American Playwrights

August Wilson, our pre-eminent African American playwright, fulfilled his extraordinary ambition of writing a full-length play documenting representative black experience for each decade of the 20th century. The Piano Lesson portrays the 1930s through a family heirloom now in the north that nevertheless recalls a racist southern history.

Horton Foote, the chronicler par excellence of small-town life in Texas since the early years of the 20th century, pays tribute in The Trip to Bountiful to the determination of an elderly woman tyrannized by her daughter-in-law to return to her native roots before she dies.

This presentation is part of Murray Biggs’ American Playwrights lecture series.