Commemorating August Wilson and ‘Black Broadway’

Is Black History Month too celebratory an occasion to hear complaints about the few black actors in major roles on Broadway right now?

Is this too commemorative a time to notice the scarcity of black people, compared with other seasons, this side of “The Lion King” and “Aladdin”? Should we ignore the reality that, when “You Can’t Take It With You,” nontraditionally cast with James Earl Jones, closes next week, the industry nicknamed the “Great White Way” so far this season has no major black casting?

Ah, well. Although the country is roiling in race relations again and the Oscars are being bashed for denying acting and directing nominations for “Selma,” we do have two important, even festive projects - a magnificent PBS documentary on the late playwright August Wilson and a handsome book about African-Americans on Broadway - timed to honor the theme that falls in our shortest month.

But first, a clarification on that “Great White way” cliche. As we are reminded in Stewart F. Lane’s informative, beautifully illustrated new book, “Black Broadway: African Americans on the Great White Way,” (Square One Publishers, 288 pages, $39.95), Broadway is not saddled with that name because, as late as the 1930s, black people were only allowed to sit in Broadway balconies, when permitted to enter at all.

In fact, the description has stuck since the 1890s, when a strip of Broadway was one of the first streets to be fully lit with electric lights. Still, it is hard not to hear a little irony each time Lane, a Broadway producer and theater co-owner, uses it in his coffee-table-size contribution to theater history.

With a moody, provocative photo of tap innovator Savion Glover on the cover, the book does not shy away from the painful parts of the daunting subject matter. Of intent and necessity, however, this is a generalist overview that begins with the African Grove Theatre, founded in 1821 as New York’s first black theater.

In eight well-focused, readable chapters, Lane takes us through the highlights of social, political and artistic changes. He spans from minstrel shows and vaudeville to the Harlem Renaissance, from the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in the Depression to octogenarian Cicely Tyson’s Tony-winning performance in the all-black 2013 revival of “The Trip to Bountiful,” from W.E.B. DuBois’ ’30s call for “drama by us, for us, near us and about us” to Wilson’s great 10-play chronicle of African-Americans in the 20th century.

As for “for us, near us and about us,” we have “August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand,” which, as Friday’s PBS documentary on the playwright so convincingly proves, the “us” includes more than DuBois probably envisioned. This is, astonishingly, described as the first documentary ever made about the groundbreaking artist, who, among other achievements, won two Tonys, two Pulitzer Prizes and a record seven New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards.

Part of the American Masters series, Sam Pollard’s 90-minute film is an invaluable look at the life, the work and the legacy of the playwright, who died of liver cancer at 60 in 2005, just after completing the last play, “Radio Golf,” in his monumental decade-by-decade epic.

The program is loosely timed to what would have been his 70th birthday on April 27, the 10th anniversary of his death on Oct. 2 and, of course, Black History Month. Pollard, whose work includes the harrowing New Orleans documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” had access to rare archives and never-before-seen video.

He interviewed many of the actors - including Viola Davis, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Charles Dutton, Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson, James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Stephen McKinley Henderson - who created decades of people we came to believe we knew, the unforgettable men and women of the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson was born and raised.

Some of the history is familiar to audiences who came to view the cycle as chapters in a book we dreaded ever having to finish. No matter how much, or how little one knows about one of this country’s most remarkable playwrights, however, the film will feel new.

We are taken to see the two-room apartment with outdoor plumbing in the poorest house in the neighborhood. It was there that Wilson, son of a white absentee father and a black mother, grew up. One sister recalls one horrible biographical detail, that, every day in school, the young boy found a note on his desk that said ” go home.”

In one of several riveting tapes of Wilson interviews, he explains how a high school history teacher accused him of plagiarism because his paper on Napoleon was so good. He walked out and never came back, instead hiding out during school hours in the library. “For five years,” he said, “I plotted my own education.”

We get to see the bars, the diners, the backyards where Wilson put characters based on people he watched telling stories as he grew up. We go to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, the playwrights conference where director Lloyd Richards brought him after reading “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

The documentary does not mention that Broadway producers have resisted backing “Jitney,” the only Wilson play never to have been seen on Broadway. Nor does anyone say that, despite having a Broadway theater named after him, Wilson hasn’t had a revival on Broadway since Denzel Washington was in “Fences” five years ago.

And nobody talks about the failure of the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, the $42 million building in Pittsburgh that was turned over to a conservator in 2013 to avoid liquidation. Last November, after being sold “unceremoniously at a sheriff’s sale” according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the center was tentatively saved by a consortium of major foundations.

Toward the end of Lane’s black history book, he optimistically declares that “Broadway, which for many years had promulgated African-American stereotypes, had actually moved ahead of American culture.”

I don’t doubt what he says is true, but you can’t prove major progress by this season.