Playwright Wilson Dying Of Cancer

August Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a giant of the contemporary American theater, has been diagnosed with an advanced form of liver cancer.

Wilson, 60, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the disease is too advanced for effective treatment and that his doctors have told him he has less than six months to live.

"It's not like poker; you can't throw your hand in," he told the newspaper. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready."

Wilson lived and wrote in St. Paul from 1978 until 1990, a productive period that saw the completion of some of his best-known plays, including "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," which won the Pulitzer for drama in 1987 and 1990, respectively.

During his years in the Twin Cities, Wilson formed a close association with Penumbra Theatre that remains intact today. The theater devoted its 2002-03 season to Wilson's plays.

Despite the grim prognosis, Penumbra artistic director Lou Bellamy said he was reluctant to write Wilson's epitaph.

Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in June. Bellamy, a professional and personal friend of Wilson, declined to comment on how long friends had known about his condition.

"We all know now," he said, "and what I'd say is that I wouldn't count him out too quickly."

Wilson's life work is a 10-play chronicle of African-American life in the 20th century. Though not written chronologically, each play is set in a different decade, from 1900 through 1990. The last play in that cycle, "Radio Golf," is set in 1997 and is running at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The first of those plays, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," premiered in 1984.

Almost all the plays are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson grew up, dropped out of high school and earned an education of his own on the streets and in the city's Carnegie Library.

Local audiences got an early look at the promise that would make Wilson one of America's foremost playwrights. "Jitney," Wilson's 1970s play, was written in 1979, shortly after he moved to St. Paul. It was first seen by audiences during a staged reading at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis.

"Jitney" premiered in Pittsburgh in 1982 and was staged at Penumbra two years later, just as Wilson was coming into national prominence with a Broadway staging of "Ma Rainey."

Other non-Caucasian writers achieved success in American theater before and after Wilson, but his forceful sense of perception has forever changed the face of playwriting.

"I use him as a flagship," said Harry Waters Jr., an assistant professor of theater and dance at Macalester College in St. Paul and the facilitator of the Many Voices Roundtable, a forum for emerging writers of color at the Playwrights' Center. "This is a man who decided what his voice was going to be, and he freed so many writers to tell their own stories from their heart and from their home."

Wilson has lived in Seattle since 1990. He and his wife, Constant Romero, a costume designer he married in 1994, have a daughter, Azula. Wilson also has a daughter from an earlier marriage.