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*Wilson’s fetishization of a certain kind of black masculinity.
Stokes had the right *look* for King, but there’s no violence in his spirit. Stokes’ truth as an actor is a fundamental magnanimity, which fits August’s heroes, but his magananimity expresses itself as generosity, as giving a gift, which is why his Impossible Dream is Beyond.
Also why he was a great Don Pedro, etc. By contrast, Wilson’s black male heroes are almost always “great spirits in chains.” In almost all of his plays, he is asking some variation of the central question of Fences, which is, “what happens to a big man in a small house?”
His heroes are generally (forgive the astrological metaphors) in a spiritual state of retrograde Jupiter. Their magnanimity, shut up like a fire in their bones, becomes backwards, introverted, forced to express itself through uncomfortable, unnatural avenues: violence, domination
Stokes is far too open and generous for that. BUT he looks every inch the Black King. Which like... fine. Also now that I think about it I wonder if anyone has done work on Wilson’s relationship (if any) to The Empreror Jones by O’Neill.
And like I’m sure Stokes Did His Work as an actor and turned in a perfectly capable performance... but I just can’t imagine how the dialogue between that actor and that character set.
Anyway the resurrection of Aunt Esther through King’s blood on the grave of her familiar is a willfully blasphemous Christian syncretism and I just know that Denzel is canny enough to sniff that out, and so I don’t know how on earth he’d direct the scene.
Also it is one of the three or four best moments August Wilson ever wrote. It also basically argues that the violence of the crack era resurrected Aunt Esther (the wisdom of the black ancestors) as Jay-Z, or perhaps as Black Thought.
Which I think is at a basic level a correct and persuasive reading of contemporary black history. Sigh, I really need to write my piece about King Hedley II, but there are just so many multivalent things I want to bring out of it.
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