Playwright August Wilson Dies of Cancer By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- Playwright August Wilson, whose epic 10-play cycle chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America included such landmark dramas as ''Fences'' and ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' died Sunday of liver cancer, a family spokeswoman said. He was 60. Wilson died at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson's personal assistant. The playwright had disclosed in late August that his illness was inoperable and he had only a few months to live. ''We've lost a great writer, I think the greatest writer that our generation has seen and I've lost a dear, dear friend and collaborator,'' said Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway production of ''Gem of the Ocean'' as well as Wilson's most recent play, ''Radio Golf,'' which just concluded a run in Los Angeles. Leon said Wilson's work, ''encompasses all the strength and power that theater has to offer.'' ''I feel an incredible sense of responsibility on walking how he would want us to walk and delivering his work.'' Wilson's plays were big, often sprawling and poetic, dealing primarily with the effects of slavery on succeeding generations of black Americans: from turn-of-century characters who could remember the Civil War to a prosperous middle class at the end of the century who had forgotten the past. The playwright's astonishing creation, which took more than 20 years to complete, was remarkable not only for his commitment to a certain structure -- one play for each decade -- but for the quality of the writing. It was a unique achievement in American drama. Not even Eugene O'Neill, who authored the masterpiece ''Long Day's Journey Into Night,'' accomplished such a monumental effort. During that time, Wilson received the best-play Tony Award for ''Fences,'' plus best-play Tony nominations for six of his other plays, the Pulitzer Prize for both ''Fences'' and ''The Piano Lesson,'' and a record seven New York Drama Critics' Circle prizes. ''The goal was to get them down on paper,'' he told The Associated Press during an April 2005 interview as he was completing ''Radio Golf,'' the last play in the cycle. ''It was fortunate when I looked up and found I had the two bookends to go. I didn't plan it that way. I was able to connect the two plays.'' Wilson was referring to ''Gem of the Ocean,'' chronologically the first play in the cycle, although the ninth to be written. It takes place in 1904 and is set in Pittsburgh's Hill District at 1839 Wylie Ave., a specific address that figures prominently, nearly 100 years later, in the last work, ''Radio Golf,'' which premiered in April at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Pittsburgh, Wilson's birthplace, is the setting for nine of the 10 plays in the cycle (''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'' is set in a Chicago recording studio). Although he lived in Seattle, the playwright had a great deal of affection for his hometown, especially ''the Hill,'' a dilapidated area of the city where he spent much of his youth. Wilson, a bulky, affable man who always had a story to tell, usually returned to Pittsburgh once a year to visit his mother's grave, but he said he couldn't live there: ''Too many ghosts. But I love it. That's what gave birth to me.'' Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, he was one of six children of Frederick Kittel, a baker who had emigrated from Germany at the age of 10, and Daisy Wilson. A high school dropout, Wilson enlisted in the Army but left after a year, finding employment as a porter, short-order cook and dishwasher, among other jobs. When his father died in 1965, he changed his name to August Wilson. Wilson was largely self-educated. The public library was his university and the recordings of such iconic singers and musicians as Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton, and the paintings of such artists as Romare Bearden his inspiration. He started writing in 1965, when he acquired a used typewriter. His initial works were poems, but in 1968, Wilson co-founded Pittsburgh's Black Horizon Theater. Among those early efforts was a play called ''Jitney,'' which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle. In 1978, he moved to Minnesota, writing for the Science Museum in St. Paul and later landing a fellowship at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center. In 1982, his play, ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' was accepted by the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. It was there that Wilson met Lloyd Richards, who also ran the Yale School of Drama. Their relationship proved fruitful, and Richards directed six of Wilson's plays on Broadway. The first was ''Ma Rainey,'' which opened on Broadway in 1984. Wilson's reputation was cemented in 1987 by the father-son drama ''Fences,'' his biggest commercial success. The play, which featured a Tony-winning performance by James Earl Jones, ran for more than a year. It was followed in New York by ''Joe Turner's Come and Gone'' (1988), ''The Piano Lesson'' (1990), ''Two Trains Running'' (1992), ''Seven Guitars'' (1996), ''Jitney'' (2000), ''King Hedley II'' (2001) and ''Gem of the Ocean'' (2004). Wilson's plays gave steady employment to black actors, not only in New York but in regional theaters, where most of his plays tried out before coming to Broadway. Besides Jones, such well-known actors as Laurence Fishburne, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton, Brian Stokes Mitchell, S. Epatha Merkerson, Roscoe Lee Browne and Leslie Uggams appeared in his plays on Broadway. ''August's work is like reading a rich novel,'' says Anthony Chisholm, a veteran Wilson performer in such plays as ''Gem of the Ocean'' and ''Radio Golf.'' ''It conjures up vivid images in the mind, and it makes the actor's job easier because you have something to draw upon to build your character.'' Later this month, a Broadway theater, the Virginia, will be renamed for Wilson, a rare honor also bestowed on such theater greats as Eugene O'Neill, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Helen Hayes and Al Hirschfeld. Wilson, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero; their daughter Azula Carmen, and another daughter, Sakina Ansari, from his first marriage. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

Listen to an interview with August Wilson on NPR

August Wilson
1945-2005

August Wilson: Cultural Power and the Case for Black Theater

Revolutionary Worker #893, February 9, 1997
From the RW Arts Correspondent

NEW YORK JANUARY 27: On an icy evening over 1,500 people vied for tickets at New York City's Town Hall to hear a debate on "Cultural Power." August Wilson--the Black playwright who is one of the most celebrated writers in the U.S. today (author of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Fences", "The Piano Lesson," "Seven Guitars" among many other plays)--faced off with Robert Brustein--the theatre director and critic who has held top posts at Yale Drama School and as artistic director for the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard's Loeb Theatre and writes for the neo-conservative magazine New Republic. The person who pulled together this important debate and moderated it was Anna Deveare Smith, an actor known for weaving a tapestry of provocative portrayals of the participants in some of the great political events of our time, like the L.A. Rebellion.

At issue was the question: Should significant resources of this society go to support and develop major Black theatres--where Black artists, actors, writers and directors can develop theatre "by, for, about, and near" Black people (to cite the criteria first laid out in 1926 by the revolutionary nationalist W.E.B. DuBois)?

Wilson is fighting for this position. Is he right?

Yes. That is our short article.

But Wilson's proposal has touched off a storm of controversy in different quarters. Wilson has been accused of being "separatist" and criticized for politicizing theatre. And it has also revealed a situation of deep inequality in the arts.

At the very time that important theatre works from Black artists like Wilson's own plays and extraordinary productions like "Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk" are winning awards on Broadway--indicating a broad and deep interest in such works--the independent Black theatres are languishing, starving for lack of resources.

In June 1966 Wilson rocked the theatre world by addressing the problem in a major speech, "The Ground on Which I Stand," at the Theatre Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University. Describing himself as one who was fired in the kiln of the Black Power movement of the '60s, Wilson made a deep and impassioned argument for Black theatres where the culture of Black people can flower. "The ideas of self-determination, self-respect and self-defense that governed my life in the '60s I find just as valid and self-urging in 1996.... Those who would deny black Americans their culture would also deny them their history and the inherent values that are a part of all human life."

Wilson pointed out that, "In terms of economics and privilege, one significant fact affects us all in the American theatre: of the 66 LORT theatres [LORT = League of Regional Theatres, an organization made up of major professional not-for-profit theatres across the country--RW], there is only one that can be considered black. From this it could be falsely assumed that there aren't sufficient numbers of blacks working in the American theatre to sustain and support more theatres. If you do not know, I will tell you that black theatre in America is alive.. it is vibrant... it is vital... it just isn't funded."

As this controversy has unfolded, it has come to light that in recent years, while some funds have gone to regional theatres for the specific purpose of "diversifying their audiences," Black, Latino, and Asian theatres have suffered.

For example, in 1991, as government arts funding was getting drastically cut in the fall-out from the censorship wars, one private funding agency, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund allocated $25 million mainly to the larger regional theatres to produce plays by Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American artists.

The effects of these grants have been contradictory. On the positive side, works by Black artists and others have been produced at these venues. And the culture of the oppressed has been shared with the largely white audiences who frequent these theatres--often for the first time.

But at the same time, Black theatres have not gotten anywhere near the kind of funding that these theatres, which mainly feature Euro-American culture, have received to do Black plays. So Black theatres have gone under, few new theatres have arisen. And there has been a bleeding of Black playwrights and actors out of Black theatres and into these other venues. Most Black theatres cannot afford to pay their actors enough to even qualify to be part of the regional theatre association, LORT, so they're not even in the running for many of the grants.

In many ways, this situation is just another indictment of the whole social set-up that is founded on national oppression.

A key issue here is how the resources of this society are allocated and how inequality is perpetuated in the cultural arena. It is a stunning exposure of how deep national oppression runs in the U.S. today when one takes a look at just how little of society's resources go towards Black arts and other oppressed nationalities. The vast amount of resources flow to venues where the stage is dominated by plays that reflect the history, experience, and culture of European Americans. And the result is that--despite many good intentions--inequality persists and deepens.

Wilson also criticizes the content of some works supported by these grants as a form of "cultural imperialism"--where the casting of Black actors in roles originally written for European Americans has become a substitute for really developing Black theatre--especially new works. He argues that casting Black actors in plays "conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, our difficult but honorable history in America; it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large....

"In an effort to spare us the burden of being `affected by an undesirable condition' and as a gesture of benevolence, many whites (like the proponents of colorblind casting) say, `Oh, I don't see color.' We want you to see us. We are black and beautiful.... We are not ashamed, and do not need you to be ashamed for us. Nor do we need the recognition of our blackness to be couched in abstract phrases like `artist of color.' Who are you talking about? A Japanese artist? An Eskimo? A Filipino? A Mexican? A Cambodian? A Nigerian? An African American? Are we to suppose that if you put a white person on one side of the scale and the rest of humanity lumped together as nondescript `people of color' on the other, that it would balance out? That whites carry that much spiritual weight? We reject that. We are unique, and we are specific."

The debate at Town Hall brought Wilson face to face with his longtime opponent Robert Brustein.

Brustein opened the debate by saying that his difference with Wilson is not so much about race but is a "philosophical dispute over the basic function of dramatic art." He opposed what he calls "ideological art" and denied that art can change society--to which Wilson correctly retorted, "Art changes individuals and individuals change society. All art has to serve the politics of someone..."

But for all Brustein's talk about the pre-eminence of "artistic criteria" he himself has clearly used "sociological criteria" in making his own assessment of Wilson's art: "...by choosing to chronicle the oppression of black people through each of the decades, Wilson has fallen into a monotonous tone of victimization..." Here Brustein reveals his bias both in terms of sociological and artistic criteria. Would Brustein accuse Shakespeare of writing a boring series of plays on the kings of England?

Those who have come to know Wilson's rich range of characters, the beauty and power of his language, and his ability to transport and enlighten know that he definitely meets the criteria that, as Mao said, while life is the source of art, art is "higher than life." In a 1992 article in the New York Times, Wilson described the path which led him to the "series of plays that could be laid end on end to comprise a dramatic tracing of the black American odyssey through the 20th century.... Since I was not a historian but a writer of fiction, I saw as my task the invention of characters. These personal histories would not only represent the culture but illuminate the historical context both of the period in which the play is set and the continuum of black life in America that stretches back to the early 17th century."

Brustein also accuses Wilson of "separatism" for making the claim that Black theatre arts cannot fully develop in the context of the current line-up of regional theatres.

At the TCB convention Wilson said: "We cannot develop our playwrights with the meager resources at our disposal. Why is it difficult to imagine nine black theatres but not 66 white ones? Without theatres we cannot develop our talents, then everyone suffers: our writers; the theatre; the audience." At the debate he added, "...Imagine if the Black artist could have Black theatres in which to practice and develop their craft, places where your visitors' pass does not expire, as it does for us now, usually on March 1 right after Black History month."

Once again, as in the debates over affirmative action and more recently ebonics, the issue of "color-blindness" and merit--in this case "artistic standards"--have been raised to deny the oppression of Black people and dismiss the just demands for equality.

In an article called "Subsidized Separatism," Brustein wrote: "Funding agencies have started substituting sociological criteria for aesthetic criteria in their grant procedures, including that `elitist' notions like quality and excellence are no longer functional."

Wilson: "To suggest that funding agencies are rewarding inferior work by pursuing sociological criteria only serves to call into question the tremendous outpouring of plays by white playwrights who benefit from funding given to the 66 LORT theatres.

"Are those theatres funded on sociological or artistic criteria? Do we have 66 excellent theatres? Or do those theatres benefit from the sociological advantage that they are run by whites and cater largely to white audiences?

"The truth is that often where there are aesthetic criteria of excellence, there are also sociological criteria that have traditionally excluded Blacks. I say raise the standards and remove the sociological consideration of race as privilege, and we will meet you at the crossroads, in equal numbers, prepared to do the work of extending and developing the common ground of the American theatre."

At Town Hall this exchange, which has developed in the pages of American Theatre magazine, the New Republic and elsewhere, got a bit more pointed:

Wilson to Brustein: Is your theatre (American Repertory Theatre) separate from the Black community in Boston?

Brustein: What do you mean, it does all kinds of theatre.

Wilson: Is it near the Black community?

Brustein: No.

Wilson: Does it get grants? Isn't that "subsidized separatism"?

We revolutionaries are first and foremost internationalists, and in this country this means that we "train the masses of all nationalities in a self-determinationist spirit, to take up the struggle in support of the long-denied and suppressed demands of oppressed people for liberation and equality as an integral and decisive aspect of the proletarian revolution," as RCP Chairman Bob Avakian has said.

Black people need space and support to develop their culture, and everyone will benefit from this. Such a flowering of Black theatre would certainly develop with different trends--revolutionary, non-revolutionary, proletarian, bourgeois, traditional, experimental, nationalist and internationalist. And for our part, we encourage the revolutionary, the proletarian and internationalist trends--as well as collaboration with and attendance of people of all nationalities.

At the same time, we work for the development of proletarian art, which through many different forms reflects--as art--the outlook and interests of the multinational proletariat and contributes as art to our revolutionary goals.

One cannot speak of equality and inclusion unless Black people, and other oppressed nationalities, have the chance to develop their culture in an environment free from the economic, political and social domination of European-American culture. And the current debate only underscores once again that to achieve such equality would require a fundamental and revolutionary recasting of the way that resources and priorities are determined. While people must fight for such equality in every arena today, we need to see that the monopoly capitalist system is perpetuating and reinventing the conditions where the culture of Black people, and other oppressed nationalities, remains suppressed.

Typically, the charge of hypocrisy has greeted Wilson's arguments from various quarters, since Wilson's own works have appeared in major regional theatres and on Broadway where they have received many awards. This is an old story: the success of a few Black artists and intellectuals is used as an argument against Black people in general.

Wilson's arrival on Broadway was a struggle against all odds. Kicked out of high school, Wilson taught himself the playwrighting craft, and fought together with Lloyd Richards, the Black director who was at Yale in late 80s, to carve out a space for this Black theatre. Now Wilson is fighting to expand this space in a way that would benefit other Black theatre artists.

And why can't there be many August Wilsons on Broadway and in multinational venues--as well as in major Black theatres?! Certainly Wilson is not arguing that Black artists and Black theatre should not share all kinds of stages. He is clear on this: "We have sought to be included from the beginning. We are fighting now to be included in the making of theatre in America." But there should also be a space for developing Black theatre arts specifically.

Isn't it the responsibility of everyone who yearns for justice and equality to support such endeavors? To accuse Wilson of separatism, and then to suggest as Brustein did the other night that if Wilson is so interested in developing Black theatre why doesn't he start one of his own, or open one of his plays in a Black theatre--as if the whole burden of centuries of slavery and national oppression which has produced this outrageous situation with Black theatre should be laid at the feet of August Wilson, personally, to solve--these are the kinds of comments that just make Black people want to have a separate country!

All those who celebrate and welcome the works of August Wilson in the theatre--on whatever stage--should see not only the justness of his call, but also the benefit to everyone. At the same time, artists of all nationalities need to fight for the culture of the oppressed to be represented in all arenas.

This debate has raised many questions. Many artists, including radical Black artists, see the great need for a Black theatre but do not want to see all the different nationalities just head off to their national tents, never to mix it up. Most oppressed nationality people are part of the multinational proletariat. And despite the ceaseless efforts of the power structure to pit us against each other, people are searching for unity--based on respect and equality. This finds expression in the arts with such phenomenon as rappers toasting in Spanish to the beat of reggae and salsa and funk.

Many progressive artists are rightfully concerned that Wilson has one-sidely rejected non-traditional casting. While Wilson makes an insightful critique of the erroneous concept of "color blindness" in a society so marked by inequality, he seems to have one-sidely rejected the whole idea of people experimenting with gender and nationality in casting. Clearly there are situations where casting against nationality can raise provocative questions about social barriers. It can also mock the oppressed and serve to perpetuate those barriers, as in the casting of a white actor in the role of a Vietnamese in Broadway's "Miss Saigon." But there are artists who are trying do something positive with non-traditional casting, and playing with such conventions can certainly have a positive role.

Revolutionary-minded Black theatre artists have raised questions about just what Wilson's vision of Black theatre would encompass, and there are many other matters that we could not do justice to in this article.

The important thing is the debate is on; August Wilson has called attention to a great inequality in the arts and throughout society. And it might just take a revolution to really address the problem.

This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
http://rwor.org

Theater Review | 'Gem of the Ocean'

Sailing Into Collective Memory

December 7, 2004
By BEN BRANTLEY
New York Times

Walls turn into water in the second act of "Gem of the Ocean," the grandly evangelical new play by August Wilson that opened last night at the Walter Kerr Theater. And though anyone watching this metamorphosis may well describe it as miraculous, the moment is achieved without anything like the special effects associated with Cecil B. DeMille in biblical mode.

It is instead the sound of human voices, remembering other voices of men and women long dead, that transforms a very solid-looking parlor in a home in Pittsburgh into an ocean on which a slave ship floats.

The year is 1904, and a black man with the burdensome name of Citizen is being led by the incantatory speech and song of those around him into the collective memory of his people. Suddenly, Citizen is hearing cries and whispers from centuries earlier. And the soft words, as he repeats them, rumble like thunder: "Remember me."

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

John Earl Jelks, left, and Anthony Chisholm in "Gem of the Ocean."

Those words might be the credo of the great cycle of dramas that Mr. Wilson has been writing since 1979, all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. For black Americans to forget their past, Mr. Wilson has suggested in plays that include the superb "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fences," is to be without a compass in the present and a clear road to the future.

The recent history of Broadway, of course, has not boded well for the future of thoughtful theater. And as of last month it still was uncertain as to whether "Gem of the Ocean," which found itself short of financing, would even open this season.

That it has opened should be a relief to anyone concerned with serious American drama. And theatergoers who have followed Mr. Wilson's career will find in his "Gem" a touchstone for everything else he has written.

But "Gem" is also the least dramatically involving of his plays. Directed by Kenny Leon, with a strong cast led by Phylicia Rashad, "Gem" has passages of transporting beauty. But it is the first of Mr. Wilson's dramas to lack people whose flesh feels as palpable as your own. The characters in "Gem," who include a former slave who is some 280 years old, are not exactly cardboard. They are more like pieces of parchment on which legends of the past and maps to the future have been drawn in swooping strokes of ink.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

From left, Phylicia Rashad, LisaGay Hamilton and John Earl Jelks in August Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean."

This is not inappropriate to the position of "Gem" in Mr. Wilson's body of work. The ninth production in the cycle of a projected 10 plays set in different decades (only the 1990's remain), "Gem" is also its first chapter chronologically, taking place in a time when slavery remains a living memory. It is a swelling overture of things to come, a battle hymn for an inchoate republic of African-Americans just beginning to discover the price of freedom. As one character puts it, they "got a long row to hoe and ain't got no plow."

At the center of "Gem" is Aunt Ester (Ms. Rashad), whose improbable age suggests that she arrived with one of the first shipments of slaves to America. She has been mentioned with reverence and awe in previous plays by Mr. Wilson, including "Two Trains Running" and "King Hedley II," where she is described as "the Book of Life" incarnate.

She now makes her long-awaited entrance, in the opening scene of "Gem" in a sly anticlimax, hunched and folksy in a worn plaid robe.

Aunt Ester, of course, is not just folks. She is the presiding figure in an allegorical canvas, an enduring spirit from a brutal past who will help the troubled Citizen (John Earl Jelks), who believes he has killed a man, find redemption.

Citizen's alternate routes to manhood are embodied by two other characters, the grizzled Solly Two Kings (Anthony Chisholm) - a former guide on the Underground Railroad and one of the ragged oracles who appear regularly in Mr. Wilson's work - and the younger Caesar (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), a self-made entrepreneur and constable who plays, cynically and self-importantly, by the white man's oppressive rules.

Rounding out the ensemble are Ester's loyal assistants - Black Mary (LisaGay Hamilton), who is Caesar's sister, and Eli (Eugene Lee) - and Rutherford Selig (Raynor Scheine), a traveling salesman and the play's only white character.

"Gem" has acquired more warmth and vigor since I saw an earlier version last year, directed by Marion McClinton (and featuring Mr. Leon as Citizen) at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. And its big poetic moments, including Citizen's visionary journey on a slave ship, are now exquisitely enhanced by the technical production (especially Donald Holder's lighting). Yet the play's dramatic immediacy is still eclipsed by your awareness of the metaphorical resonance of every event, relationship and character.

And though the dialogue is woven from the tasty, salty vernacular that Mr. Wilson is famous for, the characters, especially Ester and Solly, often speak in weighty aphorisms. ("I'd rather die in truth than live a lie." "If the wheel don't turn the right way, you got to fix it.")

It's not easy playing a metaphor. As Ester, Ms. Rashad, who won a Tony Award earlier this year as another inspiring matriarch in "A Raisin in the Sun" (also directed by Mr. Leon), impressively mixes down-home coziness and great lady stateliness. (I kept thinking of the elderly Ethel Barrymore.) But she never connects convincingly with the immemorial, scary darkness of Ester's past.

It is Ms. Hamilton and Mr. Jelks who ground the production in a firmer emotional reality, and it's a pleasure to watch their characters' awkward, tentative dance of mutual attraction. When Citizen describes to Mary his memory of a woman in a blue dress with whom he spent one night, it's in one of those rare and wonderful monologues in the theater where the plain and the lyrical, the particular and the eternal, merge into a luminous whole. It's a reminder that when Mr. Wilson is at the top of his form, there are few living playwrights who can touch him.

'Gem of the Ocean'

By August Wilson; directed by Kenny Leon; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Constanza Romero; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; fight director, J. Allen Suddeth; dramaturge, Todd Kreidler; production supervisors, Neil A. Mazzella, Gene O'Donovan; production stage manager, Narda E. Alcorn; general management, Stuart Thompson Productions/James Triner; associate producer, Robert G. Bartner; original music composition and vocal arrangements, Kathryn Bostic. Presented by Carole Shorenstein Hays and Jujamcyn Theaters. At the Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, Manhattan. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Eugene Lee (Eli), John Earl Jelks (Citizen Barlow), Phylicia Rashad (Aunt Ester), LisaGay Hamilton (Black Mary), Raynor Scheine (Rutherford Selig), Anthony Chisholm (Solly Two Kings) and Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Caesar).