#pittsburgh cycle

[hug-kiss-marry-kill]

What should we do with Raynell Maxson (Fences)?

Hug

Pat on the head

Adopt

Kill

Voting ended onApr 29, 2025

[blackinperiodfilms]

Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in.

August Wilson, Fences 

[tightwiires]

MA RAINEY White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.

CUTLER That's right. You get that understanding and you done got a grip on life to where you can hold your head up and go on to see what else life got to offer.

MA RAINEY The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain't alone. There's something else in the world. Something's been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something.

TOLEDO You fill it up with something the people can't be without, Ma. That's why they call you the Mother of the Blues. You fill up that emptiness in a way ain't nobody ever thought of doing before. And now they can't be without it.

MA RAINEY I ain't started the blues way of singing. The blues always been here.

CUTLER In the church sometimes you find that way of singing. They got blues in the church.

MA RAINEY They say I started it . . . but I didn't. I just helped it out. Filled up that empty space a little bit. That's all. But if they wanna call me the Mother of the Blues, that's all right with me. It don't hurt none.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, August Wilson

[theatreisgoodforthesoul]

“Jitney” by August Wilson

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 2016

Starring Harvy Blanks, Anthony Chisholm, Brandon J. Dirden, Andre Holland, Carra Patterson, Michael Potts, Keith Randolph Smith, Ray Anthony Thomas & John Douglas Thompson

[robinsonaden]

[bookingaroundthetwincities]

August in St. Paul Not many people get a high school diploma from the library, but Pulitzer-prize winning playwright August Wilson did. After a racist teacher accused Wilson of plagarism, he stopped going to class and educated himself at the Pittsburgh Carnegie library instead. The library awarded him an honorary high school diploma when he was 44. Wilson, who would have turned 68 this month, relocated to the Twin Cities in 1978. While living in St. Paul in the early eighties he began creating the Pittsburgh Cycle, ten plays providing decade-by-decade snapshots of twentieth century African-American life. Many of them, including the award-winning Fences and Piano Lesson, were written at coffee shops and bars along Selby Avenue. 

Photo above: Wilson is among the playwrights immortalized on the walls of the Guthrie Theater.