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Romulus Linney, Signature's 1991-1992 Founding Playwright-in-Residence, met August Wilson at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in 2002. They liked each other, and became friends.
AUGUST WILSON by Romulus Linney
August Wilson grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh when it was teeming with the music and poetry of inner city life. At his funeral, its streets were lined with people standing in the rain, waving cardboard signs with their love for him written on them. Masterfully recreated for the stage, men and women like them come alive from his youthful memories. Often on napkins. A waitress, watching him drinking his coffee and scribbling on a paper napkin, once asked him if that made writing all right, because on napkins it could mean anything. He was delighted to agree with her, since she had just explained to him the secret of artistic freedom.
August never looks away from the dire realities his people faced in the past, face in the present or will face in the future. He gives us that truth with devastating power. But he creates tragic events with a supple and abiding love. He often rocks his audiences with laughter at the clumsy energies, sardonic ambitions and bustling enterprises of his characters, trying to get along and maybe ahead. He is especially fond of them when their efforts lead them nowhere. His men and women are big enough to enjoy the ironies of their foolishness as well as the strength of their courage. They live in sometimes bristling, sometimes bemused contemplation of their unfair yet fully lived existence.
When August spoke in public, after an opening or at an Awards ceremony, he spoke to the best in everyone listening to him. A quietly enthusiastic man, he smiled his warm smile, focused his eyes ahead of him, pursed his lips a little, as he did, and told us about the fine things he could see that we were all going to do. Everyone would be there, so would he, so would we. Everyone felt the warmth of a faithful artist, glowing inside the modesty of a noble gentleman.
Two of his letters to me were written when he was dying, stricken with savage suddenness by liver cancer, one letter when there was hope, one when there wasn't. Both are steady and calm, signed in his spiky signature, though he had to dictate them to his wife Constanza. This sentence, please, from my last letter to him: "No one, no one, since William Faulkner in my youth, has spoken to me out of the richness of humanity as you have in your plays."
It was an honor to know him.
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