The End of an Era: August Wilson's Final Play

With Radio Golf, August Wilson turned his eyes toward the 1990s, a decade in which the gap between generations of black Americans was more evident than ever. The world Wilson depicts is one of individual concern, where folks are willing to sacrifice cultural and communal health to secure individual wealth. The community is displaced. In order to bring the people together, something significant must happen, something to unite the people under a common banner of shared history. The Hill District needs a prophet, and throughout Radio Golf, one wonders whether Harmond Wilks might be that man.

Wilson finished Radio Golf in 2005, completing his project to chronicle the African American experience decade by decade throughout the 20th century. In April of that year the play premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre. Six months later, on October 2, 2005, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright died. He had finished the ten-play cycle he set out to write, leaving his legacy—unparalleled in history—intact. It is no coincidence that Wilson wrote the two plays that begin and end the cycle last. Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf bookend the cycle, illuminating threads of cause and eff ect, generational conflicts, and questions of inheritance—central themes Wilson explored throughout his life.

In each play Wilson created archetypal yet wholly three-dimensional characters often saddled with tragic human flaws, whose passion for life matches their quest for justice. Wilson saw race as the principle channel through which to examine these elements of human life. He called himself a "race man," one who believed "that race matters — that [it] is the largest, most identifiable and the most important part of our personality."¹ In America, where codes of color are deeply inscribed in the fabric of our society, race determines more than one's family of origin. It determines your path through life, the way you view things, the way others view you. It shapes your participation, mediates your power and defines your challenges. The experience of race in America is epic, inexhaustible and as Wilson proved through ten plays examining the African American experience, still significantly relevant to our contemporary lives.

Sarah Bellamy
Education Director

Setting: Pittsburgh, 1997, over the course of two and a half weeks.

¹ Wilson, August. The Ground On Which I Stand. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996) p. 14.