Playwright August Wilson has cancer
SEATTLE – Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson has been diagnosed with liver cancer and told a newspaper in his native Pittsburgh that he is dying.
“It’s not like poker, you can’t throw your hand in,” Wilson told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an article published Friday. “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”
Wilson, 60, the leading black playwright of his generation, was diagnosed with the ailment June 30, his wife Constant Romero said Thursday.
“He’s taking it very well, with a lot of strength and determination,” Romero told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “It’s so hard when an illness falls on you. He has so many plans for working.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Wilson’s personal assistant, Deanna Levitin, said the “prognosis is serious, but Wilson is dealing with the matter head-on. Those close to Wilson remain optimistic regarding his situation,” the Seattle Times reported.
Further details about Wilson’s condition and treatment were not disclosed, but Levitin said by telephone that until very recently, Wilson was working on rewrites of his play “Radio Golf,” now running at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
“Radio Golf” is the final part of Wilson’s epic 10-play cycle exploring aspects of black American life through each decade of the 20th century, many through the prism of his childhood and young adult years in Pittsburgh.
Two plays in the cycle, “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” earned Pulitzers, and others have been nominated for Tony Awards and presented on Broadway and in professional theaters across the country. All but “Gem of the Ocean,” which played on Broadway this year, and “Radio Golf” have been produced at the Seattle Repertory Theater.
“One of the things I’m proudest of in my career is producing so much of August’s work here,” Seattle Rep managing director Benjamin Moore said. “I’m going to believe that since August is such a feisty guy, he’ll meet this health challenge like he’s met the challenge of writing an extraordinary cultural history.”
Wilson has lived in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood since 1990. He and Romero, a costume designer he married in 1994, have a daughter, Azula. Wilson also has a daughter from an earlier marriage.
Born to a baker, Frederick August Kittel, and Daisy Wilson Kittel, a house cleaner, Wilson was stung by discrimination at a mostly white high school, dropped out and taught himself. Taking odd jobs and writing in his spare time, he went from poetry into drama without formal training and helped found Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh.
Wilson found greater success after moving in 1978 to St. Paul, Minn., where he wrote “Jitney,” a look at black urban America of the 1970s through the eyes of drivers of unlicensed cabs.
He moved to Seattle after his first marriage ended.