AugustWilson.net
August Wilson: Playwright Takes Spotlight
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Makes Stage Debut
June 1, 2003
By GENE JOHNSON Associated Press Writer
After more than two decades in theater, August Wilson finally has the acting bug.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed Broadway plays as "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" made his stage debut two weeks ago with "How I Learned What I Learned," a monologue about growing up black in Pittsburgh's Hill District.
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And, years after he turned down roles in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" and Alan Pakula's "The Pelican Brief," he makes his movie debut this month as narrator of "The Naked Proof," an independent film premiering at the Seattle International Film Festival.
"I'm on camera two or three minutes. The rest is voice-over narration," Wilson said during an interview at a local coffeehouse last week. "I haven't seen the film yet. My daughter said it was good, though."
In "How I Learned What I Learned," Wilson, 58, plays a more serious role: himself. Pacing the Seattle Repertory Theater's stage in a brown jacket and tweed cap, occasionally lighting a Marlboro, he recalls his early adulthood, proud mother, poet-junkie friends and the street ethics of 1950s Pittsburgh.
The stories are interesting, funny and poignant.
He tells of mouthing off to the proprietor of an oyster restaurant, who promptly pulled a shotgun on him, and of foolishly directing a desperate drug addict to the home of good friends, endangering their children.
In a section on how he learned to keep his mouth shut, Wilson remembers witnessing a fatal stabbing in a bar. The victim had insulted the attacker's wife, saying, "Hey, I see you got your white woman here tonight."
When the police came, nobody said anything. By refusing to finger the man who defended his wife's honor, Wilson said, the witnesses were following a moral code that resonates throughout the western world.
And that is what he tries to accomplish in "How I Learned What I Learned": to show the similarities of black and white culture while stressing the moral failure of white America.
Wilson has portrayed the conditions created by that failure, decade by decade, in his plays. Hopefully, he said, he has given black and white audiences a better understanding of each other.
"That's been the focus of all my work -- the fact that we are African people and that we all do the same things but we do it differently, and as long as you don't understand that, then you misread us," he said.
"I'm using my life to say how I learned the things that I learned and then placing them within the social context," he said.
"Everyone, I'm sure, has a story about how they learned to keep their mouth shut. Someone else's story might involve a boardroom meeting; my story is about a guy that killed another guy with a knife."
Wilson, who began educating himself at the Carnegie Library after he dropped out of school at 15, said he learned the driving principle of his life -- that something isn't always better than nothing -- from his mom.
She won a new washing machine in a contest, but when the organizers found out she was black, Wilson said, they tried to palm off a used machine from a second-hand store. She refused to accept it, though she badly wanted a washing machine. Instead, she took out a jar, dropped in a coin and began saving to buy a new one.
That lesson guided him when Paramount tried to make a movie of "Fences," which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1987. When the studio recruited a white director, Wilson insisted on a black one. The movie was never made.
"When there's a Jewish movie, 'Schindler's List,' a Jewish director directed it," he said. "And when you have an Italian movie, 'The Godfather,' Steven Spielberg didn't direct that, even though he could have -- he's an excellent director -- but they got Francis Ford Coppola.
"I was willing to give up my movie, and I did. Why? Because something is not always better than nothing."
The idea for "How I Learned What I Learned" came from Sharon Ott, artistic director at the Seattle Repertory Theater. She wanted Wilson, who has lived in Seattle since 1990, to help the theater celebrate its 40th anniversary with a look back at his life and career.
"It's a heck of a lot more interesting than listening to a lecture," Ott said of his performance amid a few spartan props -- a chair, a coat rack, a table. "It allows you to see the genesis of a lot of his characters.
"Unfortunately for him, I think we put the performer bug in him. He was here rehearsing two days after it opened, and I thought, 'Oh boy, now he wants to be an actor."'
"How I Learned What I Learned," directed by Todd Kreidler, closes at the Rep on Monday, after selling out all nine shows. Wilson says four other theaters -- Yale Repertory, Missouri Repertory, Pittsburgh Public and Congo Square in Chicago -- have invited him to take the show on the road.
He's considering it, but first has a new play, "Gem of the Ocean," to stage in Los Angeles.
He wants to work on the delivery a bit, too; the act doesn't have a script, and he only memorized the beginning.
"Telling the stories, there's always parts I leave out," Wilson said. "Last night was terrible, man. I left out big sections of stuff. The whole story about the oyster house and reading Guy de Maupassant and the guy with the shotgun, I didn't tell that.
"It's fun, though. ... You tell these stories that you've told a hundred times before, and now you have an audience."
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