THE LEGEND OF AUNT ESTER
The mystical character of Aunt Ester—who appears onstage only in Gem of the Ocean but is mentioned in
Two Trains Running and several of the other plays in the cycle—is said to be 349 years old. The play is set in
1969, which means she was born in 1620—just one year after the first Africans arrived in America. Note how
similar ‘Aunt Ester’ sounds to ‘ancestor.’
Ester lives at 1839 Wiley, as mentioned several times here and also in other plays. It was in 1839 that 53
African natives, kidnapped from their home and sold into the Spanish slave trade, staged a rebellion on the
ship taking them to Cuba, and eventually made it back to Africa.
In the study guide for Two Trains Running produced for Penumbra Theater in Minneapolis, Sarah Bellamy also
points out that the play is set nine and a half years after the Greensboro sit-in, a nonviolent protest against
segregation, and the same amount of time after the character of Hambone began his own staunch but peaceful
protest.
These are just several examples of how Wilson links his characters to each other and to history. There are
multiple other instances here and throughout his plays.
In 2009, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture devoted a week-long festival to “The Aunt
Ester Cycle,” an ambitious project named for the character Wilson first introduced in Two Trains Running. In an
article for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Christopher Rawson described the history of Aunt Ester within Wilson’s
plays.
Ester came to August Wilson only midway through his Pittsburgh Cycle, the rich 10-play epic of love, honor,
duty and betrayal that tells the painful and triumphant story of black America throughout the 20th century. We
first hear of Ester Tyler in Wilson’s sixth play, Two Trains Running, set in the 1960s, where she is a vivid 349year-old spiritual healer who has a crucial but offstage impact on three lives.
In his eighth play, King Hedley II, set in the 1980s, she is still offstage, but her influence is fading, and her
reported death at age 366 is a tragedy fitting that decade of drive-by shootings and societal dysfunction.
Then in 2000, in his preface to King Hedley II, Wilson wrote that “Aunt Ester has emerged for me as the most
significant persona of the cycle. The characters, after all, are her children.” It is her wisdom and the legacy she
embodies that define the centuries-long story he had to tell.
So in the ninth play, he tracked her back to 1904 and put her on stage at last as the lead character in Gem of
the Ocean, complete with all her cantankerous wisdom and luminous eccentricity. And in the 10th and final
play, Radio Golf, set in 1997 and completed only as Wilson was dying in 2005, he invokes her posthumous
legacy and hints at her possible rebirth.
From “August Wilson's mythic character Aunt Ester explored in theater festival,” by Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 9, 2009