In her absorbing, richly detailed biography recently published by Simon & Schuster, Patti Hartigan calls “Joe Turner” Wilson’s greatest achievement. She has plenty of company in that opinion.…
Michael Phillips | Chicago Tribune
For a lot of reasons, Hartigan will never forget what she saw that night, notably the Act 1 climax: a haunted man’s vision, which consumes him in the middle of a joyous Pittsburgh boardinghouse celebration, of bones walking on water. These are the bones of enslaved Africans lost in the Middle Passage. Wilson’s play takes place in 1911. America’s former slaves are free, on paper, but searching — following the scent of what Wilson calls their “blood memory.
For much of the 1980s and ‘90s, Wilson worked like a one-man vaudeville touring act: a man, a typewriter and one more play in his ambitious 10-play cycle of 20th century Black American life and poetic drama. Wilson developed and revised his plays across a far-flung network of nonprofit theaters, including Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. The goal was a commercial debut on Broadway; sometimes that worked out profitably , other times not quite or not even close . Money isn’t everything.
Conference director Lloyd Richards, the first Black director on Broadway , saw something in “Ma Rainey,” even in its shaggy, four-hour nascent state. The bell curve of their subsequent, celebrated 12-year writer-director partnership extended on Broadway from 1984 to 1996. Then it fell apart, though the strain showed as early as “Fences.” The backstage drama on Wilson’s biggest Broadway success comes to vivid life in Hartigan’s book, along with Wilson’s remarkable family history.
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