Theater Schools Cast in Key Role
August Wilson has achieved the success most playwrights only dream about. His award-winning plays - which include "Fences", "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," and "The Piano Lesson" - have rendered sensitive and probing portrayals of African American life. Staged in venues ranging from regional theaters to Broadway, Wilson's plays have earned two Pulitzer Prizes and lavish praise from critics.
So it came as something of a shock to the theatrical world last year when Wilson chose to castigate the nonprofit theater establishment for its alleged part in undermining African American theater. The Charge was made at Princeton University during his keynote address to a gathering of the Theatre Communications Group, a leading nonprofit theater organization.
"... Black Theater in America is alive ... it is vital ... it just isn't funded," Wilson said. "Black theatre doesn't share in the economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and disseminate ideas crucial to its growth. The economics are reserved as privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve, promote, and perpetuate White culture."
Wilson criticized funding organizations for rewarding majority-White regional theaters for programming plays about minorities while failing to support Black theater organizations. He declared that White-controlled theater companies were attempting to diversify their programming at the expense of the Black theater establishment.
Wilson's comments brought new attention to the cause of independent Black theater in America. A number of Black theater professionals say he voiced a widely-felt frustration with the nonprofit theater establishment. But they also point out that continued survival of Black theater will require considerable innovation to strengthen links to the communities in which theater companies reside, and to institutions, such as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
