August Wilson

August Wilson PDF Author: Laurence A. Glasco
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996937207
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
August Wilson is one of America's great playwrights. He lived in Pittsburgh from his birth in 1945 to 1978, when he moved to St. Paul, MN, and later to Seattle, WA. He died in 2005 and is buried in Pittsburgh.Wilson composed 10 plays chronicling the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century--and he set nine of those plays in Pittsburgh's Hill District. He turned the history of a place into great theater. His plays, including Fences, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf have become classics of the American stage.August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays guides visitors to key sites in the playwright's life and work in the Hill District and beyond. This guidebook enriches the understanding of those who have seen or read his plays, inspires others to do so, and educates all to the importance of respecting, caring for, and preserving the Pittsburgh places that shaped, challenged, and nurtured August Wilson's rich, creative legacy.

August Wilson

August Wilson PDF Author: Laurence A. Glasco
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996937207
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
August Wilson is one of America's great playwrights. He lived in Pittsburgh from his birth in 1945 to 1978, when he moved to St. Paul, MN, and later to Seattle, WA. He died in 2005 and is buried in Pittsburgh.Wilson composed 10 plays chronicling the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century--and he set nine of those plays in Pittsburgh's Hill District. He turned the history of a place into great theater. His plays, including Fences, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf have become classics of the American stage.August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays guides visitors to key sites in the playwright's life and work in the Hill District and beyond. This guidebook enriches the understanding of those who have seen or read his plays, inspires others to do so, and educates all to the importance of respecting, caring for, and preserving the Pittsburgh places that shaped, challenged, and nurtured August Wilson's rich, creative legacy.

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson PDF Author: Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603292608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson's plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America's collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson's work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.

Lanford Wilson

Lanford Wilson PDF Author: Lanford Wilson
Publisher: Smith & Kraus
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A collection of plays by Lanford Wilson that demonstrate how his writing style has changed from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Wilson Plays: 1

Wilson Plays: 1 PDF Author: Snoo Wilson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408118297
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The first collection of plays by one of Britain's most original dramatists This first volume of Snoo Wilson's plays contains a mixture of his best early work from the 1970s and more recent efforts. Long considered to be a legend of Fringe theatre, Snoo Wilson's early plays had such absurd titles as Girl Mad as Pigs and Ella Daybellfesse's Machine. All of Wilson's plays search out strange psychological states in his characters and situations. Blowjob is a dark study in alienation and violence; in Pigsnight a Lincolnshire farm is taken by a sinister gang and turned into a machine for the organised butchering of animals. The Soul of the White Ant explores the weird world of the South African naturalist Eugene Marais whose ideas about a corporate soul lead to insanity. The volume also includes two plays with a Freudian perspective: More Light and Darwin's Flood. The volume includes an introduction by the author and notes by his various collaborators. "Snoo Wilson tackles dark pockets of human endeavour with an original wit and a savage humour" (Financial Times).

August Wilson

August Wilson PDF Author: Alan Nadel
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299356
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Contributors to this collection of 15 essays are academics in English, theater, and African American studies. They focus on the second half of Wilson's century cycle of plays, examining each play within the larger context of the cycle and highlighting themes within and across particular plays. Some topics discussed include business in the street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean, contesting black male responsibilities in Jitney, the holyistic blues of Seven Guitars, violence as history lesson in Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, and ritual death and Wilson's female Christ. The book offers an index of plays, critics, and theorists, but not a subject index. Nadel is chair of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky.

Seven Guitars

Seven Guitars PDF Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101173696
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in his continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

August Wilson's Jitney

August Wilson's Jitney PDF Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
ISBN: 9780573627958
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
"Regular cabs will not travel to the Pittsburgh Hill District of the 1970s, and so the residents turn to each other. Jitney dramatizes the lives of men hustling to make a living as jitneys--unofficial, unlicensed taxi cab drivers. When the boss Becker's son returns from prison, violence threatens to erupt. What makes this play remarkable is not the plot; Jitney is Wilson at his most real--the words these men use and the stories they tell form a true slice of life."--The Wikipedia entry, accessed 5/22/2014.

August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle

August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle PDF Author: Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786478004
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Providing a detailed study of American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005), this collection of new essays explores the development of the author's ethos across his twenty-five-year creative career--a process that transformed his life as he retraced the lives of his fellow "Africans in America." While Wilson's narratives of Pittsburgh and Chicago are microcosms of black life in America, they also reflect the psychological trauma of his disconnection with his biological father, his impassioned efforts to discover and reconnect with the blues, with Africa and with poet/activist Amiri Baraka, and his love for the vernacular of Pittsburgh.

The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson

The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson PDF Author: Harry Justin Elam
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472021842
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press).

Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Joe Turner's Come and Gone PDF Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087607
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences comes Joe Turner's Come and Gone—Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. “The glow accompanying August Wilson’s place in contemporary American theater is fixed.”—Toni Morrison When Harold Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man—in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents he begins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world—and it will take more than the skill of the local “People Finder” to discover it. This jazz-influenced drama is a moving narrative of African-American experience in the 20th century.