August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook.

Yvonne Shafer. August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook Westport: Greenwood P, 1998. 133 pp. $65.00.

While both national and international theater communities wait for the curtains to rise on Act III of August Wilson's ongoing crusade on behalf of Black Theater and while they expect any day now his eighth play, King Hedley II, Yvonne Shafer's August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook provides an opportunity for those who may not yet be familiar with the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner to examine one other perspective on his productive and prolific career: play productions.

During this intermission directly following the playwright's resounding speech at the June 1996 conference of the Theatre Communications Group, succeeded quickly by the National Black Theater Summit and Retreat at Dartmouth College, the formation of the African Grove Institute for the Arts and a second Black Theater Summit at the July 1998 National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Shafer's research-friendly new work reads like a playbill. Collectively her clinical documentation of Wilson's life, his career, and his dramatic output and play productions provide for the uninitiated Wilson researcher a crash course on this major American playwright. The timing of Shafer's Sourcebook seems to anticipate the growing tide of curiosity about this gifted writer, whose growing repertoire of plays historicizing and fictionalizing the black experience in America since 1900 has significantly replenished the canon of African American drama. As if to prepare for ever broadening critical interest in all aspects of Wilson's w ork, Shafer's Sourcebook condenses an unruly body of important materials on him into a single important reference.

In many ways Shafer's Sourcebook is an extension of my similar attempt to consolidate the proliferation of references to Wilson in an "Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about August Wilson," which was published in the 1994 Iowa University Press collection May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Spanning from 1973 to 1992, the information included here represents the first published attempt to create a much needed clearing house for then-unorganized stockpiles of references on Wilson's life, career, and literary output. Although, in a few instances, Shafer duplicates my earlier efforts, her Sourcebook advances the cause.

As the timeline of material she has retrieved on Wilson brings us closer to the brink of the millennium (1997), her work has significant merit as the most recent published archival reference on him. She also assembles here one of the most extensive chronologies on Wilson published to date, along with painstakingly detailed act-by-act and scene-by-scene plot summaries and critical overviews of his plays, performance reviews, and data on various play productions. Shafer's system of classifying this material seems a bit complex: The prefix "A" identifies primary, non-dramatic references, listed alphabetically and annotated in her "Primary Bibliography"; "P" designates productions of plays listed in "Productions and Credits"; "R" serves as the prefix for reviews; and "S" identifies other secondary materials. However, she boasts "exhaustive" primary and secondary sources dating as far back as the summer 1982 Penumbra Theater presentation of Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. Her inclusion of a final section entitle d "Productions and Credits" makes possible explorations--scholarly or otherwise--into a so-far unchartered dimensions of Wilson's career as a dramatist.

Despite the unquestionable usefulness of Shafer's Research and Production Sourcebook, her casual, one-time reference to August Wilson as "a child of the ghetto" is problematic. While her work is a testament to his importance as an artist, this phrase has the potential to diminish him and his accomplishments. Relatedly, Shafer's rather melodramatic reference to Wilson's triumph over obstacles in his early life in Pittsburgh serves to compartmentalize him and reduce him to cliche.

Cliches aside, Yvonne Shafer's Sourcebook complements nicely the growing body of references that have been published to date on Wilson. When held against the two published collections of very informative critical essays on August Wilson edited by Marilyn Elkins (August Wilson: A Casebook [Garlan, 1994]) and Alan Nadel (May All Your Fences Have Gates [Iowa UP, 1994]) and when compared to the four single studies on the playwright to date-- Peter Wolfe's August Wilson (Twayne, 1999), Joan Herrington's "I Ain't Sorry for Nothin' I Done": August Wilson's Process of Playwrighting (Procenium, 1998). Kim Periera's August Wilson and the African American Odyssey (U of Illinois P, 1995), and my The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (Howard UP, 1995)--Yvonne Shafer's August Wilson: A Resource and Production Sourcebook goes where none has gone before.