Harvest Season / August Wilson

Happy Friday!

On Wednesday SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP reached a deal, bringing a very long six months to a close. I hope it also brings some stability back to the business, at least for 2024. Please, for the love of God, give us one year.

It took a little time after the WGA strike ended but things are ramping up. Here’s a quick update on some exciting developments over the past couple of weeks:

ROAR — my team sent my feature spec to a couple of producers once the strike ended and we got a speedy and enthusiastic response from a place that would be a dream to work with. They’re a perfect match. Hope to tel you more soon.

HALF-LIGHT — I also had a zoom meeting with the team to discuss next steps for my new spec pilot and spent the past week distilling my pitch down to a short concept doc to share with them. This one already has a producer and director attached.

THE KICKOUT — A couple of weeks ago I had a phone meeting with an agent on the publishing side in New York to talk about the novel. She had a lot of positive things to say and a handful of notes and ideas for me to think about, all great stuff. I have also been collecting feedback from a small group of Beta readers to consider for this next draft. It’s been over a month since I opened the file and I’ll finally be able to get back to it this weekend. I can’t wait. It’s gonna be like hanging out with old friends.

(On the same week those three previous meetings happened The Ronin Theater Company in Phoenix opened my play, DRACULA IN TOMBSTONE, which ran for two weekends. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it down to see it but I was thrilled to know it was happening.)

It felt appropriate that all of this is happening during the harvest season.

A couple of years ago we had a great crop of oranges at the old house in Glendale. I spent time picking and washing them before I put them on the picnic table to divide up. When I saw them all there, nearly a hundred total, it was so satisfying.

This past weekend I had to stop and remind myself to be grateful that all of this new material is out there circulating, and to appreciate that this crop exists at all.

Taken as a whole they’re a snapshot of what has been going on in my brain for the past couple of years, a record of my interests and obsessions. I can remember exactly where I was or who I was with when two pieces of a certain puzzle clicked together. I can see where a certain work of art or artist influenced me and sent me spinning in a whole new direction. I remember conversations that sparked specific changes. It’s all hidden there, in the various texts, like a secret language that friends and family will understand pieces of but only I know completely.

This is one of the reasons I love reading biographies about artists. The really good ones shine a light on that secret language, as much as they can. For the past few weeks I’ve been reading August Wilson: A Life, by Patti Hartigan. August Wilson is one of my favorite playwrights. When I was in high school my dad came home with a box of damaged books that someone had given him. The cover of every book had a small sliver chopped off so that an eight of an inch of the pages underneath were exposed. To this day I have no idea where he got them, but in the mix there were a handful of Wilson’s plays that had been produced by that point.

When I moved to New York in 1997 I used to walk by the New Dramatists building on West 44th street and wonder which window used to be his room. I pictured him up there, smoking, tapping away on a typewriter. At some point I read about his grand artistic ambition, to write a cycle of ten plays that chronicled the history of African Americans in every decade of the 20th century. I was in awe of that goal and used to dream about doing something similar. The fact that he saw it through is still astonishing.

In 2001, I saw KING HEDLEY II, my first August Wilson play on Broadway. It starred Brian Stokes Mitchell and Viola Davis. I wish I remembered more of it but that night is a blur. The one thing I do remember is how I felt at intermission. The last line before the Act One curtain was like a bomb going off.

The lead character, King Hedley, planted a small garden in the backyard of his house in the Hill District in Pittsburgh. It becomes a symbol of hope for King, who is trying to put his life back together after a stint in prison for murder. He comes home at one point to find that someone has trampled his garden. It pushes him to the breaking point. He explodes, saying, “They done had World War I and World War II… the next motherfucker that messes with me it’s gonna be World War III!” Blackout.

It was bone chilling and absolutely thrilling. I have goose bumps thinking about it.

There were a couple of excerpts from the book that I wanted to share with you. The first one is about the moment he started to find his voice. From his late teens to early twenties he was a poet. Eventually he started producing nights of poetry and then plays with a black theater company he founded in Pittsburgh. He fell into writing plays almost out of necessity. When he finally did start writing plays he found inspiration in the Hill District, in the place he grew up and the people that he knew.

“But Wilson’s heartache also sparked a burst of creativity. He was beginning to absorb the advice that friends like Purdy and Rob Penny had been giving him: drop the pretense and unleash your authentic voice. Don’t try to be Dylan Thomas: be August Wilson. He started thinking, hard, about the banter he heard in Pat’s Place and at the jitney station, about men sitting around signifying and telling lies. He later had a realization about the florid verse he wrote as a young poet. “I didn’t value and respect the speech pattern,” he said. “I thought that in order to make art out of it you had to change it. I was always trying to mold it into some European sensibility of what the language should be.”

That changed for him one day in 1973 when he sat down and wrote what he called his “Morning Statement.”

It is the middle of winter

November 21 to be exact

I got up, buckled my shoes,

I caught a bus and went riding into town.

I just thought I’d tell you.

It’s simple, to the point, nothing extraneous. He put aside the grandiose language, the Biblical references, the genuflections to Greek. He found his voice. “The poem didn’t pretend to be anything else,” Wilson told interviewers. “It wasn’t struggling to say eternal things. It was just claiming the ground as its own thing. For me, it was so liberating.”

What I love about it is that all of those years of writing florid poetry clearly weren’t wasted time. He took all of that knowledge and discipline then he peeled away the excess and tuned his antennae to the poetry that was all around him,

There’s a story later in the book where he comes back to the O’Neill Playwrights Conference to develop SEVEN GUITARS. At this point he’s a star in the theater community. He’s won the Pulitzer… twice. But he still comes back to workshop his new play and enjoy the camaraderie of other playwrights. At one point he asks a young playwright named Lucy Thurber where she comes from, who her people are. She tells him, “I come from poor white trash.” Here’s what Wilson told her:

“You should never use the narrative that is being given to you,” he said. “That is a false narrative about who you are and the people you grew up with. Don’t let their language define who these people are,” he told her. He then asked her for more details. She told him that her people could drink three cases of beer and still stand up. They could run from the cops and not get caught. “Start there,” he said. “You give them their own language and allow them their own mythology. Do not let them be owned or defined by the greater narrative that is being forced on them.”

God, I love that.

“Start there. Give them their own language and allow them their own mythology. Don’t let them be owned or defined by the greater narrative that is being forced on them.”

When I look at the three original pieces of material I finished this year — ROAR, HALF-LIGHT, THE KICKOUT — all of them have ties to the people and place I come from. I haven’t been able to reverse engineer why I feel compelled to do that at this point in my life. I do know that when I’m able to tap into it fully my job gets a lot easier. And it’s probably not an accident that these three pieces are resonating with other people and picking up speed.

The last thing I’ll leave you with is a quote from the artist Romare Bearden, whose paintings inspired a number of August Wilson’s plays:

“You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.”

If you are a fan of August Wilson I can’t recommend this book enough!

Wait, I lied — here’s one more thing I just remembered from this past week:

While I was working on my pitch for HALF-LIGHT it occurred to me that I should dig up the pitch I took out last year with a studio. The content is totally different, of course, but the structure and the way I phrased or teed up certain ideas was refined over multiple rounds of notes with really smart, plugged-in people. My execs were thinking strategically about what type of information the buyers would be looking for and steered me in that direction. I was able to reverse engineer some of the mechanics into the new pitch and hopefully saved myself some trouble later.

Sometimes I think I have to start all over from scratch, or I simply fall back to doing things how I normally do them. Sometimes I internalize the lessons I learn from collaborators and just fold it into my process. But sometimes it pays to think over old feedback and see what you can take advantage of here in the present.