"FROM LORRAINE HANSBERRY TO AUGUST WILSON: An Interview with Lloyd Richards"
"After the necessary formalities in his York Street office during that August afternoon, Dean Richards gave me a seat next to him and sank into a worn leather chair. As I suspect he does to each play he encounters at the Rep or the O'Neill Center, he then proceeded to dissect carefully each of my questions before responding."
"The Long Wait"
Dr. Sandra Shannon published this article on August Wilson's play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, in 1991 when the upstart playwright was still relatively new to the scene; he was less than halfway through writing the ten plays now known as the American Century Cycle. Here, Shannon focuses upon the toll that waiting takes on the entire cast, especially the trumpet player Levee. The premise of Shannon's article not only resonated with black Americans of the late 1920s but it also speaks to familiar obstacles faced in this current moment of unrest, which, thankfully, are being met with mass resistance.
publications
Dr. Sandra G. Shannon is Professor Emerita of African American Literature in the Department of English at Howard University. Widely acknowledged as the leading authority on playwright August Wilson, she is Founder of the August Wilson Society and has written numerous essays and chapters on Wilson.
During its 1987 Broadway run, Fences garnered four Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. It has been produced around the world and is one of the most significant African-American plays of the 20th century. This reference is a comprehensive guide to Wilson's dramatic achievement.
In The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, Sandra Shannon follows the playwright's path through each decade. From the outset, she considers how he uses poetry, the blues, Romare Bearden's art, and other cultural artifacts to lead him to imagined sites of pain and resignation, healing and renewal in the collective memory of black America.
In these volumes, the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. They also 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.
This book offers new essays and interviews addressing Wilson's work, ranging from examinations of the presence of Wilson's politics in his plays to the limitations of these politics on contemporary interpretations of Black aesthetics. Also includes an updated introduction assessing Wilson's legacy since his death in 2005.
The politics of Ronald Reagan's presidency loomed large in the 1980s--an era characterized by greed,
consumption and conservative politics. Theatre of the 1980s acted as an antidote to the exclusionary ideology of the Reagan right, offering a counter narrative inclusive of minority voices and concerned with the major social and political issues of the decade...
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."