The actor and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson spent 11 years pushing, prodding and cajoling theater owners to let him bring Jitney to Broadway. It was the first in what would become August Wilson’s magnificent, 10-play cycle – one for each decade – about the lives of African-Americans, mostly in a black enclave of…

When was the last time you could consider Denzel Washington an underdog? That’s the role he has played in this Oscar race, as Manchester By The Sea star Casey Affleck collected enough of the Best Actor awards to consider him a clear front runner. Until the SAG Awards, where Washington prevailed for his overpowering…

Of the writers in competition at the 2017 Oscars, Fences playwright August Wilson is singular in multiple respects. The only writing nominee to win a Pulitzer, Wilson is also of course the only posthumous nominee — the first writer granted a posthumous nomination since Bridget O'Connor for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in…

Among the achievements of the American theater over the last century, August Wilson’s work ranks comfortably with the best. Any one of the plays he wrote — one for each decade of the 1900s — would put him there; taken together they aren’t just an unparalleled series; they’re the paradigm of lyric realism, tours of…

John Legend, who’s increasingly using his stature as a Grammy and Oscar-winning singer and songwriter (for “Glory,” co-written with Common for the film Selma) to promote theater projects that align with his social activism, has signed on as a co-producer of the upcoming Broadway premiere of August Wilson’s Jitney. The…

When it comes to deliciously complicated back stories (and sideshows), movies don't get better than Fences, the soon-to-be Oscar contender based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson play starring and directed by Denzel Washington, with Scott Rudin among its producers. Back in 1987, Wilson's play was set up at Para…

EXCLUSIVE: Award-winning playwright and writer Tony Kushner has been brought aboard to help pull together a screenplay for a film based on August Wilson’s beloved play Fences. The project, which Denzel Washington will direct and hopefully star in with his Fences Broadway co-star on Viola Davis (schedules pending), is…

Denzel Washington was in Beverly Hills tonight for a Q&A and broke some serious news. In a sit-down with “The Notorious Ph.D.” Todd Boyd, the two-time Oscar winner said he has worked an arrangement with the estate of August Wilson to direct and exec produce all 10 of the Pulitzer-winning dramatist’s plays for HBO…