Before August was August
A (longer) conversation with Ron OJ Parson and Greta Oglesby.
[What follows is an extended version of the interview that appears in Court Theatre’s program for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.]
August Wilson was the kind of playwright whose very presence could silence a crowded room. Since his passing in 2005, he has left behind not only a formidable canon of plays but a vital oral history of stories and memories that surround him and his work. Continuing a conversation that Court Theatre began with The Piano Lesson, we sat down with Ron OJ Parson and Greta Oglesby to chat about August and his first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Ron and Greta reflected on how their own artistic careers have grown and intertwined with August’s, and in this conversation they talk about their experience with the language, the stories, and the man himself. ―Drew Dir and Anastasia Barron
DREW: What was your first experience with August Wilson?
GRETA: Well my first experience with August was in Minneapolis. I was doing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. I was playing Bertha, and Claude Purdy—God rest his soul, he just passed away—Claude was directing the show and there was so much buzz because it was the first show of their season and they were doing a whole season of August Wilson. This was about five or six years ago now.
DREW: Had they done August Wilson before?
GRETA: Oh yeah, because August kind of started there, you know, he lived in St. Paul and I think one of his first shows was on the Penumbra Stage, so he was a company member and all that.
RON: Isn’t that how [the director] Lloyd Richards got familiar with him, from this Minnesota connection?
GRETA: Absolutely. I frequent that restaurant all the time when I’m working at the Penumbra, the one that August would just sit in and write notes and stuff on napkins. It’s a little place called [Fabulous] Fern’s. Anyway, so I was doing the show and they were doing a whole season of August and the very first show of the season was Joe Turner, and there was such buzz about August coming and you know, you gotta get all of his words right. So we were just kinda trying to collect ourselves and, you know, I never look in the audience anyways because I never break the fourth wall, but we have other actors going, “oh, he’s sitting in the third row” and I was like “don’t nobody tell me where August is sitting, I don’t want to know!” So anyway we get through the first act and Claude Purdy bursts through the dressing room door and goes, “Oh my God, August Wilson said he’s gotta meet you after the show,” and I’m just like “get out, get out, don’t tell me nothing!”
RON: In the middle of the show!
GRETA: In the middle of the show. “August loves you, he said he’s just gotta…” you know. So anyway I met him after the show and we talked a little bit and you know, just how wonderful the show was and this and that and then as the show was going on that weekend, Lou Bellamy who was the artistic director of Penumbra, came to me and said August really loves your work and he said he’s writing something right now that he thinks you’d be perfect for it! So I was like, “Oh, OK” you know. I had heard he was writing Gem of the Ocean so I just thought, “Oh, OK, he’s probably got this little part..” Because nobody had read it yet because it was new, and I thought he probably has this little part in there, and maybe he’ll give me this little part, and I was like, you know, great! So anyway, months went by and I got a call from his New York agent, the casting agents that were casting the show, and they said, “August is doing Gem of the Ocean at the Goodman in Chicago and he wants you to be a part of the production. Are you available?” And I was like, “Well I’m not, but I will be when I call you back!” So they sent me the script in the mail and she said you’ll be playing Aunt Ester. I had no idea who Aunt Ester was, so I was like, oh ok sure, you know, and so I get this script and I’m flipping through it and I’m just like “Ohhkay!” and I was just floored by that and I was really humbled that he looked at me and thought this is the woman that will originate this role, and set the template for who this woman should be from now on. So anyway that was my first introduction to Mr. Wilson. Each show I do people always ask which is your favorite August Wilson show and sometimes it’s like, it’s the one you’re working on. My first one was Joe Turner and I just thought, ohh, I have died and gone to theater heaven, and then doing Gem of the Ocean, I just thought, oh, you know, this is so amazing I can’t imagine it getting better than this, so anyway I’ve had the pleasure of working on several. I did Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom after that and I’m just elated to be back doing this role again.
DREW: What were your impressions of August as just a guy?
GRETA: He was just a walking encyclopedia, and he was such the voice of history and wisdom, and just to be in the same room with him and just to hear him talk you wanted to write stuff down. It was like OK, hold it, let me get that down! Because, you know, he had such wonderful things to say just about life and art and theater and how it impacts our lives. He told me something after opening night of Gem of the Ocean, and if I never get another compliment about my craft, I don’t never have to have another one. He pulled me to the side and he said to me, “there are two women that say my words just like I hear ‘em in my ear, and you’re one of them.” And I just thought, I don’t ever have to get another compliment about my craft. So I’m like Ron, I could get choked up, you know, just talking about August and the piece that I’m working on, because these pieces that he wrote, they’re so, they’re true to life. I mean, they are the African-American experience in this country and they speak to it so truthfully, and I’m always honored when I can say his words, and I always want to say them just like he got them on the paper, because you don’t have to add anything to them, you don’t have to take anything away from them. I don’t want to talk too much, but that was my first experience with August Wilson.
RON: The more you talk the more choked up you get.
GRETA: Yeah, and I didn’t really know him until I got into the rehearsal process at the Goodman, but when we were all on that first day of rehearsal when, you know, you got everybody in the room and it’s so many people there and you’re at the meet-and-greet, and we had kind of met everybody and then all the powers-that-be leave the room and leave the cast to get ready to read the script, and so after they were all gone somebody kind of finally ushered August in and there were maybe, I don’t know, twenty five people maybe still in the room that were still around and when he entered the room and I swear it was just like God had, and it was just like a hush fell over the room and people were, like, standing up, they gave him such reverence. He was an extraordinary man. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
DREW: What are your memories of him, Ron?
RON: Well, to piggyback on that emotion, I would have to say what I felt being at his funeral was so emotional and, like what you said about the respect, about walking into the room, the way that they did the procession through the neighborhood, the Hill District, the caravan and I was in one of the cars and the people on the side of the street had signs and pictures and “we love you” and “we gonna miss you” and this and that all the way through the Hill District. It was just so moving. I don’t think I had ever been to a funeral of someone that wasn’t in my family, but this one I felt I needed to be there because he, you know, he was such a special person. I had that experience with The Piano Lesson with August when Congo Square started their company here, I directed their first production and it was The Piano Lesson, and August was a very big supporter of that company and he was sitting like two rows below me when we were watching. It was in a little 77 seat house, the Chicago Dramatists, and so being there watching his reactions and stuff, I was nervous, I’m not going to lie, but he, you know, he really enjoyed it, and he told Sakina his daughter that it was one of the two best he had seen and different things like that. Greta will probably tell you to that August didn’t mince words, he didn’t say anything like that if he didn’t mean it. I remember he told me he saw a production of Ma Rainey in Detroit, and he just felt like it wasn’t really a good production and he was being honest, not being mean but just saying, well, they didn’t really hit it. But my first experience with him is with this play Ma Rainey. As I said earlier on when we were at the table, I was friends with Rock Dutton, Charles S. Dutton, we were telemarketers at a place. He had told me that he wasn’t gonna be there long because this guy at Yale was writing this play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and he was gonna play [Levee] and it was gonna change his life. So I went to Yale and I visited David and all those guys and I met August there. So I had a few experiences like that, but this play was my first experience when it was in its initial incarnation, before August was August.
DREW: Do either of you remember what it was like when Ma Rainey hit Broadway?
RON: Yeah, I was there. Rock had got me a ticket to the opening and I went with him that night. It was a good experience. Theresa Merritt, who’s the one that played Ma, later on I got to meet her. I tell this story too about how a lot of people thought it was a musical. In fact Derek Sanders told me a story that August had told him that they wanted it to be a musical, and they were gonna not do it if he didn’t change, and he said “well, no, I’m not gonna change it, this is what it is, this is the play.” But people did expect a musical and it was interesting listening to the crowd. “Who’s this August Wilson?” “What’s this play?” “Where’s Ma? I want to see more about Ma, more Ma,” you know, “Where’s the singing and dancing,” you know, and it turned out to be a little bit different but then of course the rest is history, it’s led the way for the decade, the cycles of the African-American experience, which you really get a sense of from these plays. One of my favorites.
ANASTASIA: Do you have a sense of what set apart a good production from a bad production for August?
RON: The language, people not hearing the poetry, not saying the lines. A lot of productions I’ve seen, they improv the lines, they ad lib and they change the words and when you change the words, like I said in our rehearsal sometimes people want to correct the grammar and you gotta say no no no, this is what it is. I’ll give a perfect example, I was doing Jitney, and there’s a line, I can’t remember what character but he says, “I went into one of these house and stole a TV.” Now everybody wants to say, “I went into one of them houses,” but it ain’t houses, “I went into one of them house and stole a TV,” you know, so you gotta be conscious of those little things. I think August, about the one production of Ma Rainey in Detroit, they used musicians who had never acted, so they knew the music and they could play the music, but he felt they should be actors. If you can get an actor who can play, that’s great, but not a musician who’s not an actor, because these characters are deep, and there’s more than just the surface, and I think that productions that don’t deal with the subtext lack some of the spirit that’s inside them. And to be honest I haven’t seen too many bad productions of August but I have seen some, and you can tell. Like Raisin in the Sun, it’s a great play, Lorraine’s words are there, but sometimes productions really butcher ‘em.
GRETA: I agree, I just saw a Gem of the Ocean recently, in fact what you said about changing, wanting to correct the language, and the Aunt Ester corrected a lot of the language, I just thought oh man, you know, and the director didn’t care or didn’t stop it.
RON: And that’s key in all of them, but in Gem of the Ocean I think it’s really key. I did a production of that at Actor’s Theater of Louisville and it’s funny, Pat Bowie played Aunt Ester and, of course she was very conscious of that too, but a couple of times you had to catch yourself because your natural speech patterns and your education makes you want to correct those things. But if you delve into the character and that’s the way the character talks, that’s why I was talking about in rehearsal, the rhythm of the character sometimes gives you the way to say it and sometimes it’s in punctuation, a comma or a period or an ellipses can give you a rhythm of a character and there are some actors who are so good at the experience of being in and working on August. To be around him, to know that he is a stickler for that, and he had confidence in some of those actors. Steve Henderson used to tell me, because he used to make changes all along in the different cities and if he feels an actor is proficient enough to take that change and make it, he’ll give it to you the night before and say, I changed this monologue. And Steve used to say, he used to get mad at the man, he thinks I’m too good, I can’t, I got a whole monologue to learn, but it was just a really interesting experience with him around while you’re doing one of his plays, for sure.
DREW: I know Ron you’ve talked about doing August and then coming back to August later in your career and reading the plays differently. Can you or, you too Greta, since you’ve done this play before, talk about coming back to this play, and what’s different or what stays the same the second time.
RON: Interesting, interesting, that’s a good question.
GRETA: Well of course the words are exactly the same, I just think that any time you approach any play again you have to approach it with fresh eyes and you’ve gotta, you know, approach it with fresh ears, because there’s always room to grow, there’s always new stuff to learn, there’s always new discoveries, and that’s the beauty of live theater, you can never just say to yourself well this is an old hat, it’s like riding a bike or, you know, “I know the words, I know this,” and I never approach it that way, I always approach it, you know, really fresh, and it’s great to be working again with Ron of course, you know when you have a new director and you’ve got new actors to play off of, it’s always really kind of brand new.
RON: And I think different directors are gonna have different interpretations sometimes of different things, like I’m sure we’re gonna be doing some things that are not necessarily right or wrong, just different subtexts, different issues that we want to deal with, the relationships and things like that. And August was good about that, he was like, “well let me see what you’ve got, let me see what you can bring to it, you know I didn’t think about,” and I think most good writers are like that. They write it, but let me see what the director does, you know, and sometimes they may be totally off or whatever, but that’s theater, where some people are gonna have a different vision to add to it. I think, like the controversy about the Joe Turner that was just on Broadway because the director was gonna do something totally different with it and that was controversial. Some people liked it, some people didn’t, because of that. But that’s, you know, that’s theater. Every time you direct one you’re gonna find more the next time you do it, there’s just no way not to, especially if you have an open mind and you’re not just going into it saying, well we’re just gonna do this. Like I said in the beginning, some people might say, well stand here, sit here, say this here, say it like this, give you a line reading, say I want you to say it like this. Now I don’t give line readings but I try to feed something that’ll give the line the way that I feel will bring the text to fruition. But everybody has a different vision about August Wilson. There’s another play called East Texas Hot Links that I’ve directed four times and each time it was different because of the different people, and the different set, different costumes. That’s why, while we’re in rehearsal now, starting our set is different from the description of the one in the original because that was a proscenium, that was a little different and at Court we have a thrust, so we have to add more dimensions to it, try to bring it out a little and it’s very intimate so the audience is right there in front of it, and so that’s gonna be interesting when we move into the theater.
ANASTASIA: There aren’t any manifestly metaphysical or spiritual moments in the play, but I remember you talking a little bit Tuesday about how you felt there were some very spiritual aspects to it, so I was wondering what parts of the play you felt express that most?
GRETA: Well, you know, there’s nothing overt in this particular piece, but I just think that any time to me that you’re talking about the blues… To me the blues came out of spirituals and gospels and that’s kind of how to me the blues was born, so there’s so much spirituality in and around the blues, so I think this play just resonates with a lot of spirituality because the spirit of all of these people whose lives are intersecting and intertwining. Whether it’s actually said or not, I think people will always leave the theater having had a spiritual experience.
RON: What I mean with August too is the spirit in the room. The spirit that you come out of the theater with after seeing one of his plays. There’s just a connection, like I was saying, a connection to the ancestral spirit of the people that I feel causes what happens, like what Levee’s going through when he curses God, like what I’m trying to find what is going on with Ma Rainey’s exploitation and where her soul and her spirit is hurt by the fact of the situation of African Americans at the time and that’s what I’m trying to find. In that scene, we haven’t really gotten to it yet, but when she’s talking about, you know, they ain’t caring about us, and what that does to us as a people, what slavery and all the rest of that has done to a people. So the spirituality in this particular play, I think is just innately in the characters and in the people who portray the characters. That’s why I’m trying to get us to summon up our own spirituality and our own ancestral connections to bring forth in the spirit of the piece, so in that sense that’s what I mean by spirituality in this case.
ANASTASIA: What was August’s relationship to the blues?
RON: He was a lover of it, I mean he loved the blues, he loved jazz, he loved music. But again like what Greta was saying about his wealth of knowledge, he just knew a lot about it, and in fact when I first started getting into August because I listened to a lot of blues coming up. Ann Arbor, Michigan, the blues festival used to come there every year, but some of these songs that he uses made me want to go and find some of those, like Blind Gary Davis I would have never found if I wasn’t reading August’s plays. He’s a blues guy, like that song “If I had my way…,” those are old blues songs and all his songs are real songs and you can find them. So I just think that he loved music, he loved blues, and being from Pittsburgh which is such a great city of music, Crawford’s Grill and those places. There’s a place, she was saying a place where he wrote in Minnesota, there’s another one in Pittsburgh and when we were doing Radio Golf there they took us to a place, some of them are boarded up and stuff of course, but they took us to some places where he used to write and listen to music, so I just think he was connected to it and that spirit comes through in the plays too. His writing, the rhythms, that’s why as we rehearse I try to get the actors to find the rhythm and music of the piece, like in Joe Turner, Brian talks about the music of the people and things like that, so there’s music throughout all the plays as far as what you hear and what you’re feeling. The rhythms, going all the way back to Africa. Like in Gem of the Ocean, that city of bones man, that wells up a lot of spirit, it’s a different play, but you know, the whole African connection, the middle passage, it’s really deep.
DREW: Anything else you guys would like to say?
RON: Well I would just like to talk, and this ain’t about August but it’s about reconnecting with Greta. I worked with Greta at ETA when I had, what year was that? Dream of Ophelia, 1997? And I had only been here three or four years, I had a company called Onyx Theater Ensemble when I was still directing at ETA on the South Side, and I met Greta and everybody in that play actually that I met, I’m still close friends with, and I just thought that that was, well when this came about, first of all I didn’t know where Greta was at the time. I knew she was in Oregon for a while, then I figured Minnesota, but I thought maybe she’ll be back in Chicago, I don’t know, let me see what’s going on. But I knew that, and I had heard that she had done it, and I’d talked to Angela Bassett at a DePaul function and we talked briefly about how she did Ma Rainey too one time, and I think August has fed a lot of people, he’s filled a lot of plates, he’s filled a lot of plates and a lot of tables, but when this came about my first thought was, I hope I can get Greta to do it. And politically there were some things, the economy and the crisis, and there’s people in Chicago that could do it. But I wanted the connection that we had from that other play that we got to do, which was a very spiritual play as well, which was a little known play, I don’t think it’s been done again, but I just thought that I enjoyed that experience so much. You asked that question about the youth, when I did Ma Rainey and played Levee and directed it at the same time was in 1992, so it’s a long time ago, and I was two hats and so I didn’t have the same amount of time to delve into the subtext, and now I think directing it, just doing that, is a little different and you’re older. That’s a long time ago. I’m a lot older now and I think I’m more mature in my perspectives on life and I think that always helps when you’re doing August too, your age.
