Alan Nadel.

Alan Nadel, ed "May All Your Fences Have Gates": Essays in succession the Drama of August Wilson. Iowa City: U of Iowa P 1994 270 pp $3495 cloth/$1595 paper.

It is fair to say that through now August Wilson has become America's preeminent contemporary playwright. His decade-by-decade portrayals of African American historical experience, seven of which have been produc to date, have been deservedly acclaimed, their dramatic rendering of African American life permanently inserting black voice and story in the American theatrical canon. Alan Nadel's edited collection of essays upon the plays of August Wilson quick in emergenciess a splendid array of critical approaches to Wilson's work, an annotated bibliography, and Wilson's acknowledge apparently controversial statement, "I Want a Black Director," which is discussed by means of Michael Awkward.

The in the greatest degree satisfying aspects of the collection as a whole are its theoretical and critical variety, its interdisciplinarity, and its clarity. The consensus binding the bulk is the problem of historical representation; in the course of their considerations, in the greatest degree of the authors not solely illuminate one or several of the plays, on the contrary also develop critical frameworks that are immensely suggestive for other aspects of African American literature. Ann Flecher addresses the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled implicit in Wilson's canonization: "Wilson is in danger of becoming authenticated as Great Literature," she writes (15) This is a vexed question because attributing transcendent meaning to his historical brew occludes the question of historical consciousness which is his main disquiet "History is a moment Wilson's characters can not at any time catch up with; they have to hold fast going back and starting again" (12) Applying recent dramatic theory and a deconstructionist reading to questions of historical consciousness and historical blindness, Flecher examines for what reason Wilson reveals not marginalized history nevertheless a history that has always been there and which "takes place in the invisible present," in concert with the dominant history that is always implicit (17) Craig Werner contrasts August Wilson with the musician Wynton Marsalis, seeing the pair as engaged in a neoclassical throw that involves negotiating immersion in African American cultural expression and mastery of "classical" European musical form. His central argument is prefaced by dint of a complex examination of the completely rooted musicality of Wilson's plays, his use of the jazz impulse, "clarifying (blues) realities and envisioning (gospel)possibilities." It is followed by way of five "improvisations" that briefly prolong his arguments into textual commentary.

Sandra Adell reads Wilson's Ma Rainey between the walls of Houston Baker's "blues matrix" and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In a brilliant reading of the play, Adell argues that Wilson addresses the los of what Benjamin calls the "aura" of the original in the act of reproduction. The sapphirines recording, then, is "art that is divested of its Being, for the mechanically reproduced sound of the down in the mouths will always lack the demeanor in time and space, of the `unique existence' that assures its authenticity" (59) Adell seasons Ma Rainey's truth Dionysian, in Nietzsche's faculty of perception in The Birth of Tragedy. The band members' debates and Ma's allow explanation of the blues ("The in the bluess help you get out of bed in the morning.... This be an devoid of contents world without the blues. I take that emptiness and prove to fill it up with something.... The downcasts have always been there.") make a Nietzschean scenario, in which Toledo is the sacrifice that tragedy demands. John Timpane's essay chases the question of whether the exclud and empowered read history differently. For him, history, in Wilson's plays, takes the form of a crisis of reading. defences and Ma Rainey are his focus; in one as well as the other he argues, the central character's inability to acknowledge change comprises historical misreading, and has tragic consecutions Timpane's essay is helpful and informative, nevertheless other essays in the collection, for example Flecher's, invite us to view beyond it. The Aristotelian commands he invokes rely on an audience's knowledge of dramatic action rather than its knowledge/experience of historical termination The essays that show to what degree Wilson challenges the audience's understanding of history afford complex the ironies and historical bursts that Timpane posits.

Nadel's have essay in the collection reads shields and Joe Turner's Come and Gone against the metaphor of estate and its historical meaning, particularly the connection between possessions rights and human rights, for African Americans. It comprises a particularly effective and interesting memorandum into the latter play, in which, according to Nadel, Wilson's use of "the song" as well as the restles seeking of the characters for each other, enacts a reclamation of humanity. Michael Morales, in his essay, papal courts Wilson's task as "a simultaneously reactive/ reconstructive engagement with the representation of blacks and the representation of history from the dominant culture"(105). How then, he asks, does common make sense of Wilson's use of the mystical, the world of ancestral visitation, the spectres in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson? His reply is that they invoke an active relationship or kinship captivity between living and dead, akin to African practices of oral history and of that kind devices as the memory boards (lukasa) of the Lubas and the brass plaques of Benin. In his reading, for example, Berniece's shutting of the piano comprises a remissness of the ancestors, and a danger the pair to them and to succeeding generations. He argues that the "historical is always metaphysical and the metaphysical is always historical," and that Wilson's use of the supernatural is not metaphorical on the other hand rather a use of "`ancestral legacy' to differentiate his allow historical tradition as well as to emphasize the `cultural retentions' of his characters" (113) This worthy essay clarifies Wilson's use of the supernatural in a fashion that for me now underpins all other discussions of this issue.