August Wilson and Lloyd Richards: The Voice of Genius

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2017

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

Meet two giants of the American theater: playwright August Wilson and director Lloyd Richards. Together they brought many award-winning plays to Broadway, including "Fences," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," and "The Piano Lesson." August Wilson, who wrote ten plays (together known as the Century Cycle), started out as a poet. When he turned to writing plays, intent on telling the stories of African-Americans on stage, it was Lloyd Richards who recognized his talent and helped him shape it. Richards was already an icon in the theater world. He had begun his career a generation before, aspiring to be an actor at a time when there were almost no roles for African-Americans. His big break came when Sidney Poitier asked him to direct a new play called "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry. In this episode you'll hear Lloyd Richards tell the story behind that ground-breaking production. You'll also hear both August Wilson and Lloyd Richards describe how they came to meet and have one of the most successful artistic collaborations in history. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2017

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Ellis Winkler. Usually on this podcast we tell the story of one phenomenal person. But on this episode, we've got two.
0:17.0	Two men whose collaboration produced some of the best, most profound work in the American theater, August Wilson and Lloyd Richards.
0:27.0	Why the theater?
0:29.2	I guess the theater because I couldn't do anything else.
0:33.0	By that I don't mean I couldn't do anything else.
0:36.0	I mean I couldn't do anything else.
0:40.0	Writing a play is like walking down this landscape of the self and you have to be willing to
0:46.9	confront whatever you find there and your baggage that you carry with you, your weapons or the small imperial truths that you
0:54.6	have accumulated over your life that is all you have and hopefully you will emerge
0:59.2	from the landscape with a greater truth a more illuminating truth.
1:03.0	August Wilson wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning play Fences, it's now a movie as well.
1:08.0	He also wrote nine other plays about the lives of African Americans across the last century.
1:15.1	Almost all of them made it to Broadway and almost all were directed by Lloyd Richards.
1:21.0	Lloyd Richards was already a luminary of the theater when he met August Wilson.
1:26.0	He had brought a raisin in the sun to the stage after all.
1:30.0	Now it may be a little cliche to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,
1:35.0	but the phrase does perfectly capture what emerged when August Wilson and Lloyd Richards combined artistic forces in 1983.
1:45.0	You'll hear about the lives and work of both men on this episode of what it takes,
1:51.0	a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the bountiful audio
1:56.6	archive of the Academy of Achievement.
1:59.1	Academy. Academy, this child is gifted and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.
2:07.8	If you have the opportunity not a perfect opportunity and you don't take it you may never have another job.
	...

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