From 2005:
I haven’t had anything to say in print about August Wilson’s death, and won’t, because it happens that I haven’t seen all that much of his work. I rarely sought it out before my midlife conversion to drama criticism—it never sounded like my sort of thing—and Gem of the Ocean, the only play of his I’ve had occasion to review for The Wall Street Journal, struck me at the time as “far too self-consciously poetic,” which for me is the kiss of dramatic death.
I wish I were in a stronger position to stick my oar in, since yesterday’s journalistic elegies for Wilson were (to put it mildly) fairly windy. If I had to guess, I’d say that my negative impression of his style, even though it’s only based on a couple of his plays, would probably be sustained were I to see five more of them in a row next week…
Read the whole thing here.