The L.A. Times' Charles McNulty has a thoughtful, and gently revisionist, overview of August Wilson's 10-play ouevre, now in a fat $200 edition. I haven't read Wilson's plays in a while, though I've seen most of them in some form or another, so I'm not sure I can agree with McNulty's main thesis--that the sprawl of Wilson's plays came from a "corrective" rather than a poetic impulse, as if the playwright's main aspiration was to introduce mainstream theater audiences to what McNulty calls "the quotidian rituals of African American experience." But I would agree with his corollary points: that Wilson's plays were in no sense experimental or modernist, and that they rely on great actors to put them across.
Now can somebody please put this volume on Hilton Als' Christmas list?
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