Harvy Blanks is asked why it’s important for all Americans that August Wilson was able to complete his 10-play look at the black experience in the 20th century before his death last year at age 60. It’s a question so obvious as to be rhetorical, but Blanks leans forward, grabs his questioner’s hands and thanks him for asking it.
“That’s because you used the term ‘Americans.’ You didn’t say ‘black Americans,’ and coming from a white person, I embrace that, because that’s what we are,” said Blanks, a 20-year veteran of the Denver Center Theatre Company, which Thursday opens the ninth chapter in Wilson’s historic decalogue, “Gem of the Ocean.”
“Regardless of what we’ve gone through and the different experiences we have had, we are all Americans, and you cannot talk about the white experience in this country without talking about the black experience in this country, and vice versa. We all share this common bond, and he did not write separately of that experience, he connected it.”
Wilson’s canon, written over 25 years and spanning “Gem of the Ocean,” set in the 1900s, to “Radio Golf” in the 1990s, covers the economic and human aftermath of slavery to this day. He brought the most downtrodden of Americans to the stage, from former slaves relocating to Pittsburgh in 1904 to a generation of teens who kill one another for shoes and drug money. The series brings to light the ongoing black struggle since they were freed, as Wilson believed, “only as a matter of political expediency.”
Wilson’s death was tempered for some by the completion of his cycle with “Radio Golf,” in which he for the first time took aim at the black middle class for adopting homogenous, materialistic values. Not Blanks. “He was so young and he had so much more to do,” he said.
The decalogue brought characters and stories to the stage in a way no one else would have or could have. But Wilson’s cycle is not a full chronicle of the black experience. It is a sliver – the largest plank of a sliver since biblical times, but a sliver nonetheless.
“It’s great that the forces in the universe allowed him to stay around to finish that, but this guy had about 15 or 20 more of those in him,” Blanks said.
Long before Blanks actually met Wilson 10 years ago, they knew one another. Wilson’s work largely had informed Blanks’ acting career. And the man they call the giant, the king, the Black Shakespeare? “He knew my people,” said Blanks. Through plays such as the Pulitzer winners “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” he said, “a lot of his characters are my people who I grew up with.”
For “Gem of the Ocean,” Blanks is adopting his granddaddy’s Mississippi accent. When he played the blaspheming Stool Pigeon in “King Hedley II,” he drew upon an uncle who had a love-hate relationship with God. “In essence,” he said, “all of these people, I know.”
The character he knew best was Boy Willie from “The Piano Lesson,” who wants to sell the family piano to buy a piece of land. But his sister believes it must be preserved for what it represents. In slave days, it had been sold for their great-grandfather’s wife and daughter.
“I know how important that is because my relatives were working on company farms and my grandma, who is 97 now, shared with me the harrowing story of them having to leave in the dead of night with 11 children to get away.”
Blanks reminds that this tale is set in 1940 – slavery in the era after slavery.
“The more you caught up on your bills, the further you got behind,” Blanks said. “If you owed $13 at the end of the month, somehow it becomes $26 the next.”
A sheriff heard Blanks’ grandfather was planning to leave and threatened him. So his grandpa put all 11 kids and some furniture on a flatbed truck and drove all the way across Alabama to get away.
“Once it was safe, they pulled over and my grandmama counted heads, Blanks said. “But there was one baby missing, and she got frantic.”
The story has a happy ending. Blanks’ auntie Viv had slipped down through the furniture and was lodged between two pillows.
“The reason I brought that up is because for the sister (in ‘The Piano Lesson’), it is more important for this piano to be in this house as a reminder of what all of the people, not just her people, had to go through. But to my character, it was more important for us as a people to have some land. And that became very important for my granddaddy. He became heavy into real estate in Chicago because he always wanted to have a place to come home to, and to raise his kids.”
Blanks has performed in all but one available Wilson play – the musical “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” In “Gem of the Ocean,” written ninth but chronologically the first, he plays Eli, an underground-railroad warrior who cares for a 285-year-old aunt who represents the entire black experience since the first slave arrived chained in a ship’s hull.
He now stands on the precipice of history. When the DCTC is allowed to stage “Radio Golf,” Israel Hicks will become the first director in the world to helm the entire cycle.
Blanks’ most meaningful role remains the 1910-era “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” in which he played Herald Loomis, a former slave traveling the countryside looking for his wife.
“To me, it was a microcosm for what slavery did to the black family because of the separation that took place,” he said. “They could split you up at any time. They could take your mother or father or your kids.
“August has created a metaphor for what blacks in this country are still trying to do, and that’s trying to find family. For us, that is a difficult journey to take, and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult with modernity because there are so many distractions.”
In his final interview with American Theatre magazine, Wilson expressed hope that with the completion of his cycle, blacks might now move forward into the next century united, ditching the yoke of disenfranchisement without surrendering their cultural identity.
But no one expected to move into the next decade without him.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Gem of the Ocean”
DRAMA|Denver Center Theatre Company|Written by August Wilson|Directed by Israel Hicks|Starring Marlene Warfield, Terrence Riggins, Kim Staunton, Charles Weldon, Michael Eaddy, Harvy Blanks and Jamie Horton|At the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets|THROUGH FEB. 25 |6:30 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 1:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday|$29-$45|303-893- 4100, denvercenter.org, King Soopers stores or Tickets- West, 866-464-2626
August Wilson decalogue
The plays of August Wilson, and the parts played by Harvy Blanks at the Denver Center and around the country:
Notes: All set in Pittsburgh, except “Ma Rainey” (Chicago)
*-winners of the Pulitzer Prize.
