid. As you said, he had these three positions. He was also artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, and he truly was dedicated to the playwright and dedicated to the theater. He was the pinnacle, I guess you say, look, those positions that he had. He was a bit of a mystery. That's why people called him Buddha. He would say-- you’re on the mountaintop, and you ask Lloyd what it all means, and he would say, “Be where you are.”

Alison Stewart: Oh, I like his style already.

Patti Hartigan: Yes.

Alison Stewart: He would go on to guide the careers of several, well-known playwrights, Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang. At this moment, he was championing August Wilson's manuscript, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom during the selection process of hundreds of applicants, even though as you write, it was bloated at four hours, heavy with lengthy poetic monologues, but not so precise on the structure of plot.

Patti Hartigan: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did Lloyd Richards see in that play and see in August Wilson?

Patti Hartigan: Do you know, he said when he read it-- he used to work in a barbershop in Detroit when he was a kid, and he said he could hear the voices of the guys who came in on a Saturday to get their hair cut and just sit around and tell lies. He could hear his people in those voices. The characters in that play are so richly drawn that appealed to Lloyd Richards. Now it needed some surgery, but that's what he was good at. He excelled at that.

Alison Stewart: This is this long collaboration until problems arose, which we'll talk about in a moment. The New York Times describes this pairing as one of the most successful artistic partnerships in American theater. What worked between this playwright and this director, Wilson and Richards?

Patti Hartigan: I think since A Raisin in the Sun, Lloyd Richards was hoping that another playwright would come along, and here walks in this man in the tweed coat and a hat at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. For August Wilson, we've talked about his background in writing poetry, but not ever studying dramatic structure. For instance, when he got to the O'Neill, and this was with Fences actually, he didn't realize that you couldn't have a scene end with a guy in the rain soaking wet with wet hair and wet clothes, and then at the top of the next scene, five seconds later, be in dry clothes and have dry hair. That was something he didn't think about. He just wrote these poetic monologues.

To have Lloyd Richards, who knew dramatic structure, he was dean of the Yale School of Drama, pair up with this raw talent that was oozing out of August Wilson, it was a good part-- it was a great partnership. It was great for both men. It was symbiotic.

Alison Stewart: How did they arrive at this idea that they would try out Wilson's work regionally with an eye to Broadway?

Patti Hartigan: That was an idea that Lloyd Richards came up with. The regional theater was-- it started a couple of decades earlier, but he knew these theaters and it was his idea. It was particularly suited for writer like Wilson because he didn't like to cut his place until he saw them. Directors would make him sit in the audience so that he could hear and he could know, “Oh, there's a bad note here, and I got to take that out, and this isn't working.” This particular method for him was great.

I know it was controversial at the time because the regional theater is nonprofit and it's to bring theater to communities, but the theaters were getting a new work by August Wilson and sometimes plays weren't ready. They weren't even ready to be on stage at the regional theater, and that's how he learned. It was a rare thing that happened and Lloyd Richards invented it.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Patti Hartigan. The name of the book is August Wilson: A Life. It's our choice for Full Bio. At the Eugene O'Neill Center, there were rules about when plays went up that they wouldn't necessarily get reviewed, but reviewers could come see them. Is that the way it worked?

Patti Hartigan: Yes. Producers and reviewers could come. They usually would come on a Saturday night or a Friday night. I went there as a journalist and a critic, and I knew the rules. You were not allowed to-- or you could do a feature, but you could not do a review. Frank Rich was so blown away by what he saw that the headline looked like it was a feature, but it was really-- there was review material in there about three playwrights, but primarily about August Wilson and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Alison Stewart: How did that review change August Wilson's career trajectory?

Patti Hartigan: Oh, astronomical. When a review like that runs, even if it's a feature and not a review, producers see that and they have interest sight unseen just by seeing something like that. He actually left the O'Neill and he had an offer to turn it into a musical, which he did not want to do. One thing you didn't do was tell August Wilson what to do with his plays. The offer was for $25,000, but the contract said they could fire the writer. He and his wife at the time, Judy Oliver, had recently filed for bankruptcy. He turned the offer down.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Patti Hartigan: That's what I was saying earlier about his integrity. He really believed that-- he wanted control of his work, but that led, of course, to Ma Rainey going to Broadway. After, the O'Neill, it was performed at the Yale Repertory Theater, and that production, reviewers were allowed to review there. It was at a professional theater. Then after that, it went to Broadway.

Alison Stewart: August Wilson and Lloyd Richard did five plays together. They had this very fruitful relationship. Things started to fray a little bit because August Wilson began behaving like a director in some cases.

Patti Hartigan: Yes.

Alison Stewart: This seems like the real moment that their relationship had a crack that could not be fixed was when Wilson created a production company without Lloyd Richards or with terms that were insulting to Lloyd Richards.

Patti Hartigan: Yes. There was that. That was the beginning-- widening the crack that was already existing because August Wilson didn't feel he was getting compensated fairly for his plays. It was also he was becoming-- he knew what he was doing. He knew that he was a big name now. He was a bold-faced name. People came to his plays and he wanted more control. Now you can't have two directors in the room. The production company was a very difficult moment that Benjamin Mordecai and August Wilson formed this company, and they really didn't include Lloyd Richards in it.

Then after that, they were working on Seven Guitars and August Wilson didn't like the way the production was going. He was insinuating himself in a director's role in many ways in some letters he wrote, some memos, how he acted. Then there was an actor, the great actor [unintelligible 00:18:10] McKay was really having trouble in the role of Hedley. August Wilson wanted to fire him and Lloyd Richards who’s very loyal to him, and he didn't want to, and there was a gigantic blowup and that put the nail in the coffin shall I say.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to our Full Bio conversation about August Wilson with author, Patti Hartigan. After the break, we'll hear about August Wilson's time in New York City at the New Dramatists. That's next.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our Full Bio conversation about the book, August Wilson: A Life with author Patti Hartigan. We'll hear about Wilson's time in New York City, the origin of the 10-play cycle about the Black American experiences and the specific signatures of an August Wilson play, including the actors he and director Lloyd Richards worked with. They created an ecosystem for Black creatives. Here is Richards describing why he and Wilson worked that way.

Lloyd Richards: You're looking for a repertory situation, and that is finding those people who you can work with, you really exchange with, where language becomes almost unnecessary, where there is a bond beyond just whatever's written on paper or whatever is written anywhere. That there is a bond of artistry and you look for that. I remember someone saying to me long time ago that you will go through life and you will know many, many people, but the real people that you- -really know, you will be able to count on one hand or two at most. That has to do with the people who you want to spend your life with and by spend your life, I mean your working life.

Alison Stewart: They worked with certain actors repeatedly. Some called them Wilson Warriors, including Charles Dutton, Ruben Santiago Hudson, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Courtney B. Vance who you can hear in this clip with James Earl Jones as father and son at odds in Wilson's play, Fences.

Courtney B. Vance: Can I ask you a question?

James Earl Jones: What the hell you want to ask me? Mrs. [unintelligible 00:20:35] is one you got the questions for.

Courtney B. Vance: How come you ain't never liked me?

James Earl Jones: Like you? Who in the hell ever said I got to like you? What law is there to say I got to like you? Do you want to stand up in my face and ask me some damn fool-ass question like that? Talk about liking somebody. Come here boy, I want to talk to you.

Alison Stewart: For the record, James Earl Jones was not considered a Wilson Warrior because the men did not get along. We'll talk about that tomorrow. You’ll also notice that it's most of the Wilson Warriors were meant, which we'll talk about today. Let's get into it, our Full Bio conversation with Patty Hartigan, author of August Wilson: A Life.

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Alison Stewart: Because we are New York Public Radio, I have to ask about the time that August Wilson spent in New York New Dramatists. You note that he arrived and fell in with the, I think you wrote, the ethos of the place. What impact did New Dramatists have on him?

Patti Hartigan: New Dramatists gave him so much confidence. He had arrived as a playwright. They have these residencies for, it was about seven a year, I think they just closed down if I'm correct, which is so sad. He had a place to stay. He had a place to put his hat. He was a playwright. He had not been on Broadway yet, but this was the recognition that he wanted. He was also a member of the Playwright Center in Minneapolis. He said that when he walked into that room, everyone at the table described himself as a playwright, and he finally felt, “I’m a playwright now,” and the New Dramatist was equally so.

Alison Stewart: When did August Wilson decide that his work was going to be part of a 10-play cycle “documenting” the African-American experience?

Patti Hartigan: It's hard to pinpoint the exact date. Different people have different memories of when it happened. There is a story that he was at a seder and he heard the first line, “We were slaves in Jerusalem,” and it made him think, “We need to remember. African Americans need to remember their history, not to hide their history, not to try to move on from their history.” It was probably around the time he was working on Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which was the third play that he realized that he had written this play in the '50s. He had written this play about Ma Rainey at the turn of the century and why not do one for every decade?

He came up with the idea, and then the idea, it’s a phenomenal task. He was finishing this task on his deathbed. No other American playwright has ever done anything this ambitious. There's also a story that one of the playwrights at the O'Neill said that they were walking on the beach headed toward the Crab Shanty to get a sandwich and Wilson said to him that summer that he had just come up with the idea. You can't pinpoint it down exactly, but it was around the time of Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Alison Stewart: What are signatures of an August Wilson play?

Patti Hartigan: Long monologues, long poetic monologues. He had something he called a spectacle character, which would be Gabriel in Fences, Hambone and Two Trains Running. They were these seemingly sad sacks, down on their luck, disabled, disturbed people who really had the wisdom of the community in everything they did. There's that character. There are the monologues and the monologues.

You can take a play like King Hedley II, which has some problems with it I think, but there's a speech that Viola Davis gave about bringing a baby into the world we exist in now. Why would anyone want to bring a baby in if it's going to get shot by a policeman, if it's going to shoot someone, or if the child's going to go to jail? I'm tearing up now even as I described that speech.

Viola Davis: I'm 35 years old, don't seem like there's nothing left. I'm through with babies. I ain't raising no more, ain't raising no grandkids. I'm looking out for Tanya. Ain't raising no kid to have somebody shoot him, to have his friend shoot him, to have the police shoot him. Why you want to bring another life into this world that don't respect life? I don't want to raise no more babies when you got to fight to keep them alive. You take little buddy [unintelligible 00:25:47], what has she got? A heartache that don't ever go away. She up there now sitting down in the living room, she got to sit down because she can't stand up. She's sitting down trying to figure it out, trying to figure out what happened.

One minute, her house is full of life. The next minute, it's full of death. She was waiting for him to come home and they bring her a corpse. I ain't going through that. I ain't having this baby, and I ain't got to explain it to nobody.

Patti Hartigan: His monologue spoke directly to the audience and they're funny even when they're tragic. The play Jitney, the characters on that stage are like the guy next door, the guy Lloyd Richards knew at the barbershop. They tell great stories that you don't laugh at them, you laugh with them. You can feel them. Those are the things.

Then there's also the mystical elements, particularly in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and in The Piano Lesson, that there's a feeling that you are going back to the blood's memory. You are going back to slavery. You are remembering those bones walking on the water in Joe Turner. There is a ghost that has to be exorcised in The Piano Lesson.

The final thing is he had his favorite character, and my favorite character, everybody's favorite character is Aunt Ester. It’s deliberately it's E-S-T-E-R and its ancestor. She's a woman in each of the plays whose, her age supposedly is the same age as if she had been born in 1619, the day when the first slave ships came to Jamestown. She represents historical memory. She is unseen in several of the plays, but she comes on stage in Gem of the Ocean and she keeps the memory.

He said she's just like any 90-year-old woman you see walking down the street who remembers everything that ever happened and she was the most important character for him.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting that you should mention that character and that Viola Davis monologue, because there was criticism. There have been articles written, and dissertations, and papers that August Wilson did not write great female characters, or he underwrote female characters. He was often dinged for not having substantial roles for women. One, how aware was he of that criticism?

Patti Hartigan: Oh, I'm sure he was aware of it. The women like that character that I just mentioned, that speech in King Hedley, they got more rounded. There was more to them as he wrote later. He rewrote Jitney. Jitney was originally a one-act play, and the female character of that play is just she loves her man. She's going to do whatever he says. In the rewrite, she has spine. I think that was deliberate. He had his daughter. His first daughter was older now and he was no longer looking to the 1950s as the paragon of what you write about how women are perceived in their roles.

I agree with the criticism, especially in the early plays. They are not his strongest point. Even in a play like Fences, Rose is-- yes, she was a 1950s housewife, yet when she learns that her husband Troy has been cheating on her and has a baby by another woman who died in childbirth, she has that phenomenal speech where she says, “This child has a mother, but you’re a womanless man.” Every single woman in the theater jumps to their feet and starts applauding. They do have their moments but I do understand the criticism.

Alison Stewart: We mentioned Viola Davis in King Hedley. Of course, people know her in the film Fences. We'll talk about Fences. That's a whole other story, which we'll get to but there were actors who worked with- -August Wilson again and again and again, the Wilson Warriors. Who were some of the Wilson Warriors?

Patti Hartigan: Oh, the late great Anthony Chisholm, who I interviewed a bunch of times for the book, and he passed. He was fabulous. Ruben Santiago-Hudson. There's a whole stable of them, Viola Davis. Theresa Merritt was the original Ma Rainey's, but that's the only one she did. The roles are so fantastic for African American actors, and they always have a sterling cast. James Earl Jones was not a member of the Wilson Warriors. He was in Fences and that was it.

Alison Stewart: Fences would go on to earn $11 million in its inaugural Broadway run in 1987. It swept the Tony's winning awards for Wilson, Jones and Richard, as well as actress Mary Alice. Tomorrow's will buy a conversation about August Wilson: A Life, we'll hear about Wilson's family life and how his work often took priority.

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