NEW 3-PLAY SUMMER FESTIVAL WILL HONOR AUGUST WILSON
A newly minted three-play festival, titled the August Wilson American Century Cycle Experience, will run for six weeks this summer, said Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company’s Mark Clayton Southers, offering a sneak peek of the details expected to be unveiled at the August Wilson Birthday Celebration Block Party, on April 26, 2025. The festival Experience will include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences at the landmark August Wilson House, on the outdoor stage at 1727 Bedford Avenue in the Lower Hill District. Two Trains Running will be presented on the mainstage at Southers’ Madison Arts Center in the Upper Hill. A new black box space is under construction at Madison, to house Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for 10 shows over two weeks. Southers said the casts of the three shows are set, with exception of two roles, and more details will be released at the family-friendly annual Block Party, which features more than 185 vendors, activities, a foam party, lip sync battle, food trucks, musical performances, and more. Learn more about the celebration by visiting https://www.augustwilsonbirthdaycelebration.com/ .
– Sharon Eberson
By SHARON EBERSON
With every play he writes, Mark Clayton Southers employs tangible aides as part of his process. For The Coffin Maker, for example, a play set in 1849 Oklahoma, he kept a buffalo head coin nearby. When working on an upcoming piece about Black whaling captains in Nantucket, he keeps a model of a white whale in sight, although he is planning on coloring it gray, so “none of that Moby Dick stuff” gets in the way.
For Art of the Wise, opening April 11, 2025 at Madison Arts Center, his inspiration has been paintings of vintage flowers.
Set in Mobile, Alabama, circa 1822, Art of Wise is described as uncovering “centuries of revisionist history through the paint strokes of two families, one owned by the other, yet sharing the same name. At the story’s core, two young women’s potential friendship takes a dramatic turn, with their remarkable artworks becoming a means for one family to attain freedom. This gripping drama opens wounds of the past, yet uses art to soothe through music, dance, song, and masterful illustration.”
Directed by Southers’ longtime collaborator, Monteze Freeland, the cast comprises Sheldon Ingram, Maddie Kocur, Jenny Malarkey, Joe McGranaghan, David Minniefield, Adjoa Opoku-Dakwa, Justus Payne and Karla Payne.
The girls’ paintings have been created by Linda Wallen, a painter and mosaicist who works out of a studio on Spring Hill.
When he began the play, Southers already had several decades of the 19th century accounted for.
Working his way through the Black Experience in the 19th century, theatrically speaking, with a play for each decade, the head of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company is following in the footsteps of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle.
Art of Wise, like Souther’s The Coffin Maker (Pittsburgh Public Theater, 2024), represents a decade before the emancipation of enslaved Black people.
While Wilson wrote mostly about the familiar – his Hill District hometown in the 20th century – Southers was ranging far and wide, when he realized where his journey was leading.
“On the last three or four plays, I absolutely had to write about specific decades because the way it started, I just happened to have three that were already in the 1800s. So I said, ‘OK, well, let me keep it going,’” Southers said.
The simple launching point for a not so simple time and place, 1820s Alabama, was “a young black girl who paints beautiful pictures, even though she’s enslaved.”
“Everything emanates from the paintings,” Southers explained. “The paintings offer a path for freedom for this family. And if you align it with our current world, it would be much like a young man coming out of poverty and getting a scholarship to culture. Even better, getting a contract in the NFL or the NBA, making millions and millions of dollars and buying his family a house.”
On the one hand, there is beauty, and on the other, the brutality of slavery.
The playwright did not set out to write about traumatic events that were part of that era, but the story and the times took him in that direction.
“One of the things that happened in the play, I never even planned on writing. It’s just that once you put things in motion, it’s like, the way I see God created us all.”
He is quick to explain the writer’s God-like quality when it comes to creating characters, and how their freedom of choice flows through him.
“They take on their own persona, and you give them a limp, a lisp or whatever. You give them these different things, and they come alive, and you basically write what they say.”
As the founding artistic and technical producer of his own 22-year-old company, now with his own building to house it in, it seems impossible that there are enough hours in a day to keep that theater engine running and to keep creating.
In addition, May 11 will mark the 10 years since the near-death car crash that has continued to take a physical and mental toll on Southers. He captured some of the darkest times in The Ninety Nine Chronicles, which became a video project during the pandemic shutdown.
When going gets tough, a writer writes.
Southers’ 19th-century repertoire includes Miss Julie, Clarissa, and John (1880s), Savior Samuel (1877), The Bluegrass Mile (1899), meaning the rest will take place during the time of slavery.
Southers takes the topics as they come to him. He recalled that he watched the acclaimed miniseries Roots as a young man, “but I have not seen Django [Unchained]. I have not seen 12 Years of Slave. I have not seen any of these antebellum type of movies. I subconsciously feel like I don’t want to be exposed to that. I don’t want that on my psyche.”
As a photojournalist, he recalled he was exposed to anti-apartheid protests against South Africa, but he was not a participant. Southers is a storyteller, and that’s how he faces history’s horrors and reasons for hope.
Whether talking about more than 50 Black captains in the lucrative and dangerous business of whaling, or the young painter in Art of Wise, an idea is just that, until he gets a hold of inspiration, a coin, a flower, a statue.
Whether talking about more than 50 Black captains in the lucrative and dangerous business of whaling, or a young enslaved girl who creates beautiful paintings, an idea is just that, until he gets a hold of inspiration — a coin, a statue, a picture of flowers.
“I have to illuminate it, and then make it more of a play,” said the head of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company. “Otherwise, it’s just a story.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company’s production of Art of Wise runs April 11 – May 4, 2025, at Madison Arts Center, 3401 Milwaukee Street, Upper Hill District. Tickets: https://www.pghplaywrights.org/season-info/art-of-wise/.
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