THE PITTSBURGH CYCLE
“I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it,” August
Wilson told George Plimpton in The Paris Review. “And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an
audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness.”
In a monumental 10-play cycle, Wilson both invited and challenged audiences to bear witness to the culture,
heritage, and experiences of African-Americans in the 20th century. “Somewhere along the way,” he explained
to interviewer Kim Powers in 1984, “it dawned on me that I was writing one play for each decade. Once I
became conscious of that, I realized I was trying to focus on what I felt were the most important issues
confronting black Americans for that decade, so ultimately they could stand as a record of black experience
over the past hundred years presented in the form of dramatic literature. What you end up with is a kind of
review, or re-examination, of history.”
All but one of the plays in the cycle takes place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson was born and
lived until 1978, when he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and launched his professional playwriting career. (Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, written in 1984 and the first of his plays to reach Broadway, is set in a Chicago
recording studio; he had not yet realized, he said, that the Hill District could so completely epitomize black
America.)
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s obituary of Wilson following his death in 2005, Christopher Rawson wrote, “In
dramatizing the glory, anger, promise and frustration of being black in America, he created a world of the
imagination—August Wilson’s Hill District—to rank with such other transformational fictional worlds as
Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Hardy’s Wessex or Friel’s Donegal. Critics from Manhattan to Los Angeles now
speak knowingly of ‘Pittsburgh’s Hill District,’ not just the Hill as it is now or was when Mr. Wilson grew up in
the ’50s, but August Wilson Country—the archetypal northern urban black neighborhood, a construct of
frustration, nostalgia, anger, and dream.”
In 1988, Wilson was asked by Bill Moyers what happened to Pittsburgh. “Same thing that’s happened to most
black communities,” he said. “Most of it is no longer there. At one time it was a very thriving community, albeit
a depressed community. But still there were stores and shops all along the avenue. They are not there
anymore. It has become even a more depressed area than it was then. When I left my mother’s house, I went
out into the world, into that community, to learn what it meant to be a man, to learn whatever it is that the
community had to teach me. And it was there I met lifelong friends who taught me and raised me, so to speak.
I still have family there. So I go back as often as I can. I go and I stand on a corner, and say, ‘Yeah, this is
me.’”