As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

[Wilson may never see the marquee or sit in the theater that carries his name. Last month, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he announced that he was dying of liver cancer, with three to five months to live. He disclosed it with the type of plainspoken grit one of his heroic characters might admire.] I've lived a blessed life, ... I'm ready.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.