Posted 6:38 AM by Gene

HOW TO WRITE OBITUARIES: There were surely a lot of puzzled looks in America's luxury news suites when August Wilson died. August who? A playwright. Who? Well, he was AFRICAN-AMERICAN. Ohhhh. And he won a P-ULITZER. NOW the incandescent bulb shone over the ignoramuses. That's SURELY a MARK of EXCELLENCE. But August WHO? At least in this instance they weren't alone. Who was August Wilson? All I know is he wrote very long plays about what was once called the black experience. That the news will engender floating question marks over people's heads is a measure of how the theater has become a hermetically sealed land of navel-gazing. Even twenty-odd years ago we knew who Tennessee Williams was when he died. Never again will playwrights capture the public imagination, because today they work in the intellectual equivalent of a clothes closet, sharing their imaginations only with the few who can be bothered to rummage through them.