A belated farewell to America's greatest living playwright, August Wilson, who passed away earlier this month. His passing sadly, and effectively ends a century of great American playwrighting that included immortal works by Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams , to name a couple of Wilson's equals. Gripped increasingly by reflexive leftism, American playwrights, particularly in the last quarter century, have littered the stage with gratuitious violence, nudity, and naked agitprop. Even worse, most of the atrocities masquerading as theater these days are merely the products of a workshop combine whereby the amateur playwright is "helped" toward production via the teaching and consensus of directors, teachers, and other hangers on who subsist primarily via the public dole.
Wilson's problem in gaining real traction on Broadway, the Promised Land for most playwrights, was the fact that he could actually write plays himself and didn't have need of the usual parasites who feed off an inferior playwright's corpus, so to speak. Wilson knew what he was doing, and chose to fend for himself, just like all Great Americans generally do.
Wilson was the George Bernard Shaw of our time. He was accused of being wordy, verbose. But like Shaw, with Wilson, you could sit and listen to his characters talk for hours. Real life from the wrong side of the tracks with a dash of Tabasco once in awhile. While his politics were predictably left of center, this wasn't what drove his plays. Rather, as is true with all great writers, his dramas were driven by character--something lost on the current generation of younger playwrights who write to please professors and obtain additional grants to pen more plays, lampooning Bush or the suburbs, that will never make it past their opening run.
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