Paper napkins. Handbills advertising poetry readings. Yellow legal pads. All are adorned in a distinctive, looping handwritten script. “I’d rather be the devil than be Caesar,” reads one — a bit of dialogue. “Seth – Paul Winfield – Danny Glover,” reads a line on another — a casting idea.
The papers inhabit a few dozen unassuming gray boxes lining a set of metal shelves on the third floor of the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. And they contain much of the evidence of the life left behind by one of America’s most-lauded playwrights.
The August Wilson Archive came to the University of Pittsburgh a little more than two years ago. Now partly catalogued, it officially opens to the public this week.
"A Sense of Reverence"
The archive is another jewel in the crown of Pittsburgh’s tributes to Wilson’s legacy, along with his restored childhood home in the Hill District and the Downtown cultural center bearing his name. And its opening is like a national holiday for Wilson scholars like Sandra Shannon, who’ve waited years to see this material.
“I felt a sense of reverence in the space,” said Shannon, a Howard University professor emeritus who visited the archive for the first time in February.
When Shannon visited, she bonded with other Wilson researchers at work there. “Even though there was a lady at the front desk — you know at a library you’re shh-shh-shh — we could not contain our excitement,” she said. “At some point we had begun to converse with each other, and I could see in her face, ‘This is a library!’”
Wilson was born in the Hill, in 1945. He co-founded Pittsburgh’s Black Horizon Theater but left town before his career really took off, in the ’80s.
His plays “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” earned Pulitzer Prizes, and Broadway productions of his work featured the likes of Charles S. Dutton, Laurence Fishburne, Viola Davis, and Phylicia Rashad. Ten of his plays, also including “Gem of the Ocean” and “Jitney,” make up his Century Cycle depicting Black life in America in each decade of the 20th century. Nine of the 10 are set in the Hill.
Upon his death in 2005, New York’s Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre, the first time a Black person had been so honored. And his fame has only grown since, with Denzel Washington producing big-screen adaptions of “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” both shot in Pittsburgh.
From page to stage
The archive, donated to Pitt in 2020 by Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero Wilson, is vast, including 450 bankers boxes of material. Pitt archivists are still cataloguing it, said Diael Thomas, the archive’s outreach curator. All that work is done in a Pitt facility off-campus. But the gray archival boxes in Hillman contain most of the material concerning the Century Cycle plays, said Thomas. Some of it, like the notecards and napkins on which Wilson scribbled ideas, are original; other materials, like the legal pads he drafted his plays on, are available as color photocopies.
The archive also includes photos, Playbills, and objects like a prop guitar from a production of 1995’s “Seven Guitars.”
Materials from the archive have actually been available for viewing at Hillman since last year, said Thomas. The Fri., March 3, grand opening culminates a week of events, including a new Pitt Stages production of “Seven Guitars” that was itself informed by the archive.
Any visitor can access the archive for any reason, said Thomas. But many have a specific project in mind.
Victoria LaFave, a doctoral student in the theater and performance studies department, was the dramaturg for the production of “Seven Guitars.” In the archive, she found fax printouts documenting exchanges between Wilson and his own dramaturg. LaFave said such finds aided the play’s director and actors.
“To be able to point to a textual archival piece was really useful for shaping the way people think about their characters,” she said.
Putting together the pieces
Another frequent archive user is Trinidy Madison, a junior at Pittsburgh Milliones University Prep High School, in the Hill. She’s been visiting weekly to study Wilson’s 1980s-set play, “King Hedley II,” and related materials, for a school project.
Speaking of the play, she said, “I feel like it just teaches you in the system, like, in America’s system, when you are in there you can’t really get out. Black and white, but specifically for Black, African-American men.” She added that she also found topical other elements in the play, like its discussion of abortion.
Trinidy is selecting items for the archive to photocopy for a collage she’s making honoring Wilson.
That particular art form is especially appropriate; Wilson cited among his greatest influences the Black artist Romare Bearden, who grew up partly in Pittsburgh and was known for his vibrant collage work.
Sandra Shannon, the author of “The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson,” said her first dip into the archive suggested that Wilson wrote a bit like Bearden assembled collages.
“I sensed that’s what was going on in his creative process—that it wasn’t neat. It was messy,” she said. “You don’t think in lines, you don’t think in thesis sentence, topic sentence, linear thoughts. I think he was inspired by things that were out of sync, disjointed, fragmented, and tried to make sense of them.”
Shannon and Costanza Romero Wilson are among the speakers at the August Wilson Society’s three-day biennial colloquium this week, which will draw Wilson experts from around the country to the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. And the archive, not surprisingly, will be a key topic of discussion.
