His Back Pages: Plumbing the August Wilson Archive with Playwright TyLie Shider
A (slightly) expanded version of a recent column that ran in NEXTpittsburgh on June 26, 2025
Photo by Rob Liggett
When he was a 17-year-old freshman at Delaware State University, playwright TyLie Shider was introduced to the works of August Wilson in a survey class called Modern Drama.
It was 2005 and the sheer honesty and humanity of Wilson’s work deeply moved the journalism major. It didn’t take long for the New Jersey native to fall in love with another discipline that relied on a different approach to truth-telling than the path he originally imagined for himself prior to taking the class.
Shider’s exposure to Wilson’s American "Century Cycle" of 10 plays altered his perception of what a play could do and be. He was entranced by Wilson’s deft exploration of the African American experience in Pittsburgh and how he used the challenges of working-class and poor communities to explore universal themes of love and brokenness.
Before the semester was over, Shider’s teacher delivered some bad news to his students, who had grown fond of Wilson’s work: The two-time Pulitzer Prize award-winning playwright had died of liver cancer in Seattle. It was a devastating blow in a season of artistic discovery.
When Shider collected his bachelor's degree in journalism in 2009, his instinct was not to find an entry-level job at a newspaper or TV station where he would be put through the paces of covering fires, school board meetings and mayoral races. Shider had other ideas about how best to use the skills he’d acquired as an undergraduate journalist who really wanted to find a place in the maelstrom of passion and conflict known as the American theater.
Thanks to the example of August Wilson’s life and career, another path had unexpectedly opened to Shider when he least expected it.
Reflecting on his decision as a 37-year-old with many awards of his own to affirm his career choices, Shider gives much of the credit for his artistic development to a man he never met but who “helped shape the trajectory of my writing career.”
Mindful of what a close study of Wilson’s work has meant for him, Shider advises his students to “study the biography of writers you admire because they left a blueprint for us.
“You can pull from their biographies to curate your own professional path forward," he said. "Otherwise, there’s no real professional pipeline for us for success. It’s not like you go to school, get an apprenticeship here and a guaranteed gig there. There’s none of that.”
For the past month, Shider, a 2025 Pedantic Arts Writer in Residence, has been deeply immersed in the August Wilson Archive housed at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library.
Shider is also the recipient of the 2025 August Wilson Archive Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, an honor that makes his monthlong sojourn to Pittsburgh particularly impactful and constructive.
“I came here to study the archives and write a scholarly essay about my relationship to Wilson, his work here and my discoveries in the archive,” Shider said. He’s also adapting a syllabus for his graduate playwriting students at Pace University based on his findings in the archive.
During a typical day at the August Wilson Archive, Shider reads incoming and outgoing letters Wilson wrote to loved ones, fellow playwrights and young writers who sought advice on how to pursue what seemed like an impractical calling to many of them — the path to becoming a writer.
Shider took particular interest in a letter Wilson wrote to a young writer who could’ve easily been him two decades ago had he ever written the famous playwright.
“The letter had bullet points,” Shider said grinning. “I pulled and adapted some of those points to create a course for my graduate playwrighting students.”
One piece of advice resonated with Shider because it is so evocative: “The writer is supposed to write from the landscape of self.”
“I titled [my] course ‘Writing from the Landscape of Self,’ so I’m starting right there.”
After getting a master of fine arts degree in Dramatic Writing from New York University in 2018 and completing a Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency stint that same year, Shider headed 1,200 miles to Minneapolis in 2019 — the same city Wilson fled to after leaving Pittsburgh to pursue his quest to become a nationally recognized playwright.
Like August Wilson before him, Shider made his way to the Twin Cities’ acclaimed Playwrights’ Center, where he became a two-time Jerome Hill Fellow. Wilson did a lot of his earliest professional work there, and Shider appreciated the symmetry his appointment represented.
The prize came with a stipend and production money to stage readings of his plays and other things playwrights need to introduce their work to the public. It would not make him wealthy, but it would give him enough economic wiggle room to pursue audacious ideas that would benefit both his art and the community he was constantly in dialogue with.
For the next few years, Shider became a prolific Minneapolis-based artist who was deeply embedded in the community. He was also a professor of playwriting at Augsburg University as well as a staff writer for Minnesota Playlist, an online resource for all things theater and art-related in the Twin Cities.
“Similar to Wilson, a lot of the plays that put me on the map I wrote while living in Minneapolis,” Shider said.
“That’s one of [Wilson’s] creative homes. It’s also one of my aesthetic homes. My aesthetic came together living in Minneapolis. Wilson has been quoted saying something similar. Because of the distance [from Pittsburgh], he was able to hear the voices of home clearer. I understood that [while] living there.”
During the unrest generated by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the massive uprising that followed, Shider was living in an integrated working-class neighborhood south of downtown Minneapolis called Whittier.
He was both intrigued and inspired by the murals, protest signs and elaborate art he encountered in Whittier during the week of Floyd’s death.
He decided he would not allow these signs of the community’s pain and frustration to simply pass away undocumented. He quickly enlisted a cinematographer and dusted off his journalistic instincts for a grand project. His new mission would be to interview and record people in his community with the goal of reproducing their comments verbatim in a theatrical piece.
“My goal was to concretize the protest art digitally and create a documentary,” he said.
To do this successfully, Shider would use the work of his NYU graduate school professor, the acclaimed actress, playwright and director Anna Deavere Smith as his primary model.
Smith, a former Carnegie Mellon University drama professor, is known for meticulously recording her subjects verbatim much like a journalist or historian would. Smith then adapts the words and personas of her subjects for searing one woman shows that confront many of the most electrifying issues of the day. Her mimicry and stage craft are impeccable, earning her every accolade and prize she’s won over the years including a MacArthur Fellowship.
For his play, “Whittier,” Shider conducted man-on-the-street interviews with the goal of making his characters turn toward and talk to one another in composite scenes.
“I was interested in showing the community engaging with one another,” Shider said. “I can’t get away from [journalism]. I still have questions. I’m still more interested in The Other than I am in myself.”
“Whittier” garnered a lot of press at the time, even as an unproduced work that was showcased primarily through stage readings.
It has become both a source of bemusement and frustration for Shider that “Whittier” — of all of his work — has yet to get a full stage production, despite becoming popular with theater professors around the world who use it in their classes.
Producers and theater department heads "think it's a hot button,” he said. “I think ‘too soon’ has been the response and feedback I’ve received from some artistic directors. ‘Is it too soon? Do we need to do this here? Does, say, Minneapolis need to see this?’”
If Shider had his choice, “Whittier” would be fully staged in the Twin Cities before it was staged anywhere else simply because the DNA of the times and circumstances in which it was born are roots in that period of civil unrest and deep community dialogue.
Though not directly about George Floyd, “Whittier” is about a community’s reaction to what happened to him in a city that has an unearned reputation of being excessively liberal when its law enforcement is anything but. It is also about the legal and psychic weight of coping with officially sanctioned violence, a topic that still has relevance five years after Floyd’s murder.
“I know someone’s gonna do it,” Shider said confidently. “From the work I put into the theater, it continues to bear fruit. I know ‘Whittier’ will be produced one of these days.”
Shider notes the irony of the "Whittier” script being in demand by college professors wanting to teach from it and the reluctance of those with the resources to stage it for the wider public.
“What’s happening here is the reverse of what usually happens,” he said. “Usually, a play goes up in infamy. People scoff at it. And then people understand that, OK, this is what the playwright was trying to do. It then gains a cult following.
“Mine is quite the opposite. It’s not being produced, but it’s being studied. It’s being developed. People are giving me money for it because they’re interested in my process, but people are like, ‘I’m not ready to produce that yet.’”
But Shider’s mind isn’t on “Whittier” these days or even the assault on the values that energized the protest movements against police brutality when he lived in Minneapolis.
“Has it really been five years?” Shider said in response to a question about the George Floyd murder, the backlash against Black Lives Matter and the grievance-filled movement to free Floyd’s killer Officer Derek Chauvin embraced by some elements of MAGA. “It feels like one really long year.”
Earlier this week, the August Wilson House showcased one of Shider’s new works — a reading of “Primary Sources,” an “epistolary play inspired by an untold international correspondence between two negro writers struggling to get published and make a living in 1950s New York and Paris.”
As his time in Pittsburgh winds down, Shider is still riding a contact high from his daily exposure to Wilson’s work in the archive. Recently, Shider read Wilson’s unpublished play, “Malcolm X,” a one-man show that was staged by a small theater in Minneapolis decades ago.
Asked if anything truly surprised him in the Wilson Archive, Shider said he was impressed by the playwright’s business acumen.
“He was really clear and cognizant about his money, royalties, production fees, advances — he was on it,” Shider said with a laugh.
“If he did an interview, he had a contract he would give to TV stations to negotiate ownership of what they did with the interview he was involved in. It was his [intellectual property]. He understood that. The man followed his money to a T.”
So, what was August Wilson’s next move had he lived once the Pittsburgh Cycle (Also known as The American Cycle) was done, according to information he’s come across in the Archive?
“I just read a letter he wrote to novelist Romulus Linney in 2005 telling him he was working on ‘Radio Golf,’ trying to finish that, but after ‘Radio Golf’ he was going to start a novel,” Shider said.
In the letter, Wilson said he better appreciated the work of novelists like Linney now that he was attempting a novel himself. He was not dissuaded from the task despite how difficult he understood it to be. Unfortunately, he died before he could complete it.
Asked if Minneapolis brags about being a creative home for August Wilson the way Pittsburgh does, Shider laughed again.
“Yeah, they brag on him, but they can’t brag on him the same way Pittsburgh brags on him,” he said. “That would be impossible.”
Photo by Rob Liggett
A promise to my patient readers. I swear to God you won’t go another seven months before hearing from me again. I have no reasonable excuse for such a long break between posts. I’ve decided to roll out posts that never got posted before rolling out completely fresh material about the daily erosion of our democracy and the psychic toll it is taking on me/all of us. This is an exciting time to be a writer. Instead of putting all of my grousing into individual emails and texts to friends, I’ve decided to unburden my angst on those willing to read this Substack. The next couple of posts aren’t typical of what I plan to do, though. They are thoughts/observations about various enthusiasms that have gripped me over the last few months. The upcoming posts are about local and national bands. Expect pieces on the incomparable Jesse Welles at the Thunderbird Cafe last winter and Bruce Cockburn at City Winery. If you haven’t seen Carsickness/Ploughmans Lunch co-founder Karl Mullen’s new band 5 Pound Horse, consider yourself accursed. My taste in music has expanded dramatically and I can’t wait to dig into what’s swirling around in my ears and in my head. I’m going to try to end each column on what’s been fascinating me sonically lately. Right now I have Lucinda Williams last four cover albums in heavy rotation: “Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles from Abbey Road,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty,” “Southern Soul: From Memphis to Muscle Shoals & More” and “Bob’s Back Pages: A Night of Bob Dylan Songs.” Lucinda’s rendition of Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” is even more powerful than the author’s original and crackles with spit and bile I can’t detect in the original. She never fails to open my ears to the fiery possibilities inherent in a brilliant song.
I’ve also done a whole lot of reading and listening to podcasts in the last half year and I can’t wait to share my thoughts about what’s been occupying space rent free in my head during all this time.
More than anything, I’m looking forward to writing about the absurdity of these times without fear or favor. I’ve been reading brilliant Substacks by friends who’ve been on the field of battle against the wretched Trump regime since Inauguration Day while I’ve been AWOL. I’m sufficiently embarrassed enough by my absence at this point to slink back into the frontlines. I want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my comrades if they’ll have me.
Tony Norman
Yay! I look forward to more frequent posts!
Welcome back Tony. Welcome HOME🙏🏽