King maker

August Wilson hits the homestretch

by Scott T. Cummings

Eight down, two to go. With the opening this weekend of the Huntington Theatre Company production of King Hedley II, August Wilson's one-man marathon comes out of the final turn and heads into the homestretch. Roughly 15 years ago, Wilson conceived a monumental playwriting project: to chronicle the African-American experience in the 20th century by writing one play for each decade. Set in the 1980s, the new work marks the eighth play in that already legendary cycle. The end is in sight, but for now all eyes are on King Hedley II, a play still very much in the making.

Last week, when Wilson and I sat down to talk, Jitney -- which was seen at the Huntington in the fall of 1998 before making its way to New York's Second Stage six weeks ago -- had just been named best play by the New York Drama Critics Circle, the playwright's seventh such award. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony. He spent New Year's Eve at the White House as one of Bill and Hillary's distinguished millennial guests. The most successful American playwright of the past 20 years, Wilson wears his achievements as lightly as his signature scally cap. His presence is warm, easy-going, and jocular.

And he is happy to be back at the Huntington, where five of his plays have already been produced. "Over the years, I discovered it's my favorite place to work. Somebody would say, `Oh, you're going to Boston,' and I would get excited about that. I think one of the reasons is the level of support that the theater gives you. Peter wants to put the best possible show on stage and he'll do anything to get that. A lot of theaters, you have to fight and wrestle with them to get certain things you need. At the Huntington, you need it, you got it, let's do a show." "Peter," of course, is outgoing producing director Peter Altman, whose achievements include establishing the Huntington as a key partner in the development of the Wilson cycle.

Each new Wilson play goes through a lengthy gestation tour that makes a number of regional stops before reaching New York. At the Seattle Repertory Theatre last August, King Hedley II had an all-star staged reading featuring Laurence Fishburne and Danny Glover. Its official premiere came in December at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, where it inaugurated the theater's brand-new downtown facility. That production opened in March back at the Seattle Rep before heading east to the Huntington to put the cap on Altman's 18-year tenure. From Boston, the show heads to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago (where again it will inaugurate a brand new theater), the Kennedy Center in DC, and finally, in the spring of 2001, to New York.

No other playwright in the USA enjoys this kind of extended and coordinated development path. This is not a tour of a finished production. "With each stop," explains Wilson, "there is a rehearsal process. I am blessed in that I have the opportunity to sit there and watch the play and go, `Oh, I see! If I do this, then the audience will understand that better.' The play that I end up with, I believe, will be significantly different and better than the original Pittsburgh production." One of the differences will be a recently commissioned jazz score by legendary percussionist and composer Max Roach, some of whose new music for the play will be worked into the Huntington production.

So far, the original Pittsburgh cast has stuck with the show in Seattle and Boston, as has director Marion Isaac McClinton. "I have known Marion for 22 years," says Wilson. "I met him in 1978, when he was an actor in St. Paul, and gradually he became a director. I saw a production of Piano Lesson [Wilson's Pulitzer-winning drama] at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul that was the best production of the play I ever saw. I think it was then that I determined I was going to work with him. The opportunity came when Eddie Gilbert at the Pittsburgh Public offered to do Jitney and I said I wanted to get Marion McClinton and we began to work. I like Marion because he is so passionate. Since I met him, he's always had this great passion for the theater and a willingness to take risks to make things happen."

Like most plays in the cycle, King Hedley II takes place in the traditionally black neighborhood of Pittsburgh known as the Hill District. The year is 1985, a time of drive-by shootings and Reaganomics that don't trickle down as far as the Hill. King Hedley II and his friend, Mister, make ends meet by fencing "hot" refrigerators until they can get the money together to start a video store. King's wife is pregnant but, already a grandmother at 35, she does not want to have the baby. King is insistent. The arrival in town of his mother Ruby's ex-lover Elmore triggers a series of events that cause King to question his manhood and his identity. As Wilson says of the title character, "He has built his whole persona, as we all do, around things we think we know. It's a matter of stripping these illusions away from the character in the process of him finding out who he really is."

Wilson aficionados will recognize the name King Hedley from an earlier play. "In Seven Guitars," Wilson explains, "the character of Ruby is already pregnant. She says, `If the baby is a boy, I'm gonna name him King, after Hedley.' Now Hedley killed a man because of his name, and he tells her, `I don't ever tell nobody my name is King. That's a bad thing.' So I always thought, why would she want to take this legacy and put it on this child? Every time she would say that, a little shiver would go up my spine, so I got the idea, `Why don't I write a play about the baby and see what happened to him 36 years later?' "

Two characters from Seven Guitars, which is set in 1948, have return engagements in King Hedley II: Ruby and a half-mad prophet named Stool Pigeon, who's known in the earlier play as Canewell. The Elmore who shows up in King Hedley II to woo Ruby is the same one who is mentioned in Seven Guitars as having killed her husband. These and other connections mark the first time that Wilson has made explicit narrative links between plays. Does he wish he had done more of this earlier? "I'm not going to play the wish I don't have. It would have been nice, but I did what I did. I have the two plays now." To complete the cycle, Wilson still must write the bookends, plays set in the first and last decades of the 20th century. "The 1904 play, I've started working on that, I realized that I can take advantage of anybody who was in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, because that's 1911. I can still play around that. The prospect, for instance, of bringing Rutherford Selig, this peddler and people finder, back in a play prior to Joe Turner is fascinating."

Wilson is conscious of using the last two plays to fortify the architecture of the 10-play cycle. "What I want to do is thematically and otherwise relate the two endpieces so that the other eight will sit right up under and then you'll have this connection between the last two at the beginning and the end of the century and you can really look at the progress, what it means, if there is any, and how and why and what kind. I'm excited about the prospects."

What progress does the 55-year-old scribe see for African-Americans across the span of the last century? "Very little. I don't see much progress. Status is granted in law and denied in public practice, still and continually." Although Wilson would not argue that conditions have worsened, he does perceive a terrible loss of community and tradition over the past half-century. "In my mind, if you go back to the 1940s, prior to the 1954 Supreme Court decision, when you have segregation, I think blacks were culturally at their strongest in that they had self-sufficient communities that were economically viable. We were all over here. We weren't allowed to play in major-league baseball, so we had our own league. It was black-owned and Mr. Johnson sold his peanuts and Mr. Smith sold chicken sandwiches. The community had something to do as a community on Sunday afternoon. That's gone. All of that was broken up. Used to be you couldn't go downtown and try on dresses in the department stores, but that's okay, you had a dress shop in your neighborhood where you could try on dresses all day long. But once you say, `Okay, you can come downtown and try on dresses,' people went downtown and the dress shop had to close for business reasons. You would have a doctor living next door to the dentist who lived next door to the teacher and the preacher. All those people left when they said, `Okay, you can live over here now.' Everybody moved and that broke up the economic base of the community."

Restoring that community is Wilson's mission, not only as a playwright but as principal founder of the African Grove Institute for the Arts. AGIA came out of a conference held two years ago at Dartmouth to investigate the condition of black theater around the country. "We found out that one of the reasons black theaters fail is because of poor management. They simply don't have the management skills. So we started a program with the Tuck School of Business [at Dartmouth] to develop a four-week summer intensive curriculum to train black theater managers, and we're in the process of developing that curriculum."

This is just one of AGIA's early initiatives. With help from the Getty Institute, groundwork is being laid toward the creation of a national black-theater archive. And efforts are underway to organize the USA's 50,000 black performing artists in advance of the Gathering of the Tribes, a national convention to be held in the next two or three years whose elected delegates will debate and hash out a platform for African-American theater in the 21st century. "We're not looking to change things overnight," Wilson says. "The idea is that 15 years from now you're going to have a different and much improved condition for black theater from what it is now. It's not about complaint, it's about doing the things that we should be doing."

The Huntington Theatre Company presents King Hedley II at the Boston University Theatre May 19 through June 18. Tickets are $10 to $52; call 266-0800.