Within August Wilson’s century-long odyssey, the survival of the past is symbolized through its most significant character, Aunt Ester Tyler. The mistress of 1839 Wylie Avenue, Aunt Ester represents the ingenuity and will of the African spirit to survive the horrors and the degradation of the conditions of slavery and dehumanization. This chapter teases out some of these elements of memory, illuminating how the American Century Cycle structurally signifies Passover themes, while arguing that Wilson dramaturgically deploys such cues as a strategy towards a cultural rehearsal of remembering.

August Wilson’s plays show his ability to draw upon and transcend the turbulent years he spent at his now-famous Hill District address at 1827 Bedford Avenue. With the benefit of time and distance, Wilson wrote a series of compelling dramas that speak not just to the tensions within a single Black family but also to conditions faced by the Black masses still impacted by the trauma of slavery and the effects of cultural fragmentation. We thus see in Wilson’s series of symbolic and sometimes clearly allegorical characters evidence of an overarching narrative about the counterbalances between forces that set Black families asunder and the resilience that reunites and bonds them together. This chapter explores the ways Wilson’s plays demand that we regard “family” in both literal and figurative terms through an analysis of the Black family portraits on display in them.

August Wilson once suggested that African Americans leaving the US South during the Great Migration was one of the worst things that happened to the community. Because the Great Migration and the chronicle of African and African American migrants’ histories/herstories are intertwined discussions, this chapter suggests that the American Century Cycle enables Wilson to design a culturally specific study of the affects and effects of the migration on the characters and geographic spaces he plots. It considers how Wilson uses the plays in the cycle to demonstrate his point while also providing hope that, even within the urban North, the realities of the South and transformation of Southern mores will not be forgotten or ignored.

August Wilson famously and often stated that his influences primarily consisted of the “four B’s:” the blues, Romare Bearden, Amiri Baraka, and Jorge Luis Borges. While the blues, Bearden, and Baraka tend to get the most attention, Wilson’s debt to Borges remains abstract and elusive – something that made perfect sense in his mind, but is difficult for readers and theatergoers to bring into sharp focus. This chapter provides an overview of Wilson’s comments on Borges and offer two stories by Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory” (1983) and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote” (1941), as texts through which aspects of Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (2003) might be understood.

This chapter adds to the chorus of critical scholarship aimed at addressing the women characters in Wilson’s dramas. It specifically interrogates what possibilities and limitations Wilson’s constructions of Black women accomplish within the context of when the plays are set, as well as within our contemporary (re)encounters with them. Utilizing the framework of Black feminist theatrical critique to examine Gem of the Ocean (2003) and Seven Guitars (1995), it maintains that even though Wilson chronicles the changing perceptions of Black women across the decades, contemporary (re)encounters with his work illuminate the persistent gender ideologies that his depictions of Black women are built upon.

This chapter situates August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean as a catalyst for emerging theoretical conversations such as Saidiya Hartman’s theory of critical fabulation and archival journey on the Recovery, and contemporary artistic undertakings like Vessels that mutually reckon with the utility of the vessel. In so doing, it explores how the Black body acts as a vessel for the facilitation of a radical poetics. The chapter asks: Can an analysis of the vessel position Wilson in these embodied and urgent contexts?