There’s only one place Constanza Romero could begin any narrative about August Wilson, the famed Pittsburgh playwright and her late husband.
“Any story about August Wilson has to start in a coffee shop,” Romero said. “He loved coffee. He started writing in coffee shops. If you were to ever do an interview with him, it would be in a coffee shop and he’d be slugging down cups of coffee.”
She put three years of work into crafting a story for the presentation of “August Wilson: The Writer’s Landscape,” the first permanent exhibit dedicated to Wilson’s life and work that after multiple delays will finally be opening this weekend at Downtown’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center. There will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday, and the exhibit will officially open to the public on Saturday.
“The Writer’s Landscape” features re-creations of Wilson’s office along with some of his personal effects and an era-appropriate Hill District coffee shop. It also includes tributes to the cultural influences on his plays, props and costumes from various Broadway productions and the chance for visitors to immerse themselves in his 10-play American Century Cycle.
“August Wilson’s work is universal,” said Janis Burley Wilson, the August Wilson Center’s president and CEO. “The themes that he explores in his plays are love, betrayal, trust, hopes, dreams. That’s really applicable to everyone. He’s an African American playwright who wrote about the African American experience, but it’s really the human experience.
“So everyone will be able to relate to the themes and ideas explored in his work. I encourage people to come with their families and learn more about this American treasure.”
When Wilson — no relation to August — joined the August Wilson Center in September 2017, she quickly realized there was nothing in its walls that “spoke to August Wilson the man” or his legacy. She made it a goal in her first five years at the center to create a space devoted to celebrating Wilson’s personal and professional achievements, which she has now achieved right under the wire.
Having an exhibit at the August Wilson Center honoring the man whose name is on the building felt like “the right thing to do,” Wilson said.
Originally, the plan was to put “The Writer’s Landscape” in the center’s former gift shop space, Wilson said. The final exhibit ended up quadrupling in size from its initial conception and now takes up approximately 3,600 square feet of space that includes the center’s BNY Mellon Gallery, according to Wilson.
This exhibit has now been delayed three times, once because of that decision to increase its scale and twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wilson said. The center fully reopened in September of last year, and Wilson said part of what took so long to get “The Writer’s Landscape” ready for public consumption was installing more COVID-friendly elements that didn’t require any physical operation.
“We took that time to really dig in and focus on how to create this interactive experience in a way that will be safe for people without a lot of touching,” she said.
Romero has been heavily involved with “The Writer’s Landscape” from its earliest days. She had heard about folks coming into the August Wilson Center not knowing who its namesake was and decided that was unacceptable. Her original idea was just to donate Wilson’s old writing desk as a way of showing the center’s patrons “that August Wilson was a real person.”
The exhibit’s ambitions grew under Wilson, and Romero was tasked with writing the story that would be woven throughout “The Writer’s Landscape” and tie it all together. She ended up focusing mostly on Wilson’s early days writing in Hill District coffee shops, the inspiration he drew from “the four Bs” — blues music, artist Romare Bearden, the Black power movement and writer Jorge Luis Borges — and the 10 plays he wrote that were mostly set in Pittsburgh.
“They did an amazing job of understanding the concepts of what I wanted to do and make them come to life even better than I had envisioned myself,” Romero said. “For me, it has been absolutely a pleasure to share the information I have shared with all the artists involved. ... It’s a culmination of a lot of things, but it’s mostly an homage to my husband, who I consider to be the best playwright of the 20th century.”
High-profile movie adaptations of Wilson’s plays “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” have kept his name in the spotlight over the past few years. Both films won at least one Academy Award and were produced by Denzel Washington, who also directed and starred in “Fences.” Washington recently shouted out Wilson at the 2022 Oscars, which of course had Romero “just jumping with joy!”
Romero designed “The Writer’s Landscape” to “embrace the past to illuminate the future,” just as she believes Wilson’s plays did. She hopes that comes across to everyone who checks out “The Writer’s Landscape.”
“I just want to thank [the August Wilson Center] from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to shape this exhibit,” Romero said. “This is here to stay. I sincerely hope that this exhibit will outlive all of us ... and will be a way to educate everyone about an artist as important as August for many generations to come.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: April 12, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: April 12, 2022, 11:40 a.m.