By Maya Phillips Published Dec. 3, 2020 Updated Dec. 17, 2020
[D]uring his life, Wilson had transformed the American stage, which until he arrived had been largely imagined as the nearly exclusive realm of white male writers such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, all of whom explored the limitations and failures of the American dream. But where their domestic dramas concern themselves with a strictly class-based, Gatsby-influenced version of bootstrapism, Wilson’s plays offer a more complex vision of that same dream: one that reflects the challenges of social mobility and its unique racial limitations. Wilson recognizes that the American dream is not, and could never be, the dream of Black Americans, each generation of whom lives with the injuries this country has dealt them. In that way, he introduced a frank, original view of the nation onto the stage — one that was also percolating in literature, visual arts and activism at the end of the last century — via a mythology that began in the early 1900s, with slavery fresh in the minds of his characters, and ended in the 1990s, when Black neighborhoods were trying to redefine themselves under the threat of gentrification. Read HERE.