IN THE WOODS of Barnesville, Ga., two Black men are running, barely visible in the dusk. There are crickets chirping, dogs barking in the distance and, more immediately, the urgent pants of their breath. This seems to be a familiar horror, but the men aren’t being chased; they’re heading toward a tent. Inside, Ma Rainey — played by Viola Davis, her lips painted burgundy, eyelids smoked with black, cheeks stained merlot — beckons the audience in a royal blue dress. “Daddy, daddy, please come home to me,” she sings, shimmying in the heat.

“Anytime you see two Black people running in the South, you think the Klan’s somewhere, but, no, they’re not running from something. They’re running to something — to this woman whose voice is telling their story,” says George C. Wolfe, the director of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the Netflix film version of August Wilson’s beloved play, which debuts this month. The scene feels appropriate for the opening of a Wilson adaptation: One of the most acclaimed Black playwrights in America, he spent more than three decades telling the story of Black America with pride and verve, with language that beckoned like Ma’s voice in that tent.

The play, first produced in 1984 at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn., is a fictionalized account of a famous blues singer, Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, who is in Chicago with her band in the 1920s to record a few songs. Ma’s musicians rehearse in a back room, or at least talk about rehearsing: There’s the sensible Cutler (played in the film by Colman Domingo), the laggard Slow Drag (Michael Potts), the thoughtful Toledo (Glynn Turman) and Levee (Chadwick Boseman, who died in August, in his final film role), a young and impetuous trumpet player with an idea for what a new sound might be. Ma finds herself at odds with Levee, as she does with her controlling white agent and the white studio owner, both of whom she knows are exploiting her. That’s the conflict, but much of the play’s pleasure is its dialogue: the characters gabbing, joking and arguing. Accordingly, the pith of the show is Ma’s voice — not just her husky murmur but the sound of a Black artist singing her story to and for her community. “White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there,” Ma says in the play. “They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking.”

While worthy on its own, the play is just one-tenth of the monumental project that defined Wilson’s career. With “Jitney,” a story about a group of ’70s-era cabdrivers that he wrote in 1979, he began his Pittsburgh Cycle (a.k.a., the American Century Cycle): a decalogue about Black life, one for each decade of the 20th century, all — except for “Ma Rainey” — set in his Pennsylvania hometown, where he was born in 1945. He completed the plays out of chronological order, for he didn’t initially set out to create a series, but nonetheless found a story and characters to represent each decade. And he wrote right up to the end: In 2005, the year of his death from cancer at the age of 60, he finished the last one, “Radio Golf,” about white encroachment and local politics in the 1990s. In addition to these 10 dramas, he wrote six others, but it was the Cycle that solidified his legacy as one of the country’s most important playwrights, an essential figure in not just Black theater but the American canon as a whole; two weeks after his death, Broadway’s Virginia Theater was renamed in his honor.

That’s because, during his life, Wilson had transformed the American stage, which until he arrived had been largely imagined as the nearly exclusive realm of white male writers such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, all of whom explored the limitations and failures of the American dream. But where their domestic dramas concern themselves with a strictly class-based, Gatsby-influenced version of bootstrapism, Wilson’s plays offer a more complex vision of that same dream: one that reflects the challenges of social mobility and its unique racial limitations. Wilson recognizes that the American dream is not, and could never be, the dream of Black Americans, each generation of whom lives with the injuries this country has dealt them. In that way, he introduced a frank, original view of the nation onto the stage — one that was also percolating in literature, visual arts and activism at the end of the last century — via a mythology that began in the early 1900s, with slavery fresh in the minds of his characters, and ended in the 1990s, when Black neighborhoods were trying to redefine themselves under the threat of gentrification.

In cataloging everyday Black lives, he moved theater beyond stereotypes or two-dimensional sketches of Blackness positioned from the purview of whiteness. His characters collide with the expectations of white America, but they also collide with one another, in itself radically humanizing — to have ordinary Black characters with different views and dispositions, as opposed to sharing a monolithic experience — in an era when few such stories found their way to Broadway. But Wilson also bestowed Black audiences with a different gift: a reconsideration of time, measured in and by the lives of the African-Americans living it. He was chronicling not just a century but a past and future of a people, represented by his characters’ memories, griefs, hopes, thoughts and dreams. And he welcomed Black playwrights, directors, actors and producers to both follow and diverge from that template.

Chief among them, perhaps, is the 65-year-old actor Denzel Washington, a producer of the new “Ma Rainey” film and one of the playwright’s leading advocates. In 2010, Washington won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the protagonist, a 1950s sanitation worker named Troy Maxson, in the Broadway revival of Wilson’s most lauded work, “Fences” (1985). In 2014, the Wilson estate, led by the playwright’s widow, Constanza Romero, now 62, approached the actor about adapting the entire Pittsburgh Cycle to film, beginning with the 2016 film version of “Fences,” which Washington directed, produced and starred in opposite Davis, who won an Oscar for her role as Maxson’s beleaguered wife, Rose.

Washington sees his responsibility as both Hollywood connector and Wilson custodian. He convinced Wolfe, 66, the renowned theater director, to helm the new film; and then worked with Romero to hire his friend Samuel L. Jackson and his son, John David Washington, to appear in the next Wilson film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Piano Lesson” (1987), a 1930s saga about ghosts and a family heirloom that will be overseen by Barry Jenkins. For the rest of the Cycle, which will be shot out of order over the following years, directors and actors such as Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay and Laurence Fishburne are all “circling,” Washington says. Over the phone this fall, he compared this undertaking to a relay race, passing on the baton in hopes of winning new audiences for the classics that Wilson left behind. “Lord knows he couldn’t take them with him,” Washington says. “And thank God he did leave them. Now they’ve left them in my hands, and I put them in other people’s hands.”

DAVIS, 55, STILL remembers an early encounter with the character Ma Rainey: She was a theater student at Rhode Island College in the 1980s, when one night she saw the stage and television actress Barbara Meek in a local production. “The thing that blew me away was how unapologetic she was — without screaming, without yelling, without doing any of that — just navigating her worth,” Davis recalls. “I have never seen that level of agency and autonomy.”

Ma is a standout role even in the context of Wilson’s works, which are populated with confident Black characters who either seek or declare their power within a system that would deny them: who try to get promoted at work, who try to open record shops and restaurants, who supplicate themselves before white peers to get ahead, who fight back against those same white peers or even step over other Black people to advance. Still, Ma stands out for another reason, too: Wilson’s plays are often ruled by men, whether they’re scrapping for cash or hanging in shops. And Ma is not just a Black woman at the center of her story, but a queer one, an identity otherwise absent in Wilson’s oeuvre. Rarely do gay Black women receive the spotlight, and certainly not in the mid-1980s, when the play arrived in New York. Nor in the 1920s, when the real Ma — and her protégée, the blues singer Bessie Smith — was part of a crew of queer Black female artists. (Ma’s lyrics often referenced her attraction to women, as in “Prove It on Me Blues” [1928]: “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. / It must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.”) In the theatrical version, Ma has one woman in her entourage, Dussie Mae, with whom she flirts and of whom she becomes possessive, though she never speaks of sexuality aloud: a notable omission for a character rooted in the Black community, where queerness has historically been, and is often still, marginalized and stigmatized.

Despite, and because of, these absences, which seem more noticeable today, Wilson’s work feels as familiar as a backyard barbecue or a post-church family dinner. His plays are united by their sensuousness, from the sounds of singing to the smell of beans and bread in a kitchen. In one scene in “Radio Golf,” a character interrupts another with a non sequitur about bread pudding (“I have something for you,” one says, referring to a check, and the other replies, “It ain’t no bread pudding, is it? I was just thinking about some bread pudding”). Wilson once said that the bread pudding represents an essential quality in his work — a savory digression: “The bread pudding is not part of the traditional structure of the play, but it’s part of the structure of this particular community.” He called the bread pudding an intrusion of history, where his characters’ identities assert themselves into the plot — or lack thereof. In another scene in the same play, the protagonist, a well-educated real estate developer named Harmond Wilks, reminisces about the first time he met the woman who would become his wife: “It was raining. I thought she was gonna melt. The rain look like it hurt her. Like the two wasn’t supposed to go together. You couldn’t mix them up.” The string of simple sentences and fragments replicates the character’s piecemeal rendering of the memory and creates the same effect for the audience: first the rain, then her. The gaps in the telling — those stubborn periods that make each statement so staccato — create a rhythm that mimics a slow, steady storm. In the span of just a few seconds, Wilson presents us with a scene that doesn’t simply serve the image but speaks it.

ROMERO OFTEN USES the word “uncompromising” when discussing her husband. “One of his main sayings was, ‘Something is not always better than nothing,’ because he would rather take nothing than something that was compromised,” she says. “Many of his characters are that way.” When Wilson was a child in Pittsburgh, his mother won a much-needed washing machine in a contest, but when the prize-givers found out she was Black, they offered her a used machine instead. Daisy Wilson, a homemaker, refused to take it: Something’s not always better than nothing. “My mother made me believe that I could do anything,” Wilson is quoted as saying in the introduction to a 2007 anthology. “I saw myself as a grand person. I saw the pictures of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes — all of them always had a suit on. I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s me. I want to be like that.’” His nickname as a teen was Napoleon, a figure the playwright said he was interested in because he was a “self-made emperor.” (Wilson dropped out of high school in 1960 after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper on the French military leader.)

As an adult, Wilson was known for his kindness and generosity; though self-assured, he wasn’t self-important. But he also wasn’t a pushover: The actor and playwright Ruben Santiago-Hudson, a longtime friend and collaborator, says his friendship with the writer was marked by long, deep conversations but also plenty of arguments. In 1996, Wilson drew attention in the theater community by delivering a speech titled “The Ground on Which I Stand,” in which he advocated for more Black-made art and Black-owned theaters instead of then-fashionable measures like colorblind casting. What followed were a series of arguments between Wilson and the white theater critic Robert Brustein, culminating in a 1997 live debate at New York’s Town Hall, moderated by the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

His scripts were similarly uncompromising: “He didn’t write the way people thought you should write plays,” says Santiago-Hudson, 64, who adapted “Ma Rainey” for the screen. “When he’d write, he talked about rhythm, so I had to keep the song familiar to August and familiar to the journey of African-American people.” His predecessor, both stylistically and philosophically, was Lorraine Hansberry, whose 1959 “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a poor Black family hoping for a better life in midcentury Chicago, made her the first Black female playwright to be produced on Broadway (Lloyd Richards, who directed it, became the first Black director to stage a Broadway drama). Wilson expanded upon Hansberry’s legacy, dedicating himself to a body of work about the lives of everyday Black people. In doing so, he created a theater in which Blackness was no longer tokenized but the norm, and where whiteness, for a change, existed in the margins of the story. As important was his emphasis on regular Black people — his characters weren’t meant to be symbols, the best or worst of a race: They were average, and no less engrossing for that.

Before Wilson became a playwright, he aspired to be a poet, and his early works featured characters who spoke in highly stylized lyrics, so unlike the casual, vernacular dialogue he’s celebrated for today. At first, he “didn’t recognize the poetry in the everyday language of Black America,” he admitted in a 1999 Paris Review interview. “I thought I had to change it to create art.” Eventually, Wilson found the majesty in Black colloquial language, which had the same obstinate sense of dignity as his structures and characters. Indeed, their language is one of the central ways Wilson’s characters embody their stations in life, which can’t be divorced from the diction, grammar and syntax they use with one another. Even now, there is the stigma of urban Black dialect being a bastardization of “proper” English, despite the fact that “Black” English is often appropriated by non-Blacks as a form of social capital. Wilson made a case for the merits of this language on its own terms.

Consider one of his signature phrases: “Talking about … ,” as many characters begin, usually indignantly, in response to another character’s comment. The subject is dropped, and the verb almost dons the dress of a gerund — “talking” as a noun, its own entity, independent of the speaker. By this simple twist of syntax, talk — rumors, claims — is framed as the heart of these plays and the means by which Wilson defines the endurance and significance of Blackness in America. Mixed in with these colloquialisms are long arias that interrupt the naturalistic back and forth; characters go off into lengthy monologues in which they describe feelings and visions in looser prose. “I ain’t studying you,” one character will say to another dismissively, but these figures do study one another, and we do the same.

WHAT DOES THE dignified Black man sound like? The polished poise of Sidney Poitier? The daring speech of Muhammad Ali? The gospel thunder of Martin Luther King Jr.? Or perhaps the fiery, gladiatorial rhetoric of Malcolm X? He is a paragon, someone to look to in a culture that actively tears down Black achievements and disregards Black history and Black lives.

‘It’s almost revolutionary what he’s done … for the Black community itself, because he’s made us kings and queens,’ says the actress Viola Davis.

Wilson’s works are replete with mentions of great Black figures of his era: the boxer Joe Louis, the slugger Jackie Robinson, the activist Marcus Garvey. They are always used as examples, representatives of a greatness that the characters know they themselves may never attain. Wilson’s protagonists spend much of their time questioning how to live their lives with self-respect and status: Many look to professional sports, which have historically both fetishized and exploited the Black male body. (In “Fences,” Troy Maxson, the middle-aged garbageman, bemoans the career he could’ve had in baseball.) Black fathers and sons face a generational divide in their responses to the threats of white America: Soberly acquiesce or proudly fight back? And Black husbands and boyfriends mark their status by the Black women around them, whether they can “keep” and treat them well. (In Wilson’s work, a Black woman’s dignity almost always lies in her ability and willingness to stay with her man or define herself independently of him. Ma Rainey, of course, is the outlier.)

For every illustrious Black figure in Wilson’s plays, there has been a renowned Black actor to bring that character to life. Anthony Chisholm, a friend of the playwright who died in October at the age of 77, was perhaps best known for appearing in four Broadway productions from the Cycle: “Two Trains Running” (1992), “Gem of the Ocean” (2004), “Radio Golf” (2007) and “Jitney” (2017). The 64-year-old actor-director Kenny Leon, who met Wilson while participating in a directing fellowship early in his career, acted in the world-premiere production of “Gem of the Ocean,” about a young Black man who seeks redemption from his spiritual matriarch Aunt Esther, in 2003 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. The following year, Leon directed the Broadway production of the play, starring Phylicia Rashad, and then directed Washington and Davis in “Fences” onstage before helping Wilson finish “Radio Golf.” Indeed, it can seem that all of America’s prominent Black actors have spoken Wilson’s lines at some point in their careers: Angela Bassett in the original production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (1986), Samuel L. Jackson in the original productions of “The Piano Lesson” (1987) and “Two Trains Running” (1990), James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance in the original production of “Fences” (1985). Just as Shakespeare serves as a rite of passage for many actors, the aforementioned included, a performance in a Wilson play often represents a substantial career opportunity. All 10 plays in the Cycle have been produced on Broadway — a remarkable feat for a playwright of any race — and Wilson has become, for better or worse, the standard-bearer of Black American theater, the visibility of his work unmatched by any of his peers.

“It’s almost revolutionary what he’s done … for the Black community itself, because he’s made us kings and queens,” Davis says. (Sometimes literally: In “King Hedley II,” the 2001 Broadway production for which the actress won a Tony, the main character, an ex-con in the 1980s, is named King and declares he will only be addressed by his regal name.) Simply allowing Black actors to speak freely and at length in language that doesn’t make them tropes or foils for white actors validates their presence and their voice, and recognizes the prestige in both.

And then there are the play’s songs, lyrics shared and passed down as a tie between generations, like Maxson’s lament in “Fences” about an old dog named Blue. “There’s a rhythm in it that is in our souls,” Washington says. “Music that’s in my DNA that goes back through slavery.” Such poignancy also reveals itself in the documentary “Giving Voice,” which likewise premieres this month on Netflix and follows a group of American high school students who compete in the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition, now in its 13th year, for which finalists travel to New York City and perform onstage at the August Wilson Theater. The motivation behind the contest is to expose children to creative opportunities and also to inspire the teenagers with the plays themselves. “They didn’t know that the Century Cycle was there for them,” says Fernando Villena, the co-director of the film with James D. Stern.

WHEN CONTEMPORARY Black playwrights discuss the Pittsburgh Cycle, they often use similar language. Wilson, several told me, “liberated” them, widening the field for other Black artists to invent Black stories on a larger scale. The 42-year-old playwright Dominique Morisseau, who is completing her own cycle of plays about urban life set in her hometown, Detroit, says Wilson’s plays taught her to ignore the theater’s dominant white gaze. The 50-year-old playwright and director Robert O’Hara, who last year directed Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” on Broadway, says that he isn’t often approached to do revivals of Wilson’s plays because they are typically framed with an aura of “preciousness” and staged with an eye toward hyperrealism. To him, this disregards the magic and imagination of the Cycle, particularly the mysticism of certain characters and the vivid creation of Wilson’s City of Bones, a recurring metaphor throughout the plays about the ancestral grounds of Black Americans whose forefathers were trafficked across the Atlantic. And as a gay Black man, he’s influenced by the Cycle’s consistent heteronormativity: From it, he says, he “took the absence of queerness, the overall conflict that the Black experience can have onstage … and [the idea] that we have a variety of needs and a variety of emotions and reactions.”

It’s true that, for all of Wilson’s genius, he tends to repeat his own Black clichés: the elder who speaks of keeping one’s head down, the headstrong youngster who wants to fight his way to the top, the responsible girlfriend who must remain strong. The nuances of the community that he didn’t fully capture are also part of his legacy, both for playwrights who are his creative heirs and those who, like prodigal children, cast off in the opposite direction. “I was told coming up that my plays were not like August Wilson’s and, therefore, I needed to know I was out of line,” says the 57-year-old playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. This has been one unfortunate side effect of Wilson’s acclaim — that he, who never exceptionalized, has been exceptionalized himself, heralded as the go-to Black playwright among producers making a halfhearted attempt to increase diversity, and held up as the yardstick by which other Black dramatists are measured. In Parks’s case, those comparisons only inspired her to go her own way. “Maybe that’s the DNA of his work that lives in my work, the audacity of presence,” she adds. “Like, ‘We be here, we’re standing here, we talk.’”

Wilson himself recognized that Black power in this country was rooted in that same binary of struggle and resilience; as he said in his “Ground on Which I Stand” speech, “I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave quarters, and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth.” His legacy, more than his singular figure or “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” or the rest of the Pittsburgh Cycle, then, is one of community, in which Black artists are legion, part of a larger and richer portrait of Blackness that we knew was there all along.

This is what it means to run toward a song, like the two Black men running through the woods of Barnesville — a song tied to the past, like the blues, but also living in the present. “It is hard to define this music,” Wilson wrote in the introduction to “Ma Rainey.” “Suffice it to say that it is music that breathes and touches. That connects. That is in itself a way of being, separate and distinct from any other.” Ma Rainey is singing. Wilson is singing. And now, some 15 years after his death, he’s asking us to join in.