165.
AUGUST WILSON’S HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED
In Terrence McNally’s theatrical potpourri
at the Pearl, AND AWAY WE GO, the playwright pokes fun at the current trend of
plays that are prefaced by their author’s names, as in EDWARD ALBEE’S WHO’S
AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Joining the ranks of these plays that seek to glorify
their authors by making their already famous names part of their titles is
AUGUST WILSON’S HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED, just to make sure you don’t
confuse it with someone else’s HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED, even if none
exists. Silly as the this self-conscious titling may be for a classic like
VIRGINIA WOOLF, perhaps it does have some marketing value for a lesser-known
work by a major playwright, like Wilson; if it helps draw people to this
well-done piece, more power to it.
HOW
I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED, if I may call it that, is an autobiographical play
Wilson created for his own performance in 2003, when he premiered it at the Seattle
Repertory Theatre. It is now being given a superlative performance at the
Signature Theatre by the distinguished actor-director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, in
a presentation co-conceived and directed by Todd Kreidler. Mr. Santiago-Hudson,
who staged the excellent revival last season of Wilson’s THE PIANO LESSON, is an ideal choice for the
job. His incarnation of Mr. Wilson, who died in 2005, is relaxed, honest, real,
funny, and highly believable. He
channels the great playwright’s sense of humor, his bitterness at the racial
prejudice he encountered, and his profound intelligence and poetic sensitivity,
never becoming less than engaging and accessible in immediate human terms.
Mr.
Santiago-Hudson performs on a small platform set, imaginatively designed by
David Gallo, in front of a semicircular wall of what appear to be hundreds of manuscript
pages hanging before a cyclorama. At various junctions, the sound of a
typewriter tapping out letters coincides with the appearance of typescript
illuminated on the hanging pages to spell out the words that introduce the
following scene. Thom Weaver’s lighting
does an exquisite job of bringing a wide range of colors and moods to the
production. The scenes themselves have no great sequential continuity, and
could probably be rearranged, or even cut, without being noticed. They are a
kind of ramble through Wilson’s memory of his growing up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District,
with anecdotes about the people he knew, and stories of humorous and violent
incidents he witnessed, including a killing. He talks about slavery, the jobs he quit when he felt mistreated, his mother's influence on him, the Catholic church, his self-education, his early love life and the trouble it got him into, his going to jail for non-payment of his rent, and the effect on him of John Coltrane's music. Almost everything has a “black”
inflection to it, including Mr. Santiago-Hudson’s acting, which includes
moments of singing and dance-like moves.
Not
all the material in this 90-minute intermissionless piece is of the same
quality, and the sections that describe the difference in behavior about how blacks
and whites behave in different social circumstances are unconvincingly
stereotypical and reminiscent of tired stand-up routines.
Mr.
Wilson, of course, who won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Fences (1986) and one for The
Piano Lesson (1990), is widely lauded as America’s greatest black
playwright, and his ten-play Century Cycle, nine of them set in Pittsburgh, is
one of the foremost achievements of any modern playwright, regardless of color.
He was preoccupied with exploring and expressing the black experience in this
country and much of HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED pictures him as a victim of
the racism he encountered. These stories sound plausible when you hear them
from Mr. Santiago-Hudson. However, Mr. Wilson’s father was a white man from
Germany (Wilson’s birth name was Kittel and he later adopted his mother’s
maiden name), and, unlike President Obama, also the product of a mixed marriage, his appearance was more white than black. Maybe I’m going out
on a limb here, but the stories he tells of mistreatment because he was black,
like the one about a bank teller who refused to give him an envelope, sometimes
sound forced, as if he was reading racism into simple unpleasantness, such as
white people also experience when dealing with nasty bosses and people with
whom they do business.
Such
cavils aside, HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED is a polished work of theatre performed
by an admirable artist who holds his audience in the palm of his hand. Ruben Santiago-Hudson and August Wilson are powerful teachers and there's lots you can learn from seeing them joined in this rewarding theatrical lesson.
