The 10 plays in AUGUST WILSON's portrait of 20th-century African-American life were written out of order. First came ''Jitney,'' set in 1977, after which Wilson bounced through the '20s, the '50s, the '10s, the '30s, the '60s, the '40s, the '80s and the '00s before ending, with ''Radio Golf,'' in the '90s.
As theatergoers who caught even a few of the plays when they were first produced quickly learned, phrases and characters echo or even recur throughout; at times it might have enhanced the understanding of Wilson's design (if not of the stories themselves, which needed no enhancement) to find, in the Playbill, genealogical tables of the sort sometimes provided in editions of sprawling fantasy novels or Greek drama.
Wilson's plays, with their magic realism and full-throated tragedy, are a bit of both. In the general introduction the 10-volume edition of ''The August Wilson Century Cycle,'' published by Theater Communications Group, John Lahr compares Wilson's aim and achievement favorably to those of Eugene O'Neill, who completed only a fraction of his intended Greek-style cycle. Wilson finished his own, just before dying in 2005, and though he suggested that his plays were primarily intended as black stories for black audiences, their presentation in this new, handsome $200 slip-cased collection -- in cold print and in their proper order -- unavoidably wrests them from that context. For all their specificity, the characters become archetypal when disembodied on the page, and thus become everyone's, to the point that Aunt Ester, King Hedley and Ma Rainey seem as fixed and eternal as Clytemnestra and her clan.
I don't know much about theater, but somehow I've been following August Wilson. Actually, I do know how--I read a profile of him in the Star Tribune. It must have been in the late 80s, when he was still living and working in St Paul.
Like them, too, Wilson's people will be brought back to full, dreadful life as long as humans put on plays. Catch them in March, when the Kennedy Center will offer staged readings of the whole cycle, in repertory and in order.
Don't know if I'll be able to find the time and the money to take in more than a couple of the 10 at the Kennedy Center. Here is a WP Post article about it, and here is the Kennedy Center's theater calendar--scroll down for the "August Wilson's 20th Century" listings.
MCALLEN, Texas -- Hidalgo County, in the southernmost tip of Texas, is the poorest county of 250,000 or more people in the U.S., with nearly half its families living below the poverty line. Vendors hawk bootleg DVDs and homemade tacos out of the back of pickup trucks. Stray dogs roam the scrubland along highways. Hidalgo is also home to one of America's highest-grossing shopping malls, the sprawling La Plaza Mall of McAllen, Texas.
Owned by Simon Property Group Inc., the nation's No. 1 mall developer, La Plaza features valet parking, trendy clothing chains like Abercrombie Fitch Co. and Banana Republic, and high-end jewelers Swarovski and Helzberg Diamonds. La Plaza generates monthly sales of well over $450 a square foot, compared with a national mall average of $392. Next year, Simon, of Indianapolis, plans to open the 600,000-square-foot Palms Crossing shopping center a half-mile away. In nearby Mercedes, Simon is opening the $68 million Rio Grande Valley Premium Outlets, a 400,000-square-foot, upscale outlet, in November.
The reason: Mexican shoppers, both rich and poor, are pouring into the area, making it the equivalent of Madison Avenue for northern Mexico's consumer class. Border agencies tally nearly 40 million legal visits a year by Mexicans coming to Texas for leisure activities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas figures they spent $3 billion on merchandise in Texas border counties in 2004, the latest data available, up from around $1.6 billion a decade earlier. In the past 10 years, retail sales in McAllen have risen more than 75%, nearly double the nationwide pace of 40%. Per-capita sales here are twice the national average, according to the census.
The activity demonstrates an unexpected development in American retailing. While Mexican money has long flowed north, the current upsurge has turned South Texas' poor borderlands into the latest, and one of the last, ripe frontiers for big retailers. At a time when major retail chains are facing declining market share and tepid sales in America's affluent suburbs, they are finding unexpected hope in the Mexican consumer.
Forty of the nation's top 100 retailers have recently staked their claim here. When Guess Inc. launched its new clothing boutique, Marciano, in 2004, the company chose Los Angeles, Toronto and McAllen as its three test cities. Foley's, a chain of department stores in Texas owned by Federated Department Stores Inc., Cincinnati, says operations in McAllen and nearby Laredo are its fastest-growing locations. J.C. Penney Co., Plano, Texas, says about three quarters of customers at its McAllen store are from Mexico and last year the chain allowed Mexican shoppers to apply for its gift registry and credit card. The store offers bilingual gift cards and an in-store beauty salon popular with Mexican women.
Patricia Wright's girlhood home in San Francisco's Western Addition and most of the houses on her block were bulldozed in the 1960s by the Redevelopment Agency.The urban renewal projects, alluded to above, that targeted the Western Addition and the Fillmore in the 50s and 60s seem to be regarded now as failures (just like other similar projects elsewhere in the country, such as the UofC-directed cleanup of 55th St in Hyde Park, which replaced a stretch of jazz clubs and bars with monoxide towers...)
In the name of urban renewal, longtime residents -- mostly poor and African American -- were sent packing, and many never came back.
For Wright, who is now 52 and lives in the Bayview home to which she relocated as a child, the resentment still runs deep.
"I have no trust in them whatsoever," she said. "When I hear the words 'redevelopment' and 'urban renewal,' I think it really means urban removal."
Those painful memories have Wright and some others who live in the Bayview-Hunters Point area, a predominately black community situated on the city's southeastern edge, fearful that history could repeat itself.
They've come out in force against a Redevelopment Agency proposal to place about 1,300 acres -- more than half of the Bayview -- under its jurisdiction. The plan would create the largest redevelopment district in San Francisco history, and the agency promises to clean up blight, build affordable housing and stimulate business with the help of property tax dollars.
But while people like Wright are reluctant to trust an agency that they say betrayed them in the past, others look to the Redevelopment Agency to be the catalyst for improvements the Bayview desperately needs.
The area is plagued by crime and poverty, and abandoned buildings, crumbling facades and vacant lots are commonplace. But the neighborhood's main drag, Third Street, soon will be home to a new light-rail system linking the struggling community to the city's downtown, making the Bayview attractive to real estate investors and developers who have long ignored it.
Now, 30 years after she and her late husband bought the place, Johnson's careful attention is finally paying off. Her three-bedroom house on Shafter Street in the Bayview sold for $660,000 after only two weeks on the market. Johnson is headed for a better life in Houston, where she's having a house twice the size built in a gated community by a lake – for a quarter of the price.(Though of course longtime African-Americans in the Bayview aren't the only Bay Area residents thinking about moving out b/c of real estate prices in these parts; also in Monday's SFChron was this article.)
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