August Wilson, Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright whose Fences was the first serious play in many a season on Broadway, is one of the most important writers for the stage to appear in years.
Lloyd Richards, onetime actor turned director, left a successful Broadway career to become dean of the Yale Drama School and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Company.
As a team, the two men have had a symbiotic professional relationship that seems largely responsible for Wilson's impressive dramatic output.
Wilson's newest work, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which opened at Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage this fall before heading to San Diego's Old Globe Theater and then probably New York, is merely the latest collaborative effort between the two men.
Record Show
Last spring, Fences entered the record books as the first play in thirty years to capture of all of the major theatrical awards--including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and American Theatre Critics Association for Best Play.
When it came time for the Antoinette Perry "Tony" Awards, Broadway's equivalent of the Academy Awards, Wilson was called to the podium to accept the award for Best Play, while Richards was honored as Best Director of the same play.
Fences was the second play written by Wilson and directed by Richards to open on Broadway. His first, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, opened in 1984 to nice reviews but a disappointing run.
Like Joe Turner's Come and Gone, both Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre, having first been presented as staged readings during the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.
Even as the two men mapped out the future for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, they were simultaneously shepherding their latest effort, The Piano Lesson, through its first production at the Yale Rep.
Speaking of their association, Wilson observes that "Lloyd understands the overall intention of my work and what it is that I'm trying to achieve with it. We've managed to form a bond based on mutual respect and trust. We share a similar vision, and in all the years that we've worked together, we have yet to have a major clash."
For his part, Richards says trying to explain why he and Wilson work so well together is "like trying to explain a phenomenon."
"We understand the work, and through that we understand each other," Richards says. "I feel like I have known August all my life, because I have known his characters all of my life. I know where they come from, I know how they think, and I know where they are going. This is what permits us to work
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