In his book of ten chapters, Alan Nadel scrupulously amasses together the most prominent scholars’ perspectives on Wilson as an artist: Sandra Shannon, Sandra Richards, Kim Periera, Christopher Bigsby, David Krasner, Mary Ellen Snodgrass, and Harry Elam are only a few of those scholars who have enhanced our understanding of the playwright and his plays. In addition to those within the literary realm, Nadel engages Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Edward Said and others for insight into his approach to Wilson's texts. While doing so, Nadel revisits scholarship and ventures into new territory in his interrogative recasting of our notion of twentieth-century American history and culture.

In his introduction, Nadel addresses Wilson's masterly crafting of the ten plays in his compelling cycle to represent African American life in the twentieth century, imparting that Fences was the most profitable play in the history of the American drama. Nadel suggests that one theme predominates in the cycle: “history has shown in twentieth-century America it has been impossible to deprivilege race” (2), and that the blues became a way for the playwright to explore his characters’ attempts to negotiate or emancipate themselves from this inequity. Chapter 1 describes Wilson's early life, and his growth as an artist, from being Frederick Kittel to becoming August Wilson, and is aptly titled “Becoming August Wilson.” Employing Conversations with August Wilson (2006) by Jackson Bryer and Mary Hartig, Nadel describes this transition from Wilson's early childhood to poet and playwright, situating that transformation in locations familiar to those who study Wilson, from the Center Avenue Theater Poet's Workshop, Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh, the Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, to his formative encounters with Lloyd Richards, who was his first mentor, directing six of Wilson's plays at the O'Neill and the Yale Rep, to eventually Broadway with the production of Fences in 1987, which garnered the young playwright a Drama Critic's Circle Award, a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. Nadel claims that Wilson would later sever ties with Richards, which was inevitable, when the playwright asserted his independence as an artist from that collaborative endeavor to work with directors Marion McClinton and Kenny Leon.

In chapter 2, “History and Performance: The Drama of African Historiography,” Nadel mentions an essay he wrote on African American writer John A. Williams noting that recording history involves the process of inclusion and exclusion in one's construction of presenting the details, and provides the analogy of composing an accident report. In other words, akin to an accident report, there is an imposition of cause and effect, similar to the manner in which there is an imposition of narrative accounts of a historical event. All historians are ambulance chasers of history, and in their attempt to recall history using constative words that describe the situation, and performative words that incite action, designations within the process of reconstructing history, one simultaneously erases or alters the balance in historiographic discourse, resulting in the projection of a dominant narrative. Simply stated, in Wilson's “The Ground on Which I Stand,” his plays and his characters all illustrate a resistance or struggle against a historically dominant white narrative that impedes their vital agency. Wilson as dramatist uses theatre as a cathartic medium of resistance. In his subsection “Blues Historiography,” Nadel then points to Ralph Ellison, who, like Wilson, views the blues as a means to “play” with this white authorial narrative, to revise, repossess or improvise upon a history, that disempowers those whose voices have been marginalized and their community. He provides numerous examples of how Wilson's characters’ challenge, sometimes successfully and other times not, in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom’s record producers, Fence’s Sutter's ghost, Two Trains Running’s Lutz, Joe Turner's Come and Gone’s Joe Turner, among others.

In chapters 3 through 9, Nadel begins with the production history of each play, with the exception of chapter 4 on performance history, and meticulously intersperses within each chapter a discussion of the relationships among his other plays. Not only does Nadel delve into the themes and seminal motifs, the nascent potential of the blues as it informs and embodies the performative mode for Wilson's dramatic technique, but also he probes into the playwright's distinctly African American historiographic enterprise in writing his plays. In the conclusion of the book, chapter 10, “Critical and Performance Perspectives,” Nadel engages Donald M. Pease to address Wilson's Lazarus complex as evidenced in Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, and Harry J. Elam Jr. to elaborate upon in “Performance Politics and Authenticity in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Jitney.” In Pease's essay, he reveals how seminal characters in these two plays must resolve inequities of the past, namely the deaths of their fathers, often violently, in order to be reconciled with the community, and reassert their own agency as individuals. It is the blues that becomes the “primary means of expression through which Wilson's characters recover their footing” (165). Elam, on the other hand, considers two revivals of Wilson's plays: Barlett Sher's production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone seen by former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle in 2009 at the Lincoln Center and Ruben Santiago-Hudson's production of Jitney on Broadway in 2017 following the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. Through the prism of politics, one play directed by a white director praised by theatre critics Ben Brantley and Joe Dziemainowicz, and another by a black director and Wilsonian actor, the question of accurately portraying the authenticity of black experience as a matter of cultural affinity is examined by Elam. Overall, Nadel's The Theatre of August Wilson is an extensive study of Wilson's ten-play cycle, of his unique vision as a playwright, and makes an invaluable contribution to all those who desire to study August Wilson.