Harry J. Elam, Jr. The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson.

Harry J. Elam, Jr. The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. 290 pp. $49.50.

Harry J. Elam, Jr.'s, recent book, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, provides an in-depth analysis of Wilson's plays from multiple angles with the recurrent theme of reconnecting African Americans with their past. Looking at each of Wilson's cycle plays that deal with the decades from 1900 to 2001, Elam elaborates Wilson's culturally and socially focused dramaturgy that illustrates both current social conditions and past oppression, and their impact on the very fabric of African American lives.

In order to characterize Wilson's way of remaking American history by recovering African American narratives, Elam, in the beginning chapter, coins the word "(w)righting." According to Elam, Wilson uses his "(w)righting" to invoke rites that connect the spiritual, social, and political, and give new interpretations to the mainstream narrative of American history. "(W)righting" is the act of recreating African American narratives that had been erased, or ignored through performative rites that pull the action from both conventional and ritualized time. Through this act of "(w)righting history," Elam argues, one can change the power and potentialities of the present. Elam's focus on Wilson's (w)righting of history is his vehicle to examine Wilson's dramaturgy so that African American readers can "re-imagine" the past "that the playwright believes is retained within African American cultural practices and beliefs" (2).

In subsequent chapters, Elam examines Wilson's "rites" and "(w)righting" as illustrative of music, fools, women, men, and the Yoruban god Ogun. In each chapter, Elam provides detailed textual analysis, focusing particularly on the important roles of one of these elements. In the section about music, for example, Elam argues that the music in Wilson's plays functions as both metaphor and metonym that represent, embody, and express the "souls of black folks." Elam's music of focus is the blues, which is an African American "performative rite" that enables blacks to summon memory and regenerate the will to survive. He elaborates on this point by closely examining such Wilson plays as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, Fences, Jitney, and King Hedley II. In the next chapter, Elam discusses how Wilson uses characters of "fools" and children to reconnect a particular African collective--spiritually and psychologically to its history, past, and present. "Fools" and children in Wilson's works are not only spokespersons for those forced into socially and culturally marginalized enclaves but also into the embodiment of historically embedded "racial madness" (or what W. E. B. Du Bois called "double consciousness"). In the chapter on women characters in the plays, Elam argues that Wilson's female characters are "tough, resilient, and independent," while at the same time, they have to function within conventional gender hierarchies. In the chapter on male characters in Wilson's works, Elam describes black men's "historical stigmatization" and their internalization of oppression (128). In the chapter on Ogun, Elam discovers the spirit of the Yoruban God, Ogun, within the characters and their symbolic props throughout Wilson's 20th-century cycle. For example, Elam argues that Ogun manifests itself as the "black angel in black hats" in Seven Guitars, a gold horseshoe in King Hedley II, and Seth's expression of artistry in Joe Turner. At times Elam's arguments become redundant, though repetition may be the unavoidable result of interpreting the same texts from different angles.

Elam concludes his book with a chapter that discusses Wilson's Theatre Communications Group (TCG) presentation in 1997 and his speech at the 1998 National Black Theatre Summit. In this chapter Elam presents himself as a critic of Wilson, rather than merely as an enthusiastic defender of the acclaimed playwright. Elam points out the contradictions and omissions of Wilson that are apparent both in his speeches and work. Elam argues, for instance, that Wilson's cycle "ignores the fact that sexuality and gender profoundly interact with race" (221). He also criticizes Wilson's complicity with the system he critiques. Elam's criticism of Wilson's contradictions, omissions, and complicity is highly persuasive, yet in the end, his criticism seems overshadowed by his acknowledgment and praise of Wilson's accomplishment of resurrecting collective memories and individual histories, of reconstructing cultural practices, and of providing silenced voices with speech. Apparently Elam, in the final chapter of the book, tries to provide fair criticism of Wilson, on the one hand, and to conclude the book with his immense admiration for the playwright, on the other.

I wish Elam had elaborated more of the sociohistorical comments that accompany his interpretation of the texts. Such elaboration would allow readers to discover the historical, cultural, and social implications beneath Wilson's geographic and period specific plays. For example, he ties his analysis of the manifestation of the metal god Ogun to the industrial steel town of Pittsburgh. Analyzing female characters, Elam mentions Patricia Hill Collins's analysis of the 1980s as the decade in which the entire community structure of black motherhood was abraded. Further elaboration with examples would have provided a tool for readers to connect the environment in Wilson's plays and African American history. Because Elam focuses on African Americans' reconnecting with their past as "regenerative models of healing" (xiv), it is particularly important for readers to know the sociohistorical background. That way, readers would be able to see, more clearly, the details of what Elam calls "the past," "a history of black experience" and "cultural practices and beliefs."

Production photos are well incorporated into Elam's analysis of Wilson's cycle. It might, however, be a good idea to include photos and visuals that would increase readers' understanding of Elam's analysis. In "The Overture," for example, Elam illustrates his encounter with the artistic return-to-the past movement by introducing Glen Ligon's etching entitled "To Disembark." A photo of Ligon's etching would have helped readers to understand this artist's visual expression of what history means to the present. By the same token, I was left wishing I would have been able to see Romare Bearden's collage painting Mills Hand's Lunch Bucket (1978), to which Elam refers as Wilson's critical inspiration for Joe Turner.

Elam's meticulous analysis of Wilson's plays definitely adds to the study of August Wilson. This book is most useful for providing theatre scholars and students with various ways to discover the metaphors and symbols in Wilson's texts that allude to his revisionist historicism. Elam also illustrates poetry and music found in the text and interprets them in ways that theatre practitioners (directors, designers, and actors) can easily visualize in theatrical sites.

Yuko Kurahashi

Kent State University