Like Ibsen and Shaw before him, August Wilson (1945–2005) promised theatergoers an instructive portion of sociological lament, but in Wilson’s case the implied additional value was first-person verisimilitude, reportage, personally witnessed truths coaxed out of little-explored corners and held up for examination. Wilson was black, and black American artists carry the expectation, or burden, of presumed authenticity. He did not disappoint. In his monumental ten-play cycle chronicling one episode of working-class black American life for each decade of the twentieth century, Wilson built from the ground up: his characters are his plays. Far from being teased and coaxed to produce in the bourgeois white theater-loving audience a reassuring takeaway about its own paramount responsibility for the plight of blacks, Wilson’s strivers and schemers create a sense that we’re eavesdropping on real people, on not-atypical days, in settings where they are most reliably themselves. And what they have to say is revealing, confounding, saddening, at times infuriating. To put it bluntly, many or even most of Wilson’s characters, particularly the men, are lowlifes, scam artists, adulterers, liars, and moochers, if not outright criminals. Only a black playwright could receive critical dispensation to write so frankly about black life. Indeed, a white playwright who was as free as Wilson with the word “nigger,” or even referred to black people consuming fried chicken and watermelon as often as Wilson does, could scarcely hope to be produced on the New York stage.

This winter brought concurrent productions of two of Wilson’s