The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson.

Sandra Shannon. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington: Howard UP, 1995. 254 pp. $27.95 cloth/$1 9.95 paper.

August Wilson creates portraits of people who stand on the rarely acknowledged darker side of our history. A dynasty builder, Wilson has propagated fathers, mothers, entrepreneurs, idlers, lovers, brothers, fancy and taciturn women, tinsmiths, trumpet blowers, porters, mendicant merchants, visionaries, ministers, guitar strummers, singers, veterans of war, tricksters, laborers, hopeful but sad-browed children, and tragic, passionate dreamers. In his intergenerational portraits, we see the anguished and smiling faces of friends and people we've passed on the move from there to here, and we begin to understand some of the residual pain that recoils unvoiced and somehow both poetic and threatening in the shadows. In the gallery of faces and personal histories that Wilson has crafted, we encounter our ancestors whose sins, energies, and ambitions have directed and accompanied us to the present moment.

Wilson's ability to animate the wry bones of the past impressed Sandra Shannon and sent her on an intellectual and emotional odyssey. When she read Fences, the second Wilson play to be produced on Broadway, and winner in 1987 of the first of two Pulitzers for Wilson, Shannon was reminded of the life and accomplishments of her father, whose body had just been placed in the earth. Then and there, she promised herself that she would learn everything she could about this playwright with the phenomenal talent to represent lived, pulsating truth through his characters. Shannon spent more than half a decade doing the research necessary to turn her promise into reality.

The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson is the result of Shannon's admiration-inspired quest. Her full-length study encompasses more of the Wilsonian oeuvre than any book published until now on the prolific Mr. Wilson. Published the same year as the Shannon book, Kim Pereira's study concentrates on four Wilson plays, whereas Shannon writes about all of Wilson's early poems and plays, the anthropological scripts he wrote for the Minnesota Science Museum, and five of the six Wilson plays that have been produced on Broadway. She mentions but does not go into detail about the sixth play, Seven Guitars. The fifty-year Wilson chronology printed at the beginning of the book ends in 1995, when Seven Guitars made its regional debut and Piano Lesson was broadcast on CBS. Shannon marks the dates of her inquiry from the birth of the playwright to his unquestioned establishment on the American stage and his unchallenged celebrity in the American mind. Seven Guitars is the first play in Wilson's Broadway canon not to debut a t Yale, premiering instead at the Goodman in Chicago, and it belongs to a later phase of Wilson's career, a period that also saw the controversial pairing of Wilson and Robert Brustein at New York's Town Hall in January 1997.

Shannon puts a great deal of emphasis on Wilson's journeyman years, when he was casting about trying to find his niche and voice. Shannon shows the reader how Wilson developed from a bumbling but committed poet looking about for artistic fathers to an author fully in possession of his own meaning. The reader can follow Wilson on the trajectory from neophyte to autonomy. Shannon describes the playwright in the midst of his creative flights, charting his velocity and the long arc he has traveled in his resolve to give form and utterance to the chronicle of an exiled and emergent people. To date, Wilson is the only American playwright to carry out plans to write the biography of a people in a series of dramatic texts, more than half of which are finished. In his decalogue of sacred texts about the saga of a tribe, Wilson is accomplishing what, as Shannon points out, Eugene O'Neill tried but could not fulfill.

Showing the breadth of the man and his mind opens the possibility for the reader to have global insight into Wilson's work. Shannon's journalistic, on-the-pulse approach, culminating in the uncut interview with the playwright which comprises the appendix, adds immediacy and an element of orality, making the reader feel that he or she is in the actual presence of the playwright's voice, privy to his inflections and personal phrasings. This adds a measure of drama to this book about a dramatist. For the reader's examination and enjoyment, Shannon has abstracted themes and moments from the plays that allow the reader to make his or her own meaningful comments upon the plays, and link one play to another; the index and extensive bibliography are also helpful for the student, scholar, or Wilson aficionado who wants to zero in on a particular aspect of Wilson's work.

Migration is the pivotal Wilsonian theme; he is convinced that the descendants of slaves were wrong to leave the site of their American nativity; this, of course, is an issue open to much debate. The shaman, link to a vanished agricultural past, reappears in several of Wilson's plays; it would be instructive to study the evolution from Bynum Walker, the shaman looking for a shining savior in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, to the rebellious but mercenary shaman in Seven Guitars. The scar is also an emblem worthy of note in Wilson's writing. Slavery has scarred the mind and soul of African Americans--indeed of all Americans--and Wilson refuses to look away. Many of the characters in Wilson's plays have been marked by pain. Risa, the waitress in Two Trains Running, has wounded herself, gouged out long lines on her otherwise pretty legs. Gabriel in Fences has left part of his brain on a foreign battlefield. Herald Loomis gashes his chest in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. And the new play, the one set in the eighties a nd still emerging from Wilson's pen, focuses on a scarred character.

Shannon's book allows the pattern of Wilson's work to take on a symmetry that would not be so easily apparent otherwise. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson is a fundamental text for this African American dramatic writer who has created a sustained and epic corpus on the specificity of black life. Transforming the everyday into the eternal, Wilson has revealed the mythic, universal qualities in blackness. Shannon's book is an invaluable source for additional studies on this seminal contemporary playwright. In writing this book, Shannon is expanding a tradition of community-centric scholars as the acknowledged experts in an arena prone to the custodianship of others, a practice to which Wilson called attention and denounced in his much-publicized debate with Robert Brustein at Town Hall.