August Wilson in the 'City that Encourages Dreams'

Theater, like the movies, is a collaborative art. In addition to the playwright, one needs a director, actors, a set designer, and numerous lesser contributors. It also helps to have a supportive community capable of providing a dependable audience base. Assembling all this, and keeping it together, can be no mean task, especially in this electronic age of the short attention span. But it can successfully happen. One of the most successful collaborations in American theatrical history took place in St. Paul, Minnesota, beginning in the late 1970s. That’s when a newly arrived nobody, calling himself August Wilson, teamed up with the fledgling Penumbra Theater and, with the help of money from the state’s Bush, McKnight, and Jerome foundations, began to produce and stage a succession of remarkable plays exploring the black experience in America. The Yale Repertory Theater and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in faroff Connecticut would help too over time, as would the Minneapolis Playwrights Center, but in the beginning it was largely a St. Paul show. The late Claude Purdy, a black stage director and cofounder with Lou Bellamy of Penumbra, deserves credit for luring Wilson to St. Paul in the first place. Purdy himself had come out to the city from Pittsburgh in 1975 to direct a Penumbra production of The Great White Hope and had liked the experience and St. Paul so much that he decided to stay. He and Wilson had been pals back in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson was known primarily at the time as a poet. Purdy, while still in Pittsburgh, had convinced Wilson to convert a number of linked poems about an Old West character named Black Bart into a satirical play. In 1977 he called Wilson from St. Paul and urged him to come there and rewrite it. He even bought Wilson the plane ticket to do so. “He sent me a ticket and I went,” Wilson recalled to an interviewer in 1984, “and I said, ‘This is a nice place, I should move up here.’ And a couple of months after that I did.” Simple as that: he came, he saw, he stayed. In an interview with Minnesota