"I Ain't Sorry for Nothin' I Done": August Wilson's Process of Playwriting.

Joan Herrington. "I Ain't Sorry for Nothin' I Done": August Wilson's Process of Playwriting. New York: Limelight, 1998. 180 pp. $15.00.

One of America's most acclaimed playwrights, August Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes, two Tonys, and six New York Drama Critics Awards; he has been awarded Bush, McKnight, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships in playwriting; and in 1988 he had the distinction of having two plays running simultaneously on Broadway. Yet Joan Herrington devotes little attention to the reasons for Wilson's critical and popular acclaim in her book; in fact, the volume's subtitle defines both its intent and achievement. Even though its focus on delineating Wilson's creative process as opposed to analyzing his final product sometimes makes the book seem as though it is intended for aspiring playwrights, it offers much that is useful for the August Wilson scholar. Its sustained emphasis on Wilson's creative process emerges as the book's strength and, only occasionally, its weakness.

As part of her investigation of the process Wilson uses to write his successful plays, Herrington discusses the major influences that have helped him develop as a playwright. She offers rather brief considerations of his debt to "the Four B's": Romare Bearden, the blues, Amiri Baraka, and Jorge Luis Borges. Much of this material has already been covered by, among others, Mark Rocha, and Herrington's book brings little that is new to the discussion--except for the interesting parallels she adumbrates between Wilson's method of "cutting and pasting" his scripts and Bearden's creation of his collages. She points out that Bearden used a variety of "found objects, creating a relationship among them as they were assembled... and arranged and rearranged them" until he had created his art. She successfully argues that Wilson's use of imagery and overheard, or "found," dialogue, is a literary equivalent of Bearden's technique, one that allows Wilson's images and dialogue to increase in resonance through their unusual juxtapositions. This is an important insight and offers a useful approach for understanding both Wilson's process and his plays. Developing this argument in a more substantial and sustained way could have further enriched the book and provided even greater insight into the substance of Wilson's plays.

But this kind of elucidation is simply not Herrington's primary focus. In her detailed analysis of Wilson's creative process for Ma Rainey, Fences, and Joe Turners Come and Gone, she compares successive drafts to discover how Wilson creates his final scripts and to consider the evolution of his method. She discusses the implications of Wilson's changes as they affect his characters, but her discussions rarely further our understanding of how the changes affect the individual plays' themes. However, Herrington does offer insights into how Wilson's artistic development has been aided by his association with Lloyd Richards and by his growing understanding of dramatic structure. In her discussion of Wilson's revisions of Jitney--a play that he first wrote in 1979 and began revising in 1996--Herrington offers further details about the ongoing evolution of Wilson's process: He now does all his rewriting during rehearsals through collaborating with the director and considering the actors' and audience's response as he reshapes his material. Even less restricted by dramatic traditions and rules, this new approach, Herrington suggests, may lead Wilson to write more inventive, freer plays.

In her final chapter, Herrington makes an abrupt shift--one for which she fails to provide a clear transition--to consider the controversy that Wilson created in his recent public statements, such as the speech he made at the 1996 annual conference of the Theater Communication Group and his 1997 public debate with Robert Brustein at New York City's Town Hall. An interesting overview of Wilson's public statements about race and what he sees as white theater's misguided efforts" at multiculturalism, this final chapter does little to help explain the inherent contradictions in many of Wilson's remarks--perhaps because he seems unable to reconcile his own mixed response to the acclaim he has been awarded by white critics and audiences. While he attacks the theatrical establishment and refuses to work with white directors, Wilson does not limit the performance of his own work to black theaters or reject mainstream awards.

Throughout the book, Herrington does an admirable job of incorporating material from interviews, many of which she conducted, with Lloyd Richards, Walter Dallas, James Earl Jones, Charles Dutton, Roscoe Lee Brown, and Wilson himself. Despite its somewhat narrow focus, the book is a valuable contribution to Wilson scholarship. While Herrington's interpretations can sometimes leave the reader wishing for more analysis, she always provides us with new, useful information about Wilson's writing process, material that can help broaden and deepen our own analyses. Ultimately, "I Ain't Sorry for Nothin'I Done" furthers our understanding of the complexity of Wilson's process, of Wilson, and of his work.