August Wilson

摘要

If ever someone, following current fashion, decides to stage all the plays of August Wilson's epic cycle in a single session, the audience is in for a treat—and an endurance test. The cycle consists of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century. Long before the series was com-plete-"Radio Golf", the last piece to be written, was finished only this year-Mr Wilson had been hailed as one of America's greatest playwrights, in a pantheon with such masters as Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. It is too soon to say whether Mr Wilson will in the end hold his own against such talents, or whether he will be remembered chiefly as a superb dramatist of the collective black-American experience of the 20th century. That would be no small achievement, but it would probably be seen by Mr Wilson as a mark of failure. He believed that, though the world he portrayed was indeed the world of black America, or rather the much smaller world of the Hill district of Pittsburgh in which he grew up, nonetheless his plays dealt with the universal themes of beauty, love, honour, betrayal and so on.