Two-Timer

During the deliberations that led to August Wilson's being awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for drama last week, members of the Pulitzer board likened him to the playwright generally regarded as America's greatest: Eugene O'Neill. If that comparison seems overly generous -- Wilson has not yet produced a masterpiece to rank with Long Day's Journey into Night, nor does his body of work yet rival the four-decade outpouring that won O'Neill the Pulitzer four times and the Nobel Prize to boot -- the praise may merely be premature. In just over five years, since his first professionally produced play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, reached Broadway, Wilson has established himself as the richest theatrical voice to emerge in the U.S. since the post-World War II flowering of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Just as significant, he has transcended the categorization of "black" playwright to demonstrate that his stories, although consistently about black families and communities, speak to the entire U.S. culture.

The new Pulitzer, which makes Wilson one of only seven dramatists to win at least twice (the others, besides O'Neill: George S. Kaufman, Robert E. Sherwood, Thornton Wilder, Williams and Edward Albee), is for his play The Piano Lesson, which after extensive regional tryouts is opening on Broadway this week. Outwardly, it has much in common with Fences, which won Wilson the Pulitzer in 1987: it portrays a conflict among members of a black family over whether to hunker down under white racism or risk ambition and disappointment. But unlike Fences, a kitchen-sink drama firmly grounded in reality, Piano Lesson seems haunted by specters of the brutal past -- as haunted as the U.S. still is by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. Director Lloyd Richards and a splendid cast give the script the production it deserves. That was not, alas, the Broadway fate in 1988 of Wilson's gripping but mishandled and commercially disastrous Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

The curse of most dramatists is the inability, once they achieve a hit, to top or even match it. Wilson has proved he does not suffer under that burden. But in deference to stage superstition, the night before Piano Lesson started rehearsals at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987, he began drafting his next play, Two Trains Running. A candid, joyous evocation of black street life circa 1968, it is just finishing its debut run at Yale. The episodic structure and comedic tone differ radically from Piano Lesson and Fences. The main thing the newest play has in common with them is that it too is terrific.