August Wilson’s St. Paul Roots

Let’s say that you were a high school drop out, spent a little time in the Army, worked a few odd jobs here and there, and wrote a couple plays that were performed in small theaters. If you were that person and about 33-years-old would you take a job offer in St. Paul, Minnesota writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota?

Perhaps it’s not your dream job but  it is a paid gig for writing which is not easy to come by. Would you move to St. Paul, Minnesota for such a job? That’s exactly what playwright August Wilson did in 1978.  But he kept writing plays and in 1980 received a fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and quit the museum job in 1981 and kept writing plays—and worked as a chef for the Little Brothers of the Pour.

Throughout the 80s many of his plays were performed by the Penumbra Theater Company in St. Paul whose mission is to create, “professional productions that are artistically excellent, thought provoking, relevant, and illuminate the human condition through the prism of the African American experience.” According to Lou Bellamy, the founder and artistic director of the Penumbra Theater Company, more of August Wilson’s plays have been produced there than any other theater in the world.

Wilson’s time in St. Paul proved fruitful and in 1987, less than ten years after moving to St. Paul he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Fences. That same year the mayor of St. Paul named May 27 as August Wilson Day. Wilson died in 2005 from liver cancer but not before creating a body of work has placed him among the greatest playwrights America has produced.

Tony Kushner told the NY Times after his death,  “The playwright’s voice in American culture is perceived as having been usurped by television and film, but he reasserted the power of drama to describe large social forces, to explore the meaning of an entire people’s experience in American history. For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned.”

Wilson was at the core a Pittsburgh guy who found great success in New York and around the world. But the road to his success had a lot to do with taking a job in St. Paul where his writing could be honed, performed and supported.

Scott W. Smith