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Saturday, February 08, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor

NEW YORK -- Have pen, will travel -- when you're August Wilson, you live your professional life on the road. He's been in New York since Thanksgiving, working on the revival of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" that opened Thursday night, living in the same room in the unpretentious Edison Hotel that he's had on every stay since 1987. Tomorrow he finally gets to return to his family in Seattle, but soon he'll be off to Chicago for the debut of his newest play, "Gem of the Ocean."

	August Wilson paused on the street before the 2001 Broadway premiere of his "King Hedley II." (Bill Wade, Post-Gazette) Related article Stage Review: Tamer 'Ma Rainey' still has ability to electrify

For our latest State of the August Report, we met in the Cafe Edison, known with mock disparagement as the Polish Tearoom, though by any name it's a hotel coffee shop. When Wilson arrived, it was clear the waitresses knew him well.

To someone who hadn't seen him in 18 months, he looked good: Trim, head shaved, eyes sparkling. The opening of "Ma Rainey" was still 10 days away and backstage disagreements had been a worry, but he was clearly glad to be moving on and eager to talk.

Now 57, he admitted, "Life takes its toll." He had pneumonia in December, but luckily it was at Christmas when his wife, Constanza, and 5-year-old daughter Azula visited, "so I had a lot of good care." He figures it had something to do with a broken radiator control and keeping his hotel window open -- not to mention huddling in the cold outside stage doors, smoking.

The task at hand was "Ma Rainey," but he was most enthused not about that, "Gem" or even the upcoming movie of "Fences," but by a one-man show that will debut at Seattle Rep in late spring. Wilson is a natural performer, but this will be a first.

"My initial idea was to call it, 'I'm Not Spalding Gray,' and detail our cultural differences. ... Or 'Sambo Takes on the World.' " Wilson's sense of humor is often left out of Wilson profiles. He can be angry, God knows, and he has a stern morality, but he also riffs and laughs.

"I'm trying to find organizing themes, but it keeps becoming a comedy routine." After Seattle, he hopes to perform in other regional theaters, then New York, then on an HBO special called, "Move Over, Chris Rock."

Whatever it's called, it will be about "how I learned what I learned," and, like an August Wilson play, it will evolve out of stories. "Did I ever tell you when I learned life is not in books? About the time I got a gun pulled on me in the Oyster House?" He was 20 years old with his head full chivalric romance. He had a young woman with him, and when he greeted the bartender and got a sour word in return, he said something back, and the next thing he knew he was looking at the business end of a double-barrel shotgun.

"It was the first time I'd ever seen one for real and my first thought was of Elmer Fudd. The barrels are in proportion to your fear -- they looked like hubcaps. Of course I wanted to impress my girlfriend. So in my best Douglas MacArthur voice I said, 'I shall return,' and under the cover of laughter I made my exit."

Then he pulls up a memory of watching "six Japanese guys sitting in a restaurant in St. Paul" (where he lived between Pittsburgh and Seattle). He imagined how differently six black guys would behave, and he starts acting out the scene, playing the juke box, chatting up the waitress, arguing, cadging money. In the meantime, such riffs keep slipping into his solo material.

He imagines 41 Ping-Pong balls. "I want to throw them at the audience, get them to throw them back, then point out that's how many times they shot at Amadou Diallo. He says he learned that from ministers -- "get the audience laughing and then turn it around, make it serious." Then he riffs on the fact that 22 of the 41 shots missed, and what's wrong with police training?

He bounces his growing material off his assistant, Todd Kreidler, who's helping him edit and will direct him at Seattle Rep, which now calls the show the August Wilson Project.

It obviously offers a congenial retreat from contentious subjects such as "Ma Rainey." That project began with a call from Brian Stokes Mitchell, who was making a movie with Whoopi Goldberg, who wanted to produce it on Broadway. Wilson and his producer, Ben Mordecai, flew to Malibu to meet with Goldberg at her home. They persuaded her to play Ma Rainey herself, which she obviously wanted to do.

But who would play the lead, Levee? It was Wilson who suggested Charles Dutton, "which surprised some people." Although Dutton and Wilson hit it big together with the original "Ma Rainey" in 1984 and Dutton won kudos in Wilson's 1990 "Piano Lesson," he also angered Wilson by pulling out of several other Wilson plays as his career shifted toward movies and TV.

The backstage troubles on "Ma Rainey" have had to do with egos. It reminds Wilson of the mistaken belief that, "if you cuss people out, that's how you get respect. You're scared. Well, everybody's scared." But Goldberg was great in rehearsals. "It's fun being around Whoopi. She keeps everyone in stitches."

The big project immediately ahead is "Gem of the Ocean," the ninth play in Wilson's epic cycle covering each decade of the 20th century. Rehearsals start March 8 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, with the opening April 25.

After Chicago, "Gem" goes to Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum in June. Wilson hopes to bring it right to New York in the fall. "I don't want to do any more cities: Get it done and move on to the next play." With "Hedley," which started in Pittsburgh in Dec., 1999, and reached Broadway a year and a half later, "I took too much time. I overworked it. I don't even know what's in the final script. You make choices, but in retrospect you aren't sure why. You fiddle and fiddle -- you can do too much. I think we may have had a better show in Pittsburgh than in New York."

Wilson's first Hollywood adventure, long frustrated, seems closer to reality. He has completed his re-write of his movie script of "Fences," his 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner. Producer Scott Rudin ("he makes movies he believes in") has hired Wilson's current stage director, Marion McClinton, to direct what will be his movie debut.

Whoever plays the lead, Troy, Wilson says, "I know I want Alfre Woodard and Oprah Winfrey to play Rose [Troy's wife] and Alberta" -- the woman who is only heard of in the play but who emerges as a full character in the movie script.

"That's my dream cast. And, of course, it should be filmed in Pittsburgh. That's my choice -- but I'm not the one putting up the money."